This article examines the information capabilities of the complex of documents of various contents residing in the State Archive of the Republic of the Crimea (Simferopol), supplying information on the works of customs and quarantine institutions in the Russian Imperial Period. The Crimean Peninsula, which entered the Russian Empire in 1783, from that time on was considered a significant and strategically important region by the central authorities, because of its location on the southern borders and the role of an outpost of the Russian foreign and customs policy. Simultaneously, there appeared a system of quarantine institutions created with the aim of prevention of viral diseases before they entered the Empire or suppression of them. In this regard, the Crimea became the “testing ground” for the customs and quarantine institutions, later spread through all Russia according to the “Crimean standard.” The archival documents suggest a complete picture of the diversity of functions of customs and quarantine control in the Crimean Peninsula, allowing the scholarly reconstruction of the history of the works of these institutions, the analysis of the features of the organization of their work, and the tracing of the main directions of export and import operations covered by the Crimean customs. Among the most important aspects of the given research, there is the possibility to use the archival documents as the background to identify the features of administrative communication in the structures of the customs and quarantine institutions and to obtain the account of their official and bureaucratic composition.
The dependence of Chersonese from the Seleucids and at the same time from Bosporos allows another interpretation of the Chersonesan coinage in the period in question. Bosporan King Perisades III gained influence over Chersonese due to some agreements that remains unknown to us. Iconography of Chersonesan coins from 187–175 BC shows the Bosporan ruler’s attributes, namely the images of a griffin and a gorytos on the lower denominations. On the senior denomination of silver coins there is an image of the head of Parthenos and a butting bull, the latter previously known when Chersonese was owned by Bosporos. Obviously, there was some kind of alliance, not only with Seleukos IV, but also with Philip V of Macedon in the person of the Bosporan King Perisades III, determining the policy of Chersonese and reflecting on the coins.
90 years have passed from the investigations of the Yevpatoria expedition of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture (SAHMC). Numerous archival documents now serve as witnesses of this scholarly undertaking. Epistolary materials shed light on the reasons and circumstances of the organization, the main sequence of events, the timing and scale of the expedition. The new source data have been analysed in the context of the museum and archaeological environment of the Crimean ASSR in the 1930s. The article attempts to reconstruct the biography of one of the correspondents. Ia. G. Blagodarnyi. The research has added previously unknown details on the period of P. N. Schul’ts’s academic biography, and has clarified why the researcher turned to the studies in the Crimean archaeology. There have been revealed the continuity of the work of the SAHMC Yevpatoria Expedition and the previous and subsequent archaeological researches in the north-western Crimea.
This article has systematized the experience in research of mediaeval historical and archaeological monuments located in the modern village of Pionerskoe near Simferopol, primarily Eski-Dzhami mosque and the ruins of, presumably, caravanserai. The current stage of research produced numerous hypotheses, often contradicting each other and based both on scientific facts and on groundless guesses. This study is aimed at the elimination of the gaps in the history of research of the said objects from the last quarter of the eighteenth century on. It widely uses the writings of many travellers who visited the Crimean Peninsula both for personal reasons and by office duty (A. N. Demidov, F. Dubois de Montpereux, Ch. Montandon, P. S. Pallas, P. I. Sumarokov, and others), and also academic publications by Russian researchers of ancient monuments (B. N. Zasypkin, E. D. Zilivinskaia, V. P. Kirilko, A. L. Iakobson, and others). Historical sources from earlier period (the works of Evliya Çelebi and others) and materials from the map collection of the A. Kh. Steven Taurica Scholarly Library at the Central Museum of the Taurida (Simferopol) are also attracted. The main stages of the research of the monuments have been determined, and the experience of monument identification in the Russian scholarship has been summarized. The first attempts to preserve and protect architectural sites related to the works of the Taurida Scholarly Archival Commission in the late-nineteenth century have been characterized. The experience of archaeological research of the mosque has been presented.
This article discusses a counterfeit Tyrolean thaler of the Erzherzog Ferdinand of Austria (1564–1595) minted in the period contemporary to him and discovered in the south-eastern Crimea (in the environs of the modern village of Grushevka, Sudak administrative area). This is high-quality counterfeit of a large-denomination European coin, made with a unique technology of soldering silver plates onto a base metal blank. Along with other counterfeits and authentic examples of foreign coins discovered in the Crimea, this find shows that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century money of various European issuers penetrated to the peninsula, and that, apparently, in the Early Modern Period, foreign currency took part in the coin circulation in the Taurica in this or that way along with the coins minted by the Crimean khans and Ottoman sultans.
