Palaces and Princes at Yalta

Along the coast from Sevastopol, Yalta is also marked by history. What student of modern history would not be stirred by a visit to the nearby Livadia Palace, where the February 1945 Yalta Conference took place, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on the post-war fate of Europe? To see where the meetings took place, where the document was signed, where the famous photograph of the three leaders was taken?

Where the Yalta Conference Agreement was signed

The Livadia Palace had earlier been a summer residence of Tsar Nicholas II. Upstairs, wandering through rooms where they once stayed, now lined with photos of the imperial family, is also to feel the ghosts of history, from a different era. And the little chapel where the last Tsar and his family prayed, and where the Tsarina was received into the Orthodox Church before their accession to the throne.

A few miles further along the coast is the Vorontsovsky Palace, built as a summer residence for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, a governor-general of New Russia. Vorontsov was raised and educated in Britain, where his father was Russian ambassador. He employed a British architect to design the palace, which mixes the typical style of an English country house with pronounced Moorish influences. It is a striking combination.

Vorontsovsky Palace

The palace sits above the Black Sea, with the Crimean mountains behind, and fits wonderfully into its setting. Churchill and the British delegation stayed at the Vorontsovsky palace during the Yalta conference. He was apparently not impressed, describing Yalta as the ‘Riviera of Hades’. He also joked that one of the lions in the gardens overlooking the sea looked like him.

One of the lions at the Vorontsovsky Palace

Vorontsov had a notable career, serving with distinction in the Napoleonic wars, and later leading Russia’s campaigns to subdue the north Caucasus. But he is perhaps best known for being cuckolded by Pushkin while the latter was exiled to Odessa. Visiting Vorontsov’s former residence in Odessa, looking at the remains of the terrace that overlooks the bay, one can imagine the great poet dancing with and seducing the princess at one of the balls that were no-doubt thrown.

Yalta was once a fashionable resort for the Russian aristocracy. Signs of its previous, now faded elegance remain as one strolls through some of the streets behind the seafront. In Soviet times, the town and its surroundings were designated by Lenin as a resort for the rest and recuperation of the workers. Numerous sanatoria were built up and down the coast around the town. What is left now is a rather gaudy, tacky seaside resort, frequented mainly by tourists from the former Soviet Union. This combination of faded elegance and mass tourist tat is in some ways reminiscent of Brighton.

Sevastopol and Russia

Few places are as brim-full with military history as Sevastopol. Built as a naval base when Russia first took over Crimea in the late 18th Century, it has been an important strategic point ever since. In the Crimean War, fought in the 1850s between Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia on one side, and Russia on the other, Sevastopol was besieged for almost a year, before it finally fell. The Russian defenders scuttled their ships across the mouth of the bay to block the entry of the British navy. In 1920, Sevastopol was one of the last hold-outs of the retreating White armies. And in World War II the city was again subjected to a long siege, before falling to the Germans in July 1942. It was recaptured by the Soviets in 1944, an almost completely ruined city. Sevastopol was declared one of the Soviet Union’s ‘Hero Cities’, which is commemorated by a huge monument in the pugnacious Socialist Realism style.

World War II memorial, Sevastopol

Almost everywhere you go in central Sevastopol are monuments to this military past. To a British visitor, this was an unfamiliar experience of visiting a city whose monuments portray a heroic defence against a British onslaught. To most in Britain, the Crimean War is mainly associated with the futile Charge of the Light Brigade commemorated in Tennyson’s poem. It is a military venture whose purpose seems hard to comprehend from a modern perspective. Yet at the time, Russia was seen as Britain’s main rival, and a threat to Britain’s empire in India. Propping up the ailing Ottomans against persistent Russian encroachments was regarded as a key interest. For the native Tartar population of Crimea, the participation of Ottoman troops must have excited hopes of liberation from Russian rule.

