In 1792, General M. V. Kakhovskii set down notes on his experiences serving in the military administration of New Russia. Kakhovskii described Tavrida,^[1] where his brother had served as governor from 1784 until 1788, as a land of untapped potential, a blank slate waiting to be inscribed with meaning. “If you can,” he wrote, “paint yourself a picture of the open space from Perekop to the Salgir river, spreading out over 100 versts, surrounded on the western side by the Black Sea and to the northeast by the Sivash and Azov seas.” “Sometime in the future,” Kakhovskij assured his readers,

“this vast plain will be filled with villages, embellished with churches, palaces and other buildings, and around them will be gardens. And when at last all the land is cultivated and the entire plain is populated… and the villages themselves are connected with roads… then before your eyes will be an image of one vast city spread from Perekop to the Salgir…”^[2]

Kakhovskij’s implication – that at present the Crimean landscape did not bear the marks of modernity or civilization – surely resonated with many Russians, who conceived of their new southern province as a relative wilderness occupying a precarious position on the perhaps coterminous borders between civilization and savagery, and the Muslim and Christian worlds. In the decade leading up to annexation, various writers, scholars, and court image-makers developed a symbolic language that incorporated this sense of liminality. They employed the metaphor of the garden to describe the Russian Empire as a space where nature was constantly reordered through art, poetry, and architecture. Crimea, a landscape naturally associated with gardens and paradisiacal imagery because of its climate and topography, as much as with savagery and wilderness, provided an opportunity par excellence for Catherine to exercise the transformative, civilizing power of the empire.^[3]
Catherine had reason to believe she would succeed. After all, there was a history of civilization in Crimea, where cities, temples, and markets furnished the backdrop for events immortalized by Herodotus and Strabo while Britain and Gaul were still, in the words of an inspired English traveler, hopelessly “intermingled with impassable morasses, or scantily occupied by hordes of painted savages.”^[4] Moreover, since his appointment as governor-general of New Russia in 1774, Prince Grigorii Potemkin, “de facto viceroy of Southern Russia and indisputable ruler from the Bug to the Caspian,” had pursued a policy of reorganization and colonization meant to transform the southern steppes into a secure and prosperous showpiece of imperial power. As he – on behalf of the empress – built towns, ports, and fortresses in order to promote trade and defend Russia’s geopolitical interests, a new landscape arose, carefully designed to ensure the coherence and permanence of Russia’s presence in the south.^[5]
The former khanate posed a serious challenge to Catherine and to the civilizing power of her particular brand of enlightened absolutist rule – at least, that is one of the contentions of this paper. That challenge was rooted in the cultural landscape. Crimea was already home to hundreds of thousands of Tatars, as well as numerous Greeks, Armenians, Karaims, and others. Its trade-based economy was complex, and centuries of architectural activity had already shaped its terrain. Traveling just ahead of Catherine II, who embarked on her famous trip early in 1787, Lady Elizabeth Craven marveled at Crimea’s orchards and peach blossoms, but also its exotic arches, courtyards, gardens, and palaces. Her letters, like those of a long line of travelers, scholars, and writers, articulate an awareness of the organic relationship between topography and architecture in the former khanate; between the cypress trees and minarets, the date palms and the marble columns scattered along the coast.^[6] The establishment of Russian rule could not help but upset this balance. But in the course of renovating the natural and architectural landscapes, which elements would be lost, and which preserved or transformed?
