Black Sea (5 page)

For the Crimean zones of mind and body to create wealth together, there had to be two conditions: merchants on the coast with secure access to the outside markets of the Mediterranean and beyond, and a stable political situation on the steppe. Sometimes there was turmoil on the great plains; trade routes were closed, cultivation of wheat outside town walls became dangerous, and the city-colonies were occasionally looted and burned. But for long periods, especially during the Scythian time, there was peace. The Greek colonists and the Scythian chiefs near the coast grew wheat for export. Furs, wax, honey and slaves were brought down from the northern forests to the markets in the Greek coastal cities, and for the most part the Scythians let these caravans travel freely across their open grassland to the sea. On the profits of the grain and the slaves, which fed and provided a labour-force for the Hellenic and Roman worlds, both the Greek merchants and the up-country Scythian princes grew very rich indeed.

The Scythians, and then the Sarmatians and Goths who followed them, spent this wealth conspicuously. They bought jewellery and goldwork, made in the city colonies to their personal order and fancy by Greek craftsmen and their native apprentices. They took their treasures to their graves, to lie under tall burial mounds among sacrificed horses, servants and women.

If you travel eastwards across the Crimean steppe, you come to the last of the trapezoid downs and the ground falls away at your feet. You stand on this last ridge, with a battering, restless wind in your face, and look across the Sea of Azov into the infinity of dun-coloured flatness which begins here and reaches away across a continent, past the northern end of the Caspian Sea and as far as Lake Baikal. There is no horizon. Only a long bar of shadow to the east, which is the approaching night.

On this ridge are the foundations of a stone tower. When the Mongol-Tatars of the Golden Horde entered the Crimean-peninsula, splashing their ponies across the Azov saltmarshes, they saw this tower on the skyline above them and called it
Kerim
- fort. They made their first encampment and headquarters below the tower at Eski Kerim, or Krim - 'old fort' - which might be the origin of the word 'Crimea'. From Eski Krim, the Tatars moved to Bakhchiserai and set the palace of the independent khanate in a green valley, near the sound of water and nightingales.

The zone of the body has always pressed impatiently against the zone of the mind. Sometimes the pressure was destructive, as when the Tatars rode down to the sea from Eski Krim in the late thirteenth century and sacked the Genoese metropolis of Kaffa. But often it was metamorphic. The category-fence between 'European' colonists and 'native' nomads was always falling into disrepair or developing large gaps.

Scythians, for example, were not only peripatetic horse-breeders who lived in wagons. They were also capable of laying out fields and growing crops on a commercial rather than a subsistence scale, of designing permanent fortified towns with something like a street-plan, of delicate and innovative metalwork. The Greek or Italian citizens of the trading colonies could be farmers as well as merchants, venturing and working far away from their protective walls. The nomads - there are some well-recorded cases - could live double lives as Hellenic or Italianised gentry within the walls and (literally changing clothes) as traditional steppe chieftains outside them. Rich Khazars, speaking a Turkic language but practising a form of Judaism, lived as respected citizens in Sudak. Much earlier, in the first century AD, Dio Chrysostom visited the city of Olbia, near the estuary of the Dnieper, and found the citizens quoting Homer but wearing the trousers and moccasins of non-Greek nomads.

What we do not know is whether that last process could run the other way— whether there were 'civilised' individuals from the zone of the mind who were magnetised outwards into the 'barbarian' zone of the body, who lived in wagons, drank mares' milk and did reverence before the carcases of impaled horses which guarded royal tombs. Probably there were. It happened on the American frontier, where there were always European trappers and voyaging traders and even the wives and children of colonists who Vent Indian
⁹
by choice.

But between the body and the mind, between the steppe and the coast, was a third place: the mountain zone of the spirit. Up on the flat summits of the Shatir Dagh range, or in caves hidden by forest, far above the nomads and the traders, lived communities which had lost all prospects of wealth or conquest.

From Bakhchiserai, the coach drove southwards into the foothills of the coastal range, though a small canyon, and stopped in a meadow surrounded by mountains. The Byzantinologists settled on the grass beside a lake and unwrapped their sandwiches. There were trees, a few tents, a pipe running spring water into an old iron fountain-basin at which two young women were washing themselves and their clothes.

One of them, wearing only a long black skirt, strolled across to us and bent to squeeze the water out of her hair. 'Got a Western cigarette? Our Soviet ones are so awful.'

One of the Genoese offered her a pack.
'
Any news?
'
She stood upright, shook her hair back, accepted the cigarette and, while the match was being lit for her, said, 'No news. On the
radio,
only bloody
Swan Lake.
'
Behind her, two boys were trying to stretch an aerial from their tent to a tree.

The climb from the meadows of the valley floor to the summit of Mangup Kale takes an hour, two thousand feet of struggling and sweating upwards until a broken city-wall looms up among the trees. From here the going is a little easier. But now the forest becomes a cemetery. Hundreds and hundreds of stone tombs drift on a sea of dead leaves, tilting, listing, capsizing, engraved with deep-cut Hebrew characters.

The tombs belong to the Karaim. They were a Jewish sect which began in Mesopotamia in the eighth century AD and broke with the mainstream of rabbinical Judaism two hundred years later. The Karaim believed that the word of the Lord was to be found in Scripture but nowhere else, and that the additions of the Talmud were impious and decadent. (For that reason Christian Protestants, Germans especially, have always been fascinated by the Karaim whom they imagine, quite falsely, to have been harbingers of the Christian Reformation.)