As well as statues commemorating the defenders of Sevastopol, the Panorama of Sevastopol’s Defence, a large circular building whose interior wall is covered with a vast painting depicting the climax of the siege is a centrepiece of the city’s war memorials. The Black Sea Fleet Museum portrays the war primarily, though not exclusively, from a Russian perspective. It was interesting to find that Russia had its equivalents of Florence Nightingale.

Panorama of Sevastopol's defence

The strategic importance of Sevastopol has continued to cause controversy more recently. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the position of Crimea, and especially of Sevastopol, in newly independent Ukraine was disputed by Russia and by the predominantly Russian local population. Crimea had been a full republic of the Soviet Union until Krushchev, himself Ukrainian, handed it to Ukraine in the 1950s. Sevastopol was of particular importance as the base of the Soviet, now Russian Black Sea Fleet. In 1997, a treaty was signed between Russia and Ukraine. Crimea was recognised as part of Ukraine (although as an autonomous republic), while Ukraine agreed to lease the naval base to Russia for 20 years. In 2010, the new, more pro-Russian government in Ukraine agreed to extend the lease for a further 25 years. This agreement provoked intense opposition in some quarters, including a brawl in Ukraine’s parliament.

So why is Sevastopol so important to Russia? In an age when airpower and missiles can strike anywhere, its attractiveness as a natural harbour looks less valuable. Looking at the ageing ships in the bay, the Black Sea Fleet does not appear especially impressive. In Soviet times, with NATO member Turkey just across the water, one could imagine why it was important. Probably it is partly a matter of national pride. For a city so steeped in Russian history, it is simply difficult to face up to the fact that it is no longer Russia. The proliferation of Russian flags in the city, including on many public buildings, make clear where the hearts of many of its residents lie. Is part of the motivation for Moscow now also to maintain a toehold in Ukraine, to retain leverage, and to undermine its independence? There has been a similar pattern in some other Soviet successor states in Russia’s ‘near abroad’, with separatist territories supported by Moscow in Georgia and Moldova.

Vanished peoples of Crimea

To a modern world steeped in the political culture of the nation state, schooled to believe in the unique value of the nations to which we belong, with their long and illustrious histories, great literary traditions, and irreplaceably distinct customs and cultures, visiting Crimea can be disconcerting. With its ghostly, abandoned cities and settlements, once the homes of thriving civilisations that are now no more, Crimea is testament to all that is transient, insecure and ephemeral in the world. Civilisations grow, flourish, and then pass into history, leaving only haunted remnants of what is gone forever.

In many countries we are used to thinking of our nation’s history as a progression, through different eras, changing, and yet continuous, with layers of heritage building on each other, all contributing to the formation of a modern nation, a gradual accretion of experience and accomplishment, gain and loss, continuing on into the future. Just as the English perceive a thread linking them with Alfred the Great, so nations on every continent find unique value in their heritage. But Crimea bears witness to the vanity of such notions.

Gifted by Krushchev to Ukraine in the 1950s, Crimea had been taken over by imperial Russia only in the 1780s, its colonisation taking place on the back of the displacement of the Tartars. The history of Crimea is not one of continuity, but rather of repeated invasion and migration, each new arrival displacing or assimilating those who were already there.

The landscape around Bakhchisaray and southern Crimea is one of high-cliffed plateaus, with deep ravines in between. Bakhchisaray itself sits in one such ravine, cliffs rising dramatically on both sides. Nearby is the stronghold of Chufut Kale, strung out along one such plateau. Now abandoned, Chufut Kale means ‘Jewish Fortress’ in the Crimean Tartar language. The site had once been inhabited by the Sarmatian Alans, but was taken over by the Tartars when they invaded Crimea. In the 15th Century, it was established as the Khan’s capital, before it was moved to nearby Bakhchisaray. From the 17th Century, the only remaining inhabitants were adherents of the Karaite Jewish sect, hence the name, Chufut Kale.

