From Yalta we did a quick sail to Sevastopol.
Sevastopol is one of the world's great natural harbors as the Greeks knew (who settled Chersonesos shown at left in Longhorn Orange as it is a major excavation site for the University of Texas at Austin.) At right, the Chernaya River flows into Black Sea at Inkerman -- a town of many battles and also the producer of the white stone used in the Livadia Palace in Yalta.
Formerly a closed city when it harbored the Soviet Fleet, Sevastopal now is home to both the larger Russian and the Ukraine navies. As a result of the recent Georgian conflict, the President of Ukraine is now trying to score political points with the West by threatening to renegotiate the agreement to house the Russians here. Note the grain silos -- the Ukraine has traditionally been a great breadbasket for Russia.
Hopefully this hospital ship will not be needed anytime soon. The Crimea is filled with Russian speakers (and sympathizers). Given the Ukraine's thirst for Russian oil, it's unlikely the Russian fleet will be moving anytime soon.
We'll show more harbor-area pictures later, but for now, let's start where the Greeks did: Chersonesos. While humans have populated this area since the 2nd millennium BC, the Greeks got the press. Euripides set "Iphigeneia in Tauris" here -- and wrote it only 7 years after the town's founding around 422 BC. It's not all that civilized a place in this drama as Iphigeneia's job as a priestess is to sacrifice captured foreigners (one of whom turns out to be her brother) to the gods. (She didn't like the work, but the benefits were good). That domed cathedral is part of the site: it marks the spot where the Russian and Ukraine Orthodox churches began nearly at the end of the first millennium AD. History here came early and stayed late.
Heres a software-stitched panorama of the Chersonesos which will probably turn out to be as significant an archaeological site as Pompey. Both Pompey and Chersonesos got frozen in time by disasters (in Chersonesos case a fire). While Pompey tells us much about Roman city life in the first century AD, Chersonesos will reveal the secrets of AGRICULTURE. Most sites are lucky to have buried cities; the countryside has long been destroyed by plows and then by 20th century suburban development. That was not the case here in the closed city of Sevastopol. About a third of the site has been excavated and many more clues to the Greek 4th century BC farm life sleep just below the topsoil.
The Greeks settled here because of the harbor, plenty deep enough for their ships. In 1783, when Catherine the Great founded what would be Sevastopol, she moved to the area in the left background where the harbor was even deeper.
This appears to be a Greek theater. (The Romans came here, of course, but their theaters tend to be freestanding, not embedded in a hill). The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute of Classical Archaeology is leading the excavation efforts along with Ukraine and Sevastopol governmental and museum authorities.
Information in English is quite scant here. (This will undoubtedly be fixed as the Texans expand the touring facilities of this place). This was the town's mint (and coins from Chersonesos can be found in most archaeological museums on the Black Sea.) Note Latin expression "she loves" (AMAT) on the inner wall. Did the Greeks invent the felt tip?
For now, about the best we see are the maps (no English labels). This presumably shows what the site looked like before the great fire in the 13th century resulted in the cities abandonment. The Greek word "chersonesos" means "peninsula." The much larger Heraklean Peninsula (not shown here) was covered with the farm area (called "chora") with an elaborate network of roads to bring the grain and wine to market -- and to the harbor to export to Athens.
We were fortunate to get inside this nondescript 2005 building funded by the Packard Humanities Institute from Palo Alto, California. Our neighbor in Houston, the Brown Foundation also provides financial support. This site originally held the bathhouse for the monastery.
Our guide was, I believe, Larissa Sedikova a Ukraine scholar who is co-director of the research taking place here.
We didn't see many torsos such as this a funerary statues are rare here...
More typical were these mosaics in the process of being restored.
But the jewels of this collection are stones: especially the gravestones, many holding some of their original polychrome colors. Apparently these were taken from a necropolis and used to help build the city walls.
These stelai show weapons and rosettes -- but no statues, unlike those in other Attic Greek cities such as Athens.
Unlike most other stones from necropoli, they appear to be dedicated to individuals, rather than whole families. Over 300 fragmentary stelai were recovered in Soviet days.