The physical and ideological refashioning of Crimea has attracted the attention of cultural historians and literary scholars interested in questions of identity-formation, the semiotics of political discourse, and the translation of ideology into cultural policy. Excellent studies by Andrei Zorin, Andreas Schönle, and others have shed light on the prominent place Crimea occupied in the minds of the empress and the political and literary figures surrounding her.^[7] Historians interested in the expansion of the Russian Empire have also begun to examine the built environment – towns in particular – as an important venue in which not just cultural, but social and political, relationships were negotiated and contested.^[8]
Building on this foundation, this article also focuses on Crimea’s architectural landscape – a serious concern of Potemkin’s, and an object toward which he and one of his most famous successors, Count Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov, devoted substantial resources. While much has been written about the importance of Crimea’s classical Greek and later Christian (both Greek and Genoese) legacies, the former khanate’s Tatar identity has often been set aside as less relevant to the history of Russian rule in Tavrida province.^[9] This article argues that the architectural imprint left by the Girey khans, and of Islam in particular, on the cultural landscape was in fact a constant concern of imperial officials in the decades after annexation. Indeed, developing a policy for dealing with Tatar cultural monuments was a critical part of the process of integrating the province into the empire. The introduction of imperial administrative institutions was simply not enough to ensure the legitimacy and security of Russian rule in the newly-annexed province, which was replete with ruins and antiquities – the tangible remnants of the past political, social, and cultural structures that ordered its terrain. Greeks and Armenians, Genoese and Venetians, Tatars, Turks and Karaims had been constructing homes, places of worship, and venues for commercial exchange for over two thousand years before Russia extended its rule to the Black Sea. Altogether, this multi-layered archaeological and architectural legacy both inspired and restricted Russian officials. But an examination of the variety of policies they applied to the spaces shaped by Crimean Muslims, who had long since constituted the vast majority of the population, provides a unique window onto the experience of empire and the construction of imperial identity in the borderland.^[10]

* * *

Catherine and Potemkin demonstrated their acute awareness of the link between political power and cultural space in Crimea right away. One of Potemkin’s primary concerns in the weeks after annexation was to arrange for the indigenous elite of the former khanate – the beys and mirzas – to swear an oath of allegiance to the empress. The ceremony took place in early July, not at Karasubazar (the capital of the last khan) or Bahçesaray (the traditional seat of Girey authority), but at a place called Ak Kaya (“White Rock”). For centuries, the Crimean elite had used this mountaintop site for kurultays (assemblies at which clan leaders determined whether and when to go to war, and whom to elect khan).^[11] Potemkin’s choice was deliberate. In extracting the beys’ official recognition of the empress’s authority at Ak Kaya, he both acknowledged Crimean tradition and asserted Russian authority over not just the elite, but the places that had served as sources of political authority in the past.
Potemkin next had to decide where to establish the capital of the new province. Again, the prince revealed his desire to create a new geography from the existing landscape. After briefly considering Eski Kırım (“Old Crimea,” Staryi Krym, formerly Solhat), a prosperous city of the Golden Horde and original capital of the Girey khans, he chose Akmescit (“White Mosque”), the traditional residence of the kalga sultan (a member of the Girey dynasty considered second in command under the khans) north of Bahçesaray and southwest of Karasubazar. The kalga sultan’s palace had once sprawled on the left bank of the Salgir river, but at some point either in the turbulent months leading up to Şahin Girey Khan’s abdication or in the months following Crimea’s annexation – the sources are not clear on the chronology – it was razed to the ground.^[12] Well into the nineteenth century the careful observer could still make out the subtle footprint of its ruins though, and perhaps aware of the potency of its legacy, as well as the convenience of its geography, Potemkin determined that Akmescit was perfectly positioned to become the provincial capital of the new Russian province.^[13]
While contemplating his next move, Potemkin set about building another town, this time snug against a deep harbor on the southwestern coast of the peninsula. The tiny Tatar fishing village of Aktiar soon underwent a radical and quite famous transformation into one of the most important cities in the empire.^[14] From the outset, Potemkin and Catherine conceived of Sevastopol, home to the nascent Black Sea Fleet, as an imperial city and a manifestation of the government’s ability to civilize the borderland. The city’s previous and relatively humble incarnation was easily expunged from official memory as well as from the built landscape, which was remarkable for its neatly ordered rows of white stone houses with red tile roofs and views of the sea with ships coming and going. Pavel Sumarokov, a Senator and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who traveled through the province between 1803 and 1805, was impressed by the beauty and relative modernity of the city that had risen from what he presumed could only have been a “dense forest” where “packs of rapacious wolves roamed everywhere, and only the turbulent, melancholy wind interrupted the silence.” The contrast between Sevastopol, a city “of purely European aspect,” and the other Crimean towns was almost palpable. “How strange it is,” Sumarokov mused, to be in the former khanate and yet see neither a single Tatar on the streets or a minaret rising above the roof tops.^[15]