The main street in Chufut Kale

The religious origins of the Karaites are disputed, as well as the ethnic origins of the Crimean Karaim. Contrary to Rabbinic Judaism, they accept only scripture as having ultimate authority, and not the interpretations of the Talmud. The sect thrived in Mesopotamia a thousand years ago, but the origins of the Turkic-speaking Karaim of Crimea are uncertain. It has often been claimed that they are descendants of Khazars, converts to Judaism who once ruled an empire in swathes of territory in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine.

Following Crimea’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, the Karaim abandoned Chufut Kale, settling in towns on the Crimean coast and elsewhere in Russia. The Karaim managed to avoid some of Russia’s oppressive anti-Semitic laws, citing spurious proofs that the community had been living in Crimea since before the time of Christ, and that therefore they could not share in the perceived collective, inherited Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. The assertion that they were Turkic converts was also cited in their favour. In a further, even more bizarre twist, during the World War Two German occupation, Nazi bureaucrats in Berlin were persuaded that the Karaim were not Jewish at all, although of inferior racial stock, and that they should therefore be spared the holocaust.

Today, the Karaim are gone from Chufut Kale. The remaining adherents of the sect are found mainly in Israel and the United States, with just a small number remaining in Crimea. Chufut Kale itself is a ghost town, its streets frequented by tourists and a few artists. Some buildings remain intact, including a prayer house and the former home of Avraam Firkovich, now a museum displaying old photos of the once thriving community. It was Firkovich who had provided the falsified ‘evidence’ of the Karaim’s history in Crimea that won favour with the Tsars.

As in many of these high settlements in Crimea, Chufut Kale was partly built below the ground, in caves carved and enlarged out of the rock. Now bare, their windows and doors open to the elements, exploring these caves, with their ledges and niches, it is hard to imagine the people that once lived here, the lives they led. This was a living, settled community for hundreds of years, with traditions, a language, customs, and now it is all over, the people gone.

Cave room, Chufut Kale

Spookiest of all is a stroll through the vast cemetery in the Iosofatova Valley, below Chufut Kale. Here, for centuries, the Karaim buried their dead. The graves are still there, thousands of them, higgledy-piggledy among the trees, many of the tombstones, covered in Hebrew script, overturned or upended by tree roots or subsidence. I walked through this forest cemetery, alone in the silence, in the early evening, with the sun low in the sky sending its beams almost horizontally through the trees. But the feeling of spookiness was not because of the long-dead people at rest there. Rather, it was that walking among these thousands of graves brings home that this is not just a cemetery of the people buried there, but of the civilisation, the world to which they belonged, which is now extinct. There are no Karaim left at Chufut Kale to tend or visit the graves. The tombs are just there, a silent memory of a lost world, slowly being reclaimed by the forest. Among the ancient tombs are a handful of graves from recent years, their inscriptions in Cyrillic, Karaim from elsewhere, for whom Chufut Kale is their home soil, in which, together with their ancestors, they would like to rise on judgement day.

Karaite cemetery, Chufut Kale

A few miles south of Bakhchisaray, is the site of another abandoned cliff-top stronghold, Mangup Kale. At one time, Mangup Kale was the capital of the Crimean principality of Gothia. Migrating from north-west Europe, the Germanic Goths conquered much of the northern Black Sea coast, including Crimea, in the 3rd Century AD, before being pushed out by the Huns a hundred years later. But some of the Goths hung on in Crimea, were Christianised and incorporated into the Byzantine Empire. Following a failed attempt to resist the Khazar conquest of Crimea in the 8th Century, the Goths retreated to their plateau at Mangup, and there they remained, worshiping at their basilicas, living their isolated lives until the 15th Century, when, a few years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Turks besieged and conquered Mangup as well.

