Among the Ruins

Ruins are among the most powerful elements of the built environment in Russia's southern empire. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Tavrida itself was seen, from a certain perspective, as one sprawling, glorious ruin. The province was strewn with burial sites, churches, fortifications, and cities that had fallen into various states of disrepair, suffered catastrophic destruction, or otherwise been subsumed within deep layers of soil and rock. 

The presence of architectural monuments, ruined and otherwise, played nearly as important a role in the toponymy of the region as geological and hydrographical features. Cliffs and streams, clearings and ancient walls and burial mounds: such features lent their names to the places they shaped.

They did more than that. For much of the tsarist period, the surest way to navigate the rocky and tumultuous southern coast was by following rough directions and goat paths, calibrating one's course according to rocky outcroppings, views of the sea, and ruins.

Claims to these ubiquitous and treacherous sites were empowering. Knowledge of them was valuable, even vital, to any claim to possession of the peninsula. This narration explores this idea in greater depth and maps the archaeological politics that helped define the significance of Crimea from a global - as well as an intensely local - perspective.

Related galleries: Uvarov's Antiquities; Keppen's Antiquities

Related article: Kelly O'Neill, "Constructing Russian Identity in the Imperial Borderland: Architecture, Islam, and the Transformation of the Crimean Landscape," Ab Imperio 2 (2006): 163-192. 


In December 1786, Prince Grigorii Potemkin ordered Governor Vasilii Kakhovskii to search out and collect as many ancient coins and medals as possible. Kakhovskii dutifully passed the order along to the district land captains (all of whom were…

In 1804 the Academy of Sciences commissioned archaeologist Karl Köhler to examine and evaluate the various monuments of the former khanate. Köhler fell ill and could not complete his work that year, but he returned to the task in May 1821 and…

The most famous Crimean ruin is that of Chersonesos (Chersonesus, Khersones) near Sevastopol. Peter Simon Pallas was so impressed with this site that he described the area as "truly classic ground": ground that yielded bits and pieces of Greek…

In 1837 the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, at the behest Count Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov (the governor-general of Novorossia and Bessarabia), published a volume called "On the Antiquities of the Southern Coast of Crimea and the Tauride…

Humble remains

Keppen notes that the Greek churches he found in the mountains were modest in size: no more than 18 arshins (42 feet) long and 9 arshins (21 feet) wide. Some were truly diminuitive, with lengths of only 6 arshins (14 feet). He found them easy to…