Yevpatoria, Crimea

  


      

 
Street scenes, old town; Turkish restaurant; the Mosque; the Cathedral and lavish interior; Kainite Jewish memorial with prayer room and an engraved tablet.

Yevpatoria, or Evpatoria, is a very special place, like Bakchysaray. It's where the steppes meet the sea, as Barbara put it. No mountains here, but a rich history of different cultures that once made this fabulous Black Sea port their home. I have just learned about a brand new "Black Sea Studies" program at the International Hellenic University in Greece, testifying to the geo-political importance of the area, and after getting a glimpse of this ancient city I am tempted to sign up!

Barbara was a great guide. We wandered into the "old city," where Christian and Orthodox churches, a Muslim mosque, and a Kainite (Kenite) Jewish temple and monument exist near each other, towering over historic homes and restored buildings lovingly decorated and painted.

The Orthodox Cathedral, St. Nicholas, is an opulent building, lavishly decorated with paintings and icons, right up there with St. Mary's in Krakow and the Orthodox churches of Kyiv. Another church, proclaiming "Christ has Risen," stood amidst a lovely garden where Barbara and I sat on a bench and marveled at the sight. The 400-year-old Kahn mosque is elegant but I didn't put on the burka and head dressing necessary to go inside. Memories of Istanbul's Blue Mosque twirled around my head. We heard a Call to Prayer, however, as we toured the Kainite Jewish temple, a contemporary memorial to an ancient nomadic tribe of Turkish descent. I learned that this sect, which I knew nothing about, goes back to the time of Cain and Abel perhaps. It's mentioned in the Old Testament and was apparently spared from the horrors of the Holocaust, I'm not sure why. You walk under a beautiful grape arbor to get to the memorial, which features a prayer room and beautiful marble columns, medallians and tablets engraved with texts from the Torah.

The mixture of religious buildings, ancient homes and streets, and cultural artifacts in this relatively small area of Yevpatoria astonishes. I wanted to know more about how these different cultures and religions came and went, rose and fell. I wanted Loren nearby to tell me more. I think he would have felt at home here himself. I imagined Barbara, Loren and I, having lunch and tea outside at the lovely Turkish Restaurant Jeval.

Yevpartoria, Crimea, an international crossroads: Loren's soul might well reside here.

Yalta and Livadia Palace

Yalta waterfront; Livadia
palace; interiors; vistas.

Going to Yalta from Simferopol on the bus is half the fun and excitement.

Heading into the mountains of southern Crimea is a dream, and I thought for some of the time that we were driving along Route 1 in California. The mountains rose and the sea emerged, the legendary Black sea, a crossroads between East and West for centuries . Barbara said it was "like Yosemite meeting the ocean," it was that beautiful.

And then we arrived in Yalta, a beautiful Russian seaside resort town that has remained a Russian resort town. We walked along the tree-lined boardwalk and pepple (not sandy) beaches, past some Renaissance-like buildings that look like former palaces, lots of health resorts, shops, and souvenir stalls, a busy harbour filled with huge cruise ships from around the world, and sailboats and fishing boats on the shimmering sea's horizon. It was a clear blue-sky day and the whole scene looked like a water-color painting.

A highlight of our visit was seeing the Livadia Palace, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met to end world War II. It is a long white Renaissance-style palace with a beautiful portico entrance, floor to ceilingl windows, balconies that look out on incredible vistas, large elegant rooms and decorative arts.

The first floor of the palace features the state rooms where the three leaders met for the Yalta conference, including a state reception room surrounded with carved walnut wainscotting and a lovely Venetian glass chandelair floating down from a walnut carved ceiling. For breaks, these world leaders could stroll in anItalian courtyard, or meditate in the smaller but lovely Arabian coutyard decorated with magnificent tiles.

The second floor features the elegant royal rooms of the last Tzar of Russia and his family, all victims of the Communist revolution. A royal study, library, bedrooms, and the children's classroom overlook the most magnificent vistas of

nature, mountains and sea imaginable.