The citadel, Mangup Kale

Little is known about the Crimean Gothic realm. Linked by religion and its long association with Byzantium with the Greek world, at the end Gothia was allied with the Empire of Trebizond (modern-day Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey). Probably Mangup had been a true Crimean ethnic mix, Gothic, Greek, Sarmatian, Jewish. Certainly there were Karaim there. Walking up through the forest to the Mangup plateau, one passes through another Karaite cemetery, hundreds more tombs eerily bearing witness to the people that were once there. At the top, there is not much left. The monumental gateway to the citadel is still standing. The basilica of Saint Constantine is no more than a couple of overgrown walls. At the tip of the plateau, beyond the citadel, overlooking terrifying precipices, are more elaborate cave rooms, hewn out of the rock, with stairways, alcoves, windows and doors.

The Mangup plateau is a beautiful place to stroll on a hot summer’s day, broad meadows with a profusion of wild flowers, with walls, towers, the foundations of buildings scattered about here and there, the remains of the city that once stood. Walking there is a humbling experience. Here was a city, with fine buildings and monuments, a distinct people with their own language and traditions. And it is all gone, bar a few almost forgotten ruins, returned to dust.

Remains of the basilica of St Constantine
Mangup Kale

What a romantic idea! That once upon a time, in the mountains of southern Crimea, far away from the Germanic peoples of western Europe, a Gothic realm endured from ancient times almost to the modern era. It is an idea that excited travellers and scholars. Adolf Hitler too was interested, and plans were discussed by the Nazis to resettle Germans from South Tyrol, the northern Italian region of Alto Adige, in a renewed Gothia, in Crimea, its cities renamed to reflect the Gothic heritage. But it was a fantasy. The Crimean Goths are long gone. But where did they go to? Most likely they simply converted to Islam and were assimilated into the Crimean Tartar people. As my hostess in Bakhchisaray told me, in different regions of Crimea the Tartars have different physiognomies, reflecting their various ethnic antecedents. Some of them are probably more than a little Gothic.

Return to Crimea

There are few places in the world where the migrations of peoples, the ebb and flow of empires, have left so many and such diverse traces in such a small area as Crimea. Scythians, Sarmatians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Jews, Italians, Mongols, Turks, Russians, all have passed through. Some have been swept out or assimilated by the next wave of invaders; others have hung on for thousands of years. Their remains have been left, layer upon layer, the remnants, in some cases, of civilisations that have passed away.

The Crimean Tartars have been more tenacious than most. The Crimean Khanate, with its capital in Bakhchisaray, a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, was annexed by imperial Russia in the 1780s. Their homeland steadily swamped by Russians, politically marginalised, over subsequent decades the Tartars left in droves for Turkey, many of them perishing on the journey.

The Khan's palace, Bakhchisaray

Persecuted by the Soviet regime, their elite killed or imprisoned, those that remained suffered their greatest tragedy in May 1944. As a collective punishment for the collaboration of some of their community with the Germans (hardly surprising considering their sufferings at the hands of the Soviet regime), the Crimean Tartar population was deported en masse to central Asia. As my guest house hostess in Bakhchisaray explained, they were given only 15 minutes to pack their things, before being herded into trains. Many did not survive the journey, and others died not long after their arrival. This despite the fact that thousands of Crimean Tartar men served in the Soviet army. They returned to Crimea at the end of the war to find their families gone, and were themselves packed off into exile.

Yet my hostess spoke proudly of the resilience of her people. Many of those who survived prospered in central Asia. She and her husband were teachers in Uzbekistan, and built themselves a big house. According to her, the Crimean Tartars were harder working and better educated than the Uzbeks. But, she said, they always knew they would return one day to Crimea. It was a rich and beautiful land, and it was theirs, even though she herself was born in Uzbekistan.

Their chance came as the communists began to lose their grip. She and her family came back in 1991, just before the end of the Soviet Union. It was easier then, as it was still one country. As they were already settled in Crimea when independence came, they automatically received Ukrainian citizenship. And because they bought a house before the new, Ukrainian currency was introduced, they did not, like some later returnees, see the Roubles they received for their home in Uzbekistan lose their value. They were luckier than many, who having sold their homes in central Asia, were left without money to buy a new place in Crimea. Even so, initially the best they could afford was a tumble-down old house, much poorer than the one they had had in Uzbekistan.