This article addresses the results of modern studies of the main types of transport amphorae in the Byzantine Taurica for the period of the “Dark Ages.” The analysis attracts new archaeological complexes from the Crimea, the Lower Don Area, the Taman Peninsula, and the North Caucasus containing imported “Globular” amphorae and the “Black Sea” amphorae produced in the pottery centres of the Crimean Peninsula and published over the past 15 years. The conclusion is that from the second half of the seventh to the first half of the eighth centuries, the main type of amphora products on the local market were imported Byzantine “Globular” amphorae, which continued to arrive to the Northern Black Sea Area also later, as long as the middle or the second half of the ninth century. First of all, it comes from the materials excavated at the castle of Mangup in the mountainous Crimea. However, the dominant type of transport vessels from the second half of the eighth and ninth century were the “Black Sea” amphorae of two main types: smooth-walled with zones of fine corrugation and those with a grooved body (types 1 and 2 according to A. L. Iakobson). Despite the indicative stratigraphic situation revealed in Sougdaia and Phanagoreia, there is still no need for their chronological desynchronization. The examples excavated at the ancient town of Mangup, production centres and settlements on the Southern Coast of the Crimea generally show the synchroneity in the manufacture and circulation of these types of amphorae. The “Black Sea” amphorae continued to be used in the trade of the Byzantine Taurica as long as the beginning or the first half of the tenth century. In addition to the traditional eastern direction (Taman Peninsula, Don and Azov Sea Areas), they were also largely exported to other regions of the Black Sea and, most likely, the Eastern Mediterranean. This is indicated by the finds of grooved amphorae of type 2 along the Southern and Western coasts of the Black Sea, in the port area of Constantinople, and, possibly, if one pays attention to their morphological similarity to the amphorae of the Butrint 2 / Bozburun 1 / Yenikapu 12 types and the unsolved question of the centre of production of the latter, in the Aegean and the Adriatics. In conclusion, there appeared arguments that historiographic attempts in historiography to set aside the clarification of the traditional typological scheme of the development of the “Black Sea” amphorae and to replace it with the international system of their attribution are too anticipatory. As the review of the most important modern discoveries in the field of research of Mediterranean “Globular” amphorae has shown, their study is still at the stage of forming a presentable source base, which is comparable to the situation with their analogues from the Crimea.
The 2021 excavations at the Southern Suburb of Tauric Chersonese uncovered the grave of a 3- or 4-year-old child. The grave goods contained a figure vessel showing human head. Its stylistic features allow the author to interpret the vessel as young satyr’s head. The figure vessels form a specific category of ceramic ware. The few finds of similar head-shaped vessels at the cemeteries of the Northern Black Sea cities and towns are well known from the late-nineteenth century on. The artefacts in question were of definitely cult nature and were used possibly both when worshipping in temples and as grave goods. They often occurred in the graves of children. Figure vessels were manufactured with special moulds in a few centres of the Asia Minor. The vessels in question also meet with analogies among bronze and glass wares. The conclusion is that the introduction of new finds of the types with their particular archaeological context into the scholarship will only decide the questions of their chronology, functional purpose, attribution, and reconstruction of ideologies associated with them.
The Northwest Necropolis Church in Hadrianopolis, one of the cities of the Paphlagonia, is located southwest of the central area, 20 m northwest of the Bath B. Started 2017, excavations at the Northwest Necropolis Church were completed in 2021. The south and apse wall of the church came today at the foundation level, while the north and west came today at a height ranging between 1 m and 2 m. It is understood that the walls of the building were heavily damaged because of agricultural activities. Due to the extensive destruction of the body wall, no trace of the location, dimensions and position of the windows could be found. The only data about the windows are fragments of the windowpanes discovered during the excavations. Fragments of the windowpanes were unearthed in large quantities. The edges of some of the windowpanes were examined to get ideas about the frame. In addition, the paste residues that came today on the edges of some fragments were analyzed in lab to determine the ingredients. In this study, in the light of all datas, how the illumination in the Northwest Necropolis Church could have been, the technique with which the windowpanes were made, how many windows openings could be in which direction, in interpretation of the analysis results and the color scale were mentioned.
The sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius placed the Gothic region of Dory (Δόρυ) in the south-western Crimea. Procopius kept silence religious views of the inhabitants of Dory. Undoubtedly, they confessed Christianity, “like other Gothic peoples.” As written sources contain no reliable information about the existence of a Gothic diocese in the mountainous Crimea from the fourth to sixth century, the date when Christianity started spreading among the barbarians of the south-western Crimea is to uncovered by the materials of excavations of the cemeteries they created. Archaeological materials suggest that Gothic and Alan Christian communities emerged in the mountainous Crimea from the late-fourth century on: they imported amphorae with dipinti εὐλογία and τρυγία with wine used at divine service. Apparently, the Christianization of the borderland “barbarians” intensified after the Emperor Theodosius I issued edicts in 380 and 381, proclaiming the Nicene Creed of Christianity as the only state religion and equated church structures with state institutions. From the first half of the sixth century on, the inhabitants of the region of Dori buried their dead in their lifetime, usually ceremonial clothing, together with individual objects of Christian worship which the deceased wore during life. The churches excavated atop of the plateau of Mangup and near its foot, in the Karalez Ravine, are usually attributed to the construction activity of the age of the Emperor Justinian I (527–565).
The governorate public archival societies (commissions) established in Russia from 1884 on possessed an uncertain status and problematic financial situation, which lead to further “archival disorder” and the loss of documents important for the history of Russian provinces. Russia several times attempted to make an archival reform by subordinating provincial archives to central institutions. The next stage in the implementation of this idea was the transfer of methodological guidance over public provincial archivists from the St Petersburg Archaeological Institute to the Russian Historical Society (1912). On May 1914, the latter organized the congress of the representatives of the scholarly archival commissions and the corresponding institutions to attract the representatives of 31 academic archival institution from the most regions of the Russian Empire. For the first time, this forum made those who participated in the creation of provincial archives to discuss the questions challenged by the local scholarly societies and to offer particular measures capable of improving the situation. A. I. Markevich as the chair of the Taurida Scholarly Archival Commission represented the Taurida governorate. The author of the article has introduced into the scholarship two previously unknown papers by the leader of Crimean regional studies addressing the state of archival affairs in the peninsula. They are extraordinary important as an historical source on the Taurida Scholarly Archival Commission and on the acquisition to the governorate’s historical archive in Simferopol. The persistence of the local archival activists resulted in the significant increase of state subsidies and the granting of one-time allowances for the organization of archival services in governorate centres. The First World War prevented the realization of the further plans for archival reform.
This article publishes a metal mirror found in the southwestern Crimea. Similar to a significant part of the finds of this category, the mirror under study finds no context or monument to be reliably associated with. This circumstance, however, does not diminish the value of the artefact, since the find is distinguished by high artistic performance and a number of authentic features allowing the one to determine its chronology and cultural and historical period. The mirror under analysis is a figured “disk” with an eight-petal festooned edge, the front side of which is smoothly polished. On the reverse side there is a decoration showing two dragons, with the heads looking on the centre of the disk. This image is known on metal mirrors in the Khitan state of Liao, then becomes widespread in the Song period. For the dragon scenes, there are other variations: with one dragon playing with a pearl; with four dragons moving in a circle; with a dragon and a phoenix; a dragon and a tiger. Dragon mirrors are copies of Chinese mirrors but made by the workers in the Golden Horde. The find in question meets with analogies in the sites from the second half of the thirteenth and fourteenth century. Bronze mirrors from mediaeval states of the Far East were made by casting. Then, irregularities and casting seams were removed from the surface of the artefact. The mirror side was grinded, polished, and amalgamated with a mixture of mercury and tin. The material used in the making of the find from the south-western Crimea was tin-lead bronze with a high tin content (21.8%), which correlates with the results of elemental analysis of mirrors of the Golden Horde period uncovered in other monuments.
There are more than 230 rock-cut wine-presses from the Early Mediaeval Period located in the south-western Taurica, at the local “cave towns” (Mangup, Eski-Kermen, Kachi-Kal’on, and others) or in their environs. This source base allows the one to develop a classification with four main classes of rock-cut wine-presses (named I–IV) identified. As the new devices for the primary processing of grapes in the Bakhchisarai administrative area, structurally different from the previously known monuments, are discovered and documented, the existing classification needs to be amended. There are four rock-cut wine-presses discovered in the area in between of the town of Bakhchisarai and the village of Skalistoe, where the former villages of Ulakly and Balta-Chokrak were located. These wine-presses consist of a pressing platform, a juice receiver, and a rock-cut base to install the vertical post carrying the press lever. These constructions do not have a juice drain connecting the press with the receiver. These features allow the one to unite these constructions into class V. Although the preliminary estimation relates them to the Late Mediaeval or Early Modern Period (sixteenth to nineteenth century), they may have been carved out already in the nineteenth century. Another group of three portable wine-presses, consisting of a pressing platform and a juice drain with a spout, is located on the territory of the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchisarai (2) and atop of Chufut-Kale (1). These three wineries are identified with class VI. While wine-presses of classes I–V existed at the same site only, being stationary structures, the wine-presses of class VI were portable. The account of written sources allows the one to date the portable wineries in question from the late-eighteenth to the early-twentieth century.