Yalta is sometimes called "The Pearl of Ukraine," but I didn't feel like I was in Ukraine when I was in Crimea. Everything about it is so different from eastern Ukraine, the mixture of pre-historic, Christian, Orthodox, Turkish, Russian, Tatar, and Islamic history, the prosperous looking seasdide towns, the ancient names and places of mixed ancestry.

I'm told the majority of people in Crimea remains firecely loyal to Russia, while the indigenous people, the Crimean Tatars, who were forcibly removed from their homeland by Stalin and the Soviets, view the Soviets as intruders and oppressors. The Crimean Tatars live with the pain of a well-organized Soviet army-enforced deportation on the evening of 18 May 1944. Some 47% of the rsesettled population died of disease and malnutrition during the deportation. Crimean Tatars are now returning to their homeland after over sixty years in exile, many from Uzbekistan and Turkey. Sometimes the tension is palpable, and sometimes it is lost in the beauty and serenity that engulfs Crimea.

Returning Crimean Tatars have lots of stories to tell. The pain of losing their land remains, along with fervent efforts to preserve their language and culture. Would an ordinary but ancient pair of forged iron tongs mean anything to most of us? Probably not. But to one family it is all that remains of parents, grandparents and other relatives forced to flee their homes in a hurry one dark night in 1944, grabbing whatever they could in a state of shock and panic, a pair a tongs, a symbol of the sorrow of forced removal from ancestral homes.

Crimea has a complex past and present under its magnificent exterior. But Yalta remains a shining star.

Bakhchysaray and Chufut-Kale

Barbara at the caves; the cave city Chufat-Kale; the Khans' palace with minaret and entrance to small mosque; and the Uspensky monestary.

Bakchysaray, which means "garden palace" in Turkish, was once the capital of the powerful Crimean Khanate between the 15th and 18th centuries. After decades of tragic destruction

from both the Russian Tzars and then the Soviets, the town and its treasures are coming back to life.

The Khans' original palace survives, supposedly

because Catherine the Great thought it was

"romantic and sweet," which it is. The

palace was built by slaves under the direction of Ottoman, Persian and Italian architects. This would be a fantastic story to research and study. It's noted for its intricate designs and gates, its lovely mosque and minarets, its pretty harem, its wall paintings and decorations, and beautiful courtyard. The "Fountain of Tears," erected by master Omer in 1764 to honor his daughter, moved famous Russian poet A.S. Pushkin to write his poem "The Bakchyrsaray Fountain" in the 1820s.

Nearby is the lovely Uspensky Monestary, built into the rocks, probably by Byzantine monks in the 8th or 9th century. The gold-domed church, whitewashed and tiled, shines like a bright star on the hillside. The Soviets closed the church down, but it opened once again in 1993 and is maintained by local monks.

The most fantastic hike is through the old cave city of Chufat-Kale, fortified both by nature and man. It is a complex series of caves and structures (sheds, homes and barns) built into the limestone rock, which provided a fortress and refuge for different groups of migrants for hundreds of years. The views of the valley below are breathtaking. The guidebook Barbara has said it was first settled by Christian descendants of Samarian tribes, then around 1390s by the Crimean Tatars, and after the Tatars dispersed, by a dissident Jewish sect, the Kainite Turkish Jews, until about the mid-19th century. This sect of Judaism gave the mountain its current name, Chufut-Kale.

Wow, if these hills could talk. Scholars have tried to listen; lots of archeologists, for example, have explored the caves and tried to reconstruct their complex history. It's certainly a scholarly feast. But I think my brother Loren could tell me more than any guidebook or scholarly studies. He knew this history and I wish he were here to tell me.

Bakchysaray is a fascinating part of Crimea, and the planet, a place where old civilizations sought refuge and moved mountains, and modern generations are moved to understand them.

Crimea, Tartars and Bakhchysaray

Barbara (with my luggage!) in front of the

Crimean Tartar Library; a lovely archway at the Library; a taste of Smferople.