As my hostess told me, no Crimean Tartar had tried to reclaim the homes their families had owned, now occupied by Russians, even though in some cases the keys they had taken with them into exile still fitted the locks. Many Russians had not welcomed the Tartars’ return, and, said my hostess, there had been peer pressure not to sell houses to Tartars. Those returnees who had not been able to buy houses, as her family had, had taken over unoccupied land and built shacks there. According to the law, after a certain period of occupation, they could claim the land as their own, and build proper houses. All this, my hostess averred, was evidence of the determination and resilience of the Crimean Tartars. And just as she was proud of their success as exiles, in Uzbekistan, so she contrasted the spirit of the Tartars with the Russian settlers who had taken their homes. You can imagine, she said, what kind of people would take over the houses of others. They were lazy, she said. They had not even maintained the Tartar houses they had occupied.

And indeed, walking through Bakhchisaray there is plenty of evidence of Tartar success since their return to Crimea, with thriving restaurants and guest houses catering for tourists. My hostess told me that, on her return, she had only been able to get a teaching job in a village several kilometres away from Bakhchisaray. But she had got up early every morning and walked there. She and her husband had saved and eventually knocked down the rickety house they had bought, and built a bigger, better one, with space for paying guests. Now her son was studying to be a lawyer, because, as she said, it is important to know your rights and how to fight for them. The Crimean Tartars, she told me, had twice been left with almost nothing, when they were sent to central Asia, and when they returned to Crimea. And both times they picked themselves up and thrived. Hers was a story of tragedy, but also of pride and of hope.

The Crimean Tartars are back, and though a minority in their land, they are a force that cannot be ignored. But who are they? My hostess told me that it is in fact incorrect to refer to them as ‘Tartars’, a name given to them by the Russians. Indeed, the name ‘Tartar’ is a misnomer. The Tartars were one of the tribes conquered by Genghis Khan as he united the people who became the Mongols. According to my hostess, the Crimean Tartars were an ethnic mixture of the varied peoples who had lived in Crimea, including Mongols, Goths, Greeks, Italians and others who had been united by their conversion to Islam. They were the native people of Crimea, and should be known simply as Crimeans.

Not all Crimeans speak their own, Tartar tongue, a Turkic language, closely related to Turkish. In their exile, many switched to Russian. Indeed, although my hostess told me she and her family spoke Tartar, I noticed that, among themselves the family spoke Russian. When introducing me to her (non-English speaking) husband, I noted a look of surprise on his face that she spoke to him in Tartar, and they quickly switched to Russian. She told me there were now 14 Tartar schools in Crimea, including one in Bakhchisaray, but most of the tuition was in Russian. Before the exile, she told me, many of the Russians in Bakhchisaray, the minority at that time, could speak Tartar. On their return, they found some elderly Russians who had been there since before their departure, who could speak the Tartar language better than many Tartars themselves.

Khan's Palace gardens, Bakhchisaray

The former palace of the Crimean khans has been renovated and turned into a museum. And even if one cannot help suspecting that some features, such as the stained glass and the rose gardens, might be more in the taste of 21st Century Russians than of the 18th Century Khans, it gives some impression of the Islamic civilisation that preceded the Russian takeover, a provincial outpost of the Ottoman Empire. Especially famous is the Fountain of Tears, commissioned for the last Khan, to mark his grief for the unrequited love for a Polish woman, enslaved in his harem, who had pined away, unable to accept her new life. Moved by the story, Pushkin wrote a poem about it. He also started the tradition of leaving a red rose for love, and a yellow one for chagrin, at the fountain. The story may have its charm, but it reveals a dark side of Crimea’s past. Under the Khans the slave trade was one of the most important pillars of the economy, with raids into Ukraine, Poland and Russia to provide perhaps millions of slaves for the Ottoman Empire.