The memorial library of Prince M. S. Vorontsov in the Alupka Palace and Park Museum-Reserve contains ten volumes of the newspaper “L’Ambigu”, published in 1802–1818 in London by the French emigrant Jean Gabriel Peltier. The very first issue of the newspaper caused a lot of noise: a pamphlet published there, calling for the assassination of Napoleon, provoked a high-profile trial against the publisher. The publications of the French counter-revolutionary Peltier in the library definitely testify to the political predilections of their owners and show the keen interest of the Russian elite of the early 19th century to political intrigues in Europe.
The article discusses Arabic inscriptions on a figured bronze padlock, which was excavated at Chersonese, its chronology and attribution. The first inscription runs along the upper lateral plane of the front door of its body and is a nominal single-member demonstrative sentence, informing the artisan’s personal name, his father’s name (kunya), name by the birthplace (nisba), and nickname (laqab): “This is the creation of Omar (Umar), son of Abu Bakr, of ez-Zabadani, Syrian”. The other two inscriptions are a poetic wish for the future owner of the castle, apositively connected by means of a continuous personal pronoun of the 3rd person singular numbers with the subject of the first inscription. Modern ez-Zabadani is a Syrian town in the Damascus governorate, located 25 km fare from it, at the border with Lebanon. The discovery of the unique figured lock at Chersonese allows the ones to identify a dynasty of Syrian craftsmen who had the exclusive right to sign their padlocks. In the Chersonesan find, Omar was the first to use a rotary key to press out the locking springs of the lock’s shackle instead of the rod crank keys that were used to open his previous horse locks, his father’s locks in the form of unicorns with an elephant’s head instead of a croup, and the cylindrical faceted lock of Abu Bakr found in the Volga area, at the ancient town of Bilyar showing the date of its manufacture as 541 AH (13/07/1146–01/07/1147 AD). The lock of Omar, son of Abu Bakr, improved by turning the key of the locking mechanism, was designed and created by him already in Iraq, the only place where he could get the nickname Syrian. For general reasons, his move to Mosul became possible, if not forced, after the Sultan of Egypt and Damascus (Syria) Saladin, famous for his victories over the crusaders, subjugated this city in 1186 AD. The last known representative of the famous dynasty of Syrian craftsmen was Omar’s son Ahmad, who lived and worked in Mosul. He is known as an engraver who created a large bronze basin decorated with carved ornaments and figures in medallions, which from the late-nineteenth century on resides at the Louvre Museum. According to one of its inscriptions, the basin was made by Ahmad, the son of Omar, nicknamed Dakki. Another inscription, located on the low bottom, reads: “Made
This article addresses A. V. Suvorov and F. de Wollant’s works of 1793–1794 aimed at the modernization of the strategic defence system of the newly acquired territory of the Russian Empire. Regarding the organization of the defence of the Crimea, the change in the location of its key main elements is clearly noticeable. Before the unification of the Crimea with Russia, the idea was to control the coast and the inland by the fieldwork fortification system developed in the 1770s. From 1783 on, the main task was to protect the coastland from the enemy’s landings. The defence system of small fieldworks was replaced with large fortresses accumulating significant materials and resources and military contingents. The cases of two projects, in Tiraspol and Simferopol, uncover new trends in the organization of strategic defence of the southern coastal border of Russia, with an emphasis on the creation of strong key fortresses instead of a network of numerous small-sized fortifications.
his research has systematised and analysed the images (attempts to replicate) of architectural forms typical of madrasah (“madrasah-ness”) on the tombstones from the mediaeval Crimea (Kyrk-Azizler, Solkhat, and so on). An attempt has been made to search for synchronous analogues in regions with similar ethno-confessional structure. The analyses also addresses the relationship between the status of persons associated with scholarship and education, or alleged students or teachers of madrasah, and the type of their tombstones.
The analysis of new archival data is the background to address the features of the late-eighteenth-century defensive structures located on the Taman and Crimean Peninsulas. The new sources introduced into the scholarship supply a more complete picture of the fortification sites located on the Crimean and Taman Peninsulas. This article focuses on the features of the defensive structures of the fortification ensembles in question. Especially interesting is the Vice Admiral Mordvinov’s report calling the empress’s attention to the cost to be paid for the construction of this or that fortification. The most expensive items of this estimate were related to the fort at the entrance to the Dnieper estuary, the fortifications of Sevastopol, and the fortress of Fanagoria. It was planned to build a new coastal artillery battery instead of Pavlovskaia and Aleksandrovskaia batteries to control the Strait of Kerch. The document supplies a specific list of the materials and tools necessary for the work in alphabetical order and shows the norms of payment for labour costs for certain works, taking into account their intensity and workers’ qualifications. Among the workers, there was a group of the so-called “workmen”: masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, sod-layers, and others, paid with 12 kopecks per day. There was a special category of unskilled workers, or rabotnye liudi, paid with 10 kopecks per day on the average. The introduction of the new archival documents into the scholarly circulation allows to understand the history of the forts in the Azov and Black Sea Area and, generally, the development level of Russian military engineering in the period under study.