I’m in Simferople, Crimea, visiting my PCV friend Barbara, who lives and works with the Crimean Tartar community. Simferople is a city of about 345,000, which feels huge coming from Starobilsk. Barbara lives in a neighborhod repopulated by returning Tartars who were kicked out of their Crimean homeland by Stalin in 1944. Here’s how she describes the community (www.crimeantartarlibrary.blogspot.com):

The Crimean Tatars are a Turkic Muslim people who inhabited the Crimean Peninsula—the southern land mass of Ukraine surrounded by the Black Sea and Sea of Asov—for over seven centuries. For three hundred years, from 1441 t

o 1783 when Crimea was annexed by Russia, the Crimean Tatars ruled the peninsula through the Crimean Khanate. At the height of the Crimean Khanate, there were over six million Crimean Tatars inhabiting the peninsula, and at the time of annexation to Russia, they constituted 98% of the population. The intense Russification of the peninsula over the next century forced many Crimean Tatars to leave their homeland, and by the time of the Russian Revolution, there were only 300,000 Crimean Tatars left on the peninsula. Under the Bolsheviks a brief flowering of Crimean Tatar culture occurred between 1921 and 1927, and Crimean Tatar was made the official language of the peninsula along with Russian.

Stalin’s repressive policies soon ended this “Golden Age” and resulted in further devastation of the Crimean Tatar people and culture, culminating in the mass overnight deportation on May 18, 1944, of all Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan and other distant Soviet Republics. Over 46% of the Crimean Tatar population died during transport and in the subsequent camps, and almost all evidence of Crimean Tatar culture—mosques, place names, art and literature—were destroyed in Crimea, leading to the desired final solution of a “Crimea without Crimean Tatars.”

Still, the Crimean Tatars--living in exile, not allowed to speak or teach their language, practice their religion, play their music, or write their stories--kept alive the dream of their homeland and formed a national movement which, after fifty years of nonviolent struggle, brought them back to their native land of Crimea. The Crimean Tatars slowly began to return in1985, a momentum that gathered strength as more and more restrictions were lifted, and in a 4-year period from 1989 to 1993, over 200,000 Crimean Tatars flooded back to Crimea. Today, an estimated 300,000 Crimean Tatars live in Crimea, constituting 13% of the population. They have an official governing body, representatives in the Crimea and Ukraine Rada (Congress), national schools that teach all subjects in Crimean Tatar, a university that educates Crimean Tatar language teachers, art and history museums, theater, radio and TV stations, and the Gasprinskiy Crimean Tatar Library where I so happily find myself working as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

For an excellent English-language website on the history and culture of the Crimean Tartars go to www.iccrimea.org.

The Gasprinskiy Crimean Tartar Library, named after a major turn-of-the-20th century Tartar writer who was far ahead of his time, is a major institution for this community, working to preserve the language and culture of the Tartar people. Barbara continues:

As Crimean Tatars flooded back to their homeland in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they began to establish organizations to serve their returning people. In 1990, the Crimean Tatar Library in the name of I. Gasprinskiy (known as the Gasprinskiy Library) opened as a branch of the central library system in Simferopol, the capitol of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine. Five years later, it became an autonomous library under the Ministry of Culture in Crimea.

The mission of the library is to acquire, store, and make available to users the world’s largest collection of documents in the Crimean Tatar language and about Crimean Tatars in other languages. Today, the library has a collection of more than 32,000 books plus 9000 complete sets of magazines and newspapers in the Crimean Tatar language; 4500 books in Turkish and other Turkic languages; and more than 2000 rare and valuable books.

Being with Barbara in Simferople is an adventure in itself, meeting her neighbors, sharing meals, and visiting the library.

On Saturday we went to the fabulous town of Bakhchysaray and visited the Khan’s palace, a building spared when Catherine the Great of Russia ordered the destruction of Crimean mosques, because it was a romantic and lovely structure, which it is; the Uspensky monastery, built into the limestone rock of the surrounding hill, most probably by Byzentine monks in the 8th or 9th century; and Chufut-Kale, one the best preserved and best-known cave towns of Crimea. Loren would have absolutely loved this area, and I got a feeling it may have been near or around the site of The Clan of the Cave Bear and other stories by Auel. Quite a hike, but well worth the effort to explore this fascinating place. More about Bakhchysaray later!