The official plan for Simferopol, as Akmescit was officially called after May 1785, plotted an ideal neoclassical town very much akin to the naval port to the south. But whereas the small cluster of fishermen’s homes at Aktiar had posed no challenge to the construction of Sevastopol, the provincial capital had a substantial extant environment to contend with. In the opinion of most Russian officials and European observers, the structure – indeed, the very essence – of Tatar towns was inimical to the enlightened ideals inherent in urban planning.^[16] They had a certain charm, of course: from a distance, the view of Evpatoriia (Gözleve) with its “lovely houses on the seashore, the Greco-Russian church, the vast and wondrous mosque and a riot of slender, straight minarets” was quite pleasing, one prominent scholar reminded officials. However, the charm fell swiftly away as one approached the labyrinth of narrow, crooked, dirty streets. Others, such as the Reverend Arthur Young and the renowned scholar Peter Simon Pallas, found that the narrow streets lined with the windowless high walls of houses through which the curious eye could not penetrate created a uniquely “gloomy appearance.” As they would later in Tashkent and other parts of Central Asia, officials worried about the diseases and moral backwardness they imagined lurking in those inaccessible dark spaces.^[17]
“Russian” Simferopol grew in fits and starts. By 1797, it consisted of little more than a barracks (the former governor’s mansion), a Russian school, several buildings for administrative offices and courts, one “very indifferent Greco-Russian church,” and another only slightly better built, an Armenian chapel, three mosques, a Tatar bath-cum-prison, and a handful of stone houses. The landscape changed little until after the Napoleonic wars, when the number of houses began to grow steadily, from 445 in 1816 to 1,014 in 1836 and eventually 2,300 in 1851, including lovely garden-rimmed dachas along the Salgir. Doing his part to beautify the city, Governor A. N. Baranov built a public garden immediately across from his formal residence on the river in 1820, while Governor A. I. Kaznacheev (1829-1837) dedicated himself to transforming the persisting “wilderness” of empty space and “Asiatic” streets into a thriving European-style center. By the mid-1830s four Orthodox churches, one Armenian Catholic church, and a synagogue graced the “European quarter,” and by 1845 the number of Christian churches (including Orthodox, Lutheran, and Catholic) equaled that of mosques.^[18]
But Simferopol’s Tatar identity persevered and evolved. Despite their misgivings about the layout of the Tatar urban landscape, the official town plan approved in 1794 located the cathedral square anchoring the new city precisely on the border between the Russian and Tatar quarters, as if to draw the two into dialogue with one another.^[19] Meanwhile, the preservation of four large mosques dispersed throughout the town suggested that Akmescit would not give way – and perhaps that Russian authorities did not mean it to give way – as easily as Aktiar. In fact, Simferopol’s mixed identity was officially endorsed in May 1818, when Alexander I granted permission to the inhabitants of Tavrida’s towns to build houses in “the Asiatic manner.”^[20] Tatars still constituted over 60% of Simferopol’s population, the number of Tatar shops and khans (inns or merchant warehouses)^[21] increased, and in the late 1830s construction began on a new mosque complex. The Kebir Cami (a Friday mosque), which had dominated the visual space of the city since 1508, stood uncontested until the construction of the Alexander Nevsky cathedral in the early 1830s. Sure enough, new construction pushed the existing Tatar town toward the outskirts of the urban environment, but it was never torn down or built over. It is therefore not terribly surprising that for decades after Catherine christened the city Simferopol, inhabitants and visitors alike continued to refer to it by its former name.^[22]
Tavrida’s rulers contented themselves with a provincial capital that fused “Asiatic” and “European” elements not only because of the limits of treasury coffers and manpower, but because in many senses it was imperial practice to build on the foundations of what existed. In the former khanate, what existed was not a backward, sleepy urban backwater, but a series of vibrant, prosperous towns that had served as nodes along the trade routes and power networks linking Central Asia to the Mediterranean since the days of the ancient Greeks. Even a man like Sumarokov, who looked disparagingly on the Crimean Tatars, was impressed by their second city, where people of so many customs and backgrounds converged. Having walked its streets feeling “as much a foreigner as [he] would in Tunis,” Sumarokov catalogued the institutions of urban living in turn-of-the-century Akmescit: twenty bakeries, 197 shops, twelve coffee houses, thirteen khans, two taverns, five eating establishments, nine bouza houses (shops selling a fermented beverage made by Tatars from millet, buckwheat, or barley), and eleven blacksmiths.^[23] In the early nineteenth century, Simferopol was an underdeveloped urban landscape, but its composite culture lent it a small measure of both exoticism and sophistication.