This long inscription gives the Oath of Chersonesos and is a very important document in the Black Sea area. Citizens swore allegiance to their democracy and promised to defend it. Furthermore, it explicitly mentions grain -- which Athens needed to import in large quantities from Black Sea colonies. (You undoubtedly noticed the large grain silos behind the battleships in Sevastapol's port on our earlier pictures.)
Marble was rare here and usually had to be imported from Athens. Instead, sculptors used the softer limestone readily available in the area. Tombstones contained some non-Greek names, suggesting that the indigenous population had assimilated with the colonizers.
Nearby was a sheltered area where partially-reassembled mosaics awaited redeployment.
Besides grain, Chersonesos produced much wine. However, olive was a problem as this area is not conducive to olive trees.
Down at the edge of the peninsula, rise a few remnants of the 1935 Basilica, named for the year it was unearthed. This site was the birthplace of Slavic Archeology and work started about 200 years ago. Bathers outnumber tourists even though the beach (like much of the soil here) has been badly eroded by time and the Black Sea. The steepness of the Crimean Mountains' descent into the Black Sea encourages the erosion and makes good beaches somewhat rare here.
Look closely at the Ukraine Hryvnia (equivalent to about a US quarter). The back features the 1935 Basilica, so proud are the Ukrainians of this ancient site.
This seems to be a 6th century building and is therefore most likely the work of the Byzantines who inherited Chersonesos from the Romans. Inscriptions nearby suggest a Jewish synagogue was also in this area. While tourists help make the site better known (and therefore more likely to compete for research funds), their numbers threaten the fragile remains which can be damaged merely by walking on them.
The approach taken here by the Texans is multi-disciplinary including using NASA photos to identify farmland.
In 2005, they engaged other researchers excavating shipwrecks near Sevastopol. Most research is being stored in highly sophisticated digital databases.
The town walls are extensive.
Since this became a major Byzantine outpost, it was a focal point for interactions between the Christian West and the pagan Slavs. So it was not by chance that this cathedral is here to mark the spot where the Russian and Ukraine Orthodox traditions began.
The ancient arch of the city walls and the late 19th century St Vladimir's Cathedral built of local Inkerman stone. Vladimir would not have been most folks' first choice for sainthood. When he became king in Kiev, he first tried to restore paganism possibly including rituals involving human sacrifice. When that failed to excite the people, he set up a task force to see which monotheistic religion all should adopt: Judaism, Islam, or Christianity.
The answer was -- Christianity. So Vladimir traded in his 7 wives for a new one from Constantinople, and converted at the same time.
Next we visited the diorama museum commemorating the first great siege of Sevastopol: September 1854 until September 1855 during the Crimean war.
This place gets the award for best language-free sign. I understand the no popsicles at left, but the upper right prohibition: is it against cowboy hats or male thongs?
Our statuesque Snezhana explains the statue: it's of Odessa native Franz Roubaud painted the original diorama. Unfortunately, during WWII a fire destroyed it and what we saw was a recreation by Soviet artists. Luckily sufficient documentation was available to recreate Roubaud's vision.
These are superb depictions of scenes of the 1854-55 siege which originally opened in 1905 on the 50th anniversary of the war. By that time, Roubaud had relocated to Munich and sent the painting for display in the specially-created building. The scenes are from one day: June 18, 1855, when the Russians successfully repelled the assault. (They won the day but eventually lost Sevastopol -- and the war. When the Tsar realized how poorly his serfs fought against freemen on the British and French side, he moved to emancipate the serfs.
In the foreground are sculptures which duplicate the camp of the Russians. Middle and Backgrounds are paintings. A 1942 bomb during the second siege of Sevastopol left Roubaud's masterpiece in 86 pieces -- unrecoverable. Here we see cannons taken from Russian ships being loaded. A famous hero, sailor T. Aleksandrov pours water on an incoming bomb. The Russians started the war by scuttling their fleet in the harbor, after redeploying sailors and cannon to defend the city. Typically the enemy would bombard their positions all day, and the Russians would rebuild overnight.
The various scenes flow seamlessly into each other and each of them is well composed with focal points such as this one of a famous Russian surgeon N. Pirogov. This takes vision and a lot of paint as the length of this wrap-around painting is 377 feet.