This article presents a historiographical reconstruction of a little-known page in the heritage and biography of the art historian and orientalist Boris Petrovich Denike (1885–1941). The research uses the method of comparing the content of B. P. Denike’s article with the entries in his journal concerning the visits to the Crimea from 1905 to 1937. This approach allows the one to prove that the description of the monuments provided by B. P. Denike’s essay is the result of not only rethinking of the well-known current scholarship on the Crimean Tatar architecture, but also the scholar’s personal impressions of the monuments obtained during visits to the Crimea in different years. B. P. Denike managed to make a typological definition of the features of the Crimean Tatar architecture and to determine its place in the system of world architecture. In a brief essay of 1937, B. P. Denike revealed the synthetic nature of the Crimean Tatar architecture. According to B. P. Denike, the unique appearance of the structures belonging to the “cult” and “civil” architecture of the Crimean Tatars shaped in result of the synthesis of many styles. B. P. Denike managed to reveal the Crimean Tatar architecture’s unique perception of the architectural styles of the East and West, explainable by its genesis. Simultaneously, the reading of B. P. Denike’s biography in the context of the continual researches of the Crimean Tatar culture allows the one to compile a list of unexpected connections, intertwining the destinies of outstanding persons in the history of Crimea, such as archaeologist B. N. Zasypkin, archaeologist and ethnographer N. L. Ernst, art historian Ia. A. Tugenhol’d, Turkologist and Crimea researcher Ia. M. Kemal’, and museum worker G. Ia. Rosselevich. B. P. Denike’s forgotten article now returning to the academic circulation is of especial value, as the researcher described several monuments of the cultural heritage of the Crimean Tatars that did not survive.
This article researches the weaponry of the Salgir fieldwork from 1772–1784, the first Russian fort in the Crimea. The location of the fort and its arsenal was localized with magnetic surveys on a bends of the Salgir River south of the modern village of Muskatnoe, Krasnogvardeiskoe administrative area of the Republic of Crimea. The plan of the fort in the Atlas of Plans and Profiles of Field Fortifications (Fieldworks) in the Crimea and Its Environs of 1778, which resides in the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RSMHA), shows two artillery cellars. One of them appears on the magnetic field map as a great magnetic anomaly. The excavations uncovered a part of the artillery magazine containing 516 cast iron shells of four calibers (four three-pound cannonballs, 216 six-pound grenades, and 8 six-pound cannonballs, 286 twelve-pound cannonballs and 2 twenty-pound cannonballs). Although Catherine II’s decree of 1784 ordered to remove the cannons from the Salgir fieldwork, the ammunition remained in one of the cellars in the fort for more than 240 years. The mark on one of the grenades possibly means “Shuvalov.” It is possible that this and other grenades and cannonballs excavated in Salgir fort were cast at one of the factories of the Gornobladatskii complex on the Urals, which was owned by Count Petr Ivanovich Shuvalov. “The chief commander of the artillery” from 1756 on, he contributed to the development and implementation of new howitzers, called “edinorog/unicorn” after the heraldic image of this monster on Count Shuvalov’s coat-of-arms. The cannonballs were probably made by P. I. Shuvalov’s order at his own factory.
This article uses already published research works and the sources introduced into the scholarly circulation for the first time to examine Alexander I’s visits to the Crimea in the context of state measures for the protection of ancient monuments on the Crimean Peninsula. The case of the Palace of Bakhchisarai allows the author to address the ways of making decisions on the restoration and repair of this unique cultural site. It has been shown that an important task of the repair and restoration work in the Palace of Bakhchisarai initiated under the reign of Alexander I was to preserve the original architectural ensemble of the monument. The realization of this goal became possible due to the direct support from the Emperor, who first approved the plan for the repair of the palace, suggested by the architect I. F. Kolodin and examined in the Building Committee, and then the corrected project of the architect F. F. El’son. Simultaneously, Alexandre I understood the uniqueness of the site and, therefore, the need for its preservation, greatly after he personally examined the palace during the “most high visits” to the Crimea in 1818 and 1825.