The Karaim reached Crimea in the twelfth century, dislodged from Palestine and Egypt by the upheaval of the First Crusade. They migrated into the Byzantine Empire and beyond it into northeastern Europe, where parties of Karaim settled in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Many sectarians, like the Albigensian Christians of southern France, have felt safe only in remote, defensible places far from centres of power and population. The Karaim shared this existential terror. They withdrew to the tops of the Crimean mountains or, in Lithuania, to the fortress-islands of Trakai in a lake among birch forests. But, like hermit-crabs, they preferred to settle in fortifications already built and then abandoned by others rather than to raise their own, and the Karaim did not take over Mangup Kale until it had been sacked and emptied by the Turks. The oldest Karaite grave in the woods below the summit is dated 1468, a few years before the fall of Mangup, but most of them were carved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In Crimea, the Karaim kept their distance from the Christian or Moslem societies around them, living careful Karaite lives, trading and manufacturing small household goods but avoiding service to any government. One historian has remarked that, between about 1100 and 1900 AD, almost nothing happened; Karaite history in Crimea was a long and peaceful blank. However, by staying aloof the Karaim acquired a reputation for being more upright and more honest than other communities, and in consequence, when the history of the Karaim began to happen once more, it took a curious turn. Gentiles, impressed by their probity, began to invent reasons why the Karaim should be exempted from the general anti-Semitism. It was supposed that they must be converts, like the Khazars. Here was an absurd irony: by attempting to be more intensely and primordially Judaic than other Jews, the Karaim ensured that Gentiles would consider them not to be truly Jewish at all.

After the Russian annexation of Crimea at the end of the eighteenth century, Catherine II took a respectful interest in the Karaim. She had added enormous territories to the Russian Empire: in the west, much of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in the south almost the whole northern shore of the Black Sea. To develop them, she recruited colonists — Germans, Greeks, Armenians, even French settlers - and the Karaim with their sober energy were suitable to her purpose. Catherine moved some of the Crimean Karaim to reinforce their old settlements in Lithuania; and in the huge new frontier province of Novorossiya (New Russia) in the south she granted them full Russian citizenship, which was denied to the main Jewish population. From Mangup and their other cliff-redoubt at Chufut Kale, above Bakhchiserai, the Karaim began to migrate down to the cities of the Crimean coast, especially to Evpatoria. When the Scottish traveller Laurence Oliphant climbed up to Chufut Kale in 1852, he found only a handful of Karaim left, looking after the old synagogue. The last of them had abandoned Mangup some fifty years before.

During the Second World War, the Nazi racial bureaucracy in Berlin decreed (vainly, as it turned out) that the Karaim should not be included in the 'final solution of the Jewish question', on the grounds that they were not biologically and genetically Jewish but descendants of Khazar converts to Judaism. This was complete nonsense. But the main Jewish communities of the Black Sea, themselves listed for slaughter, seem to have supported the myth in order to save their brethren if they could not save themselves.

Just below the rim of the Mangup summit, there is a spring of chill, delicious water. Then the trees part and you emerge into a tableland of flat, short turf scented with thyme. Ruins stand about, some with towers and arches, others little more than the stone wall-footings which are all that remains of basilicas and gatehouses and synagogues and watch-towers. The world, sea and land, lies spread out below. People came and settled on Mangup when they were afraid or wanted to be alone with God, or both.

That day there was a camp on the flat summit: a line of pup-tents flying the Russian tricolour, an old army cooker on wheels, a blackened bucket full of stewing tea, clouds of blue woodsmoke. An archaeological expedition from the University of the Urals at Sverdlovsk (now again Ekaterinburg) had been digging on the summit for several weeks. Up here, above the world, they knew nothing. The students gathered round gravely, while we drank their tea through thick Russian sugar-cubes. Only light music dribbled from their radio, a long giggle of embarrassment to fill the silence of Russia which grew more enormous as the hours passed.

All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one's home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession — to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership - is a joke.

Crimea, whose beauty provokes almost sexual yearnings of possession in all its visitors, has demonstrated this joke in every century of its history. It has no natives, no aboriginals. Before the Scythians, before the Cimmerians who preceded them or the Bronze Age populations who raised the first burial-mounds, there were human beings who had come from somewhere else. Crimea has always been a destination, the cliffs at the end of the sea or the shore where the wagons must end their journey. Voyaging communities settled in Crimea (the Scythians lived here for nearly a thousand years) but in the end they dispersed or moved on. All that has been constant in Crimean history has been a certain structure which the peninsula has imposed upon its visitors: the zones of mind, body and spirit have often been effaced but until now have always re-emerged. Only in recent times has the Crimean truth - that it belongs to everybody and to nobody — been violated. Two of these violations, which would be merely absurd if they did not imply so much blood and suffering in the past and very probably in the future, are the declarations of two autocrats. In 1783, Catherine II ('The Great') proclaimed that the Crimean peninsula was henceforth and for all time to become Russian. And in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian seeking to divert the attention of his own people from their miseries, announced that he was transferring Crimea from Russia to become for all time Ukrainian.

Mangup is about all these Crimean ironies. Most of the ruins on the Mangup summit belong to a forgotten, improbable principality of the Middle Ages. The fortress of Theodoro-Mangup contained an independent Greek principality, ruled by the Princes of Gothia. But what did 'Greek' mean up here, or 'Gothic'?

The Goths came to the Black Sea and to Crimea from an unusual direction, from the north-west rather than from the east. A proto-Germanic confederation of peoples from southern Scandinavia, they had occupied Crimea in the third century AD, in the course of their conquest of most of the Black Sea's northern shore. A hundred years later, the Black Sea Goths were defeated by the Huns. Many headed westward, on the next leg of a migration which in the time of their great-grandchildren would deposit them in Italy as the army of their king, Theodoric the Great. But some remained in the Crimean mountains. Christianised and then incorporated into the Byzantine Empire, they were still there in the sixth century when the emperor Justinian I fortified Mangup as part of a line of strong-points intended to shield the coastal cities against an attack out of the steppes.