The cart is a sculpture in the foreground; the horse is painted on the mural. The original took Roubaud 3 years to paint -- the same as the reconstruction in the 1950s in Moscow while Sevastopol rebuilt the display hall. The panorama reopened in 1954 -- 100 years after the first siege of 349 days started. This town is strategically placed but with tenacious defenders. During WWII, the Germans and Romanians besieged the city 250 days and finally captured it, using very heavy artillery including their ultimate railroad cannon nicknamed "Heavy Gustav."
The outside contains statues in niches of the siege heroes including ordinary sailors (perhaps Aleksandrov again?) ...
And probably the nurse P. Grafova (according to the signs inside referring to their “sister of mercy”); The Crimean War brought women into the war effort as nurses including the war's most famous nurse, Florence Nightingale. At this time, wounded soldiers were 10 times as likely to die of disease in the hospital than they were from their war wounds. Louis Pasteur was just beginning his career when hostilities began.
After lunch, we journeyed to the end of the harbor past the shipyards of Inkerman.
The Crimean Mountains rise steeply from the floor of the Black Sea and erosion has exposed some of the underlying limestone. Behind them rest the Pontic Steppes and a semi-arid climate.
Earthquakes still occur in Ukraine with the most recent in 1927. Stone quarried here is white and called Inkerman Stone. We saw it used in the Livadia Palace in Yalta.
Some serious cave activity
Note the window at upper left -- two churches have been created in these caves.
Somewhere in these fertile fields, the Battle of Balaklava was fought as the Russians tried to break the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. Here because of an ambiguous and then misinterpreted order, the Light Brigade rode into the valley of Death, giving us Tennyson's line "Theirs was not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die." He should have used Cool Hand Luke "what we have here is a failure to communicate." Some of our clever Smithie cruisemates (there we no other kind), spoofed Lord Tennyson's poem with a paean to shopping -- not too far fetched when you realize that the commander of the Light Brigade survived the attack. He was the 7th Earl of Cardigan for whom the sweater is named.
An industrial park seems to have sprung from the caves.
A serious cliff here. The mountains were started by the accumulation of sedimentary deposits from the sea.
On top appears to be Kalamita, a 6th century fortress last used to defend Inkerman from the Cossacks. Below an ancient monastery was created out of the caves and used to store icons during the iconclast wars of the 8th century.
Here's a 1910 painting made at a different angle from the previous picture. The Soviets stored ammunition in these caves until an explosion blew up most (but not all) of it. After 1990, newly sprung capitalists extracted and sold some of it, blowing many to bits in the process until the Ukraine government put a stop to it.
A final view of the shipyards and the Crimean Mountains rising behind the Chernaya River.
Our afternoon took us to Hansaray in the Crimean town of Bakhchisaray. Here is the only remaining palace of the Crimean Khan.
We're looking North across the guards barracks and to the Crimean terrain above.
Founded by Khan Sahib I Giray in 1532, the Bakhchisary Palace was built with slave labor in the 16th century (and restored since to resemble how it looked then). The Giray dynasty ruled from then on until the late 18th century. Their descendants are alive today. Looking west from the courtyard, we see the tourist entrance to the Ambassadors' Courtyard.
This was the headquarters for the Crimean Khan, a political entity which lasted from 1441 to 1783 when Catherine the Great forced the Crimea into the Russian fold. It traces roots back to Genghis Khan's empire. These Khans controlled most of Crimea excluding its southern ports which were run by the Genoans. Technically the Ottomans were their masters, and had to approve (but not nominate) a new Khan. In reality, they were treated as equals by Istanbul -- and they treated Russia as a doormat, raiding it often and taking millions of slaves.
Behind the royal tombs is the cemetery. The Crimean Tatars did not pay tribute to the Ottomans and were compensated for their wartime service. When the Ottomans quit conquering and war booty dried up, the economy faltered in Crimea.
Steppe laws of succession required the Khan to be a descendant of Genghis Khan. (Even the Russian Tsars followed this rule.) The Crimean Khanate was one of the dominant powers in Eastern Europe until the 18th century. Some estimate that they took over 3 million slaves during their rule.
Each side of the courtyard holds a mosque; this one is the larger.
This ornate ceiling shields visitors to the Divan Hall or Divankhana.
The Khan's business was transacted here in the divan room. (" Divan" means "council" in Persian and since it had couches as seen at left, we've made an English word for a couch out of it.) The harem could watch through the screened windows on the second floor. A 1736 fire gutted the room but paintings were available to guide the restoration. The council who met here functioned a bit like a parliament. Members were heads of their own territories and could not be removed by the Khan.
This is the Iron Gate in the Ambassador's Courtyard. It frames a wooden door lined with iron door protecting the Khan's residence. It's older than the complex, having been moved here from an earlier palace.
The Renaissance pediment with calligraphic ornament of the 1503 Iron Gate. It is the work of the Venetian Alvise Lamberti da Montagnana who was captured on his way to working on the Moscow Kremlin. The Khan managed to free Lamberti who returned the favor by creating this lavish portico. At center is the tamğa - the symbol of the Giray dynasty.
The interior of the lower level of the Summer Arbor (forgive this software-stitched picture.) Note the fountain at center. This room was built later -- at the beginning of the 17th century and this was originally an open porch; the stain glass windows were added later. It also was severely damaged during the 1736 fire.
Here's the exterior of the upper story of the Summer Arbor.
Another stitched picture, this one of the smaller mosque on the west side of the complex. Built in the 16th century, it was restored in 1991. At lower center is a Koran holder.
The Jewish star found in the mosque (and not that unusual a decoration in Ottoman-influenced architecture.)
Here's the most famous piece of sculpture here, the Bakhchisaray Fountain or Fountain of Tears. Built in 1764, it stood at the tomb of the Khan's favorite concubine. In 1784, it was moved to the north side of the Ambassador's court. After an 1820 visit, an exiled Pushkin composed a love poem making it forever famous. Some feel Pushkin's work helped preserve the palace after Catherine the Great took over the Crimean. The place was then in need of Pushkin -- many of the Khans had been poets.
This 1733 Golden Fountain embedded in the south wall of the L-shaped Ambassador's court was used for ablutions before praying in the mosque. Its rosette represents eternal life. The Khans had extensive waterworks built to move the spring water of the area into their city. For about 7000 citizens, they had 120 fountains fed by ceramic pipes.
The entrance to the harem which would be owned by the Khan's mother, if she were still alive. Otherwise, his senior wife would run the place. Originally this was joined to the rest of the palace by a gallery. This is a single story building, one of four buildings in the original complex.
The front door of the harem with another elaborately carved portico, thought to be from the 16th century.
Near the doorway of the harem rests this ornately carved screen which allowed the occupants to see their visitors. The harem was built in the 18th century.
The living quarters of the harem are presented as if still in the 16th century.
The harem drawing room. The surviving harem building has only three rooms and its entryway.
A music room
Looking east in the courtyard at the larger mosque, the first building erected in the complex. Originally this had a domed roof. The Soviets closed it down, but it has reopened for services since.
The minarets here are more embellished than any we saw in the city of 2000 mosques called Istanbul.
Not as tall as the minarets is the Falcon Tower -- so named because the Khans hunted with falcons. Inside, this was empty space to allow for training of the birds.
A panoramic view of the North and West sides of the courtyard. To the south lie a three-level terraced garden.
Back to that great Sevastopol harbor we took a few pictures of the area and the park that leads to it.
This is a very strategic spot and so many wars have been fought for control here -- leaving the place with many war memorials.
Modern apartments rise up the Crimean foothills.
This Greek-style portico suggests an acropolis. Note the red marble which...
...is meant to serve as a red carpet for admirals and other dignitaries arriving by sea. It is very slippery.
A modern adaptation of a classic lamppost
A lovely park winds through several more war memorials.
A bit of Soviet Realism style above the names of the fallen
This famous admiral's statue...
...is accorded all due reverence by the populace. Would this admiral really shake hands with a man holding a purse?
This memorial, most likely to the defenders of the WWII 250 day siege of Sevastopol, chased us out of the harbor as we sailed to Odessa.