The construction and reconstruction of urban space is only part of the story of cultural politics in Crimea. Even more important is official policy toward individual Tatar monuments. Tavrida was incredibly rich in artifacts, antiquities, and ruins – more so, perhaps, than any other province in the empire. It was so rich in fact, that heavy rains often revealed such treasures as Byzantine coins and ancient silver reliquaries.^[24] But it was houses of worship, both whole and ruined, that dominated the landscape and reflected the religious mosaic of the peninsula’s population, with the distribution of churches and mosques serving as a constantly shifting map of political and cultural authority. In 1784, imperial officials counted thirty-three churches, plus an additional fifty-seven in ruins, as part of their assessment of the economy and infrastructure of the former khanate.^[25] At the same time, there were as many as 1,540 mosques in Crimea. Forty-two years later, the Tavrida mufti (the highest-ranking Muslim spiritual leader) reported to the Department of Foreign Confessions that that number had risen to 1,646.^[26]
While the number of churches skyrocketed from the 1830s onward, those that had somehow survived for centuries in the clefts of mountains, on the edge of the sea and in other out of the way places often attracted the strongest sense of devotion and reverence from the burgeoning Christian population. Crimea’s mosques, though in many cases “younger” than its churches, also accumulated cultural capital with the passage of time. One of the oldest and most important Muslim monuments in Crimea was the Özbek Han mosque in Staryi Krym.^[27] The remains of the original mosque date from 1314, though the existing structure was built at the turn of the sixteenth century, incorporating the portal, mihrab, and other elements from the original. The mosque’s square floor plan, monumental entrance, and carved wooden door suggest the influence of Seljuk-period Anatolian architecture, and provide evidence of the complex cultural and economic linkages between Crimea and the Turkic world.^[28]
Not surprisingly, the antiquities of Crimea attracted the Russian imperial gaze. However, it was not monuments such as the Özbek Han mosque that excited the interest of the scholars and politicians of St. Petersburg. Their regard for the Tatar legacy is illustrated at least in part by one of the first official forays into collecting antiquities carried out by the new rulers of Crimea.^[29] In December 1786, Prince Potemkin ordered Governor 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 Tatars), as well as the mayors and commandants of the towns of Bahçesaray, Evpatoriia, Balaklava, Arabat, and Karasubazar. Curiously, nothing turned up, save for sixty-five coins dating from the reigns of Timur (Tamerlane) and the first three Girey khans. Potemkin promptly returned these to their owners, explaining that he was interested only in “true antiquities”; that is, items at least 1,000 years in age, “from the period of the Greeks and Romans. Turkish and Tatar items [were] not needed.”^[30] This constituted one of the earliest articulations of imperial authorities’ desire to expunge vestiges of the four centuries of Tatar rule from the archaeological and ideological identity of the province.
The fact that Potemkin returned the unwanted coins to their owners rather than throwing them away is symptomatic of his careful approach to the Tatar cultural legacy in Crimea. In the spirit of her 1773 decree on the toleration of all faiths, Catherine’s annexation manifesto declared that Russia would preserve and respect Muslim institutions. Potemkin thus went to great lengths to prevent Russian soldiers under his command from destroying or desecrating Crimean mosques, acts which would surely incite a reaction from their new subjects.^[31] Russian officials had of course not extended that level of protection to politically and culturally significant structures before: in the years of armed conflict preceding annexation, soldiers destroyed the summer palace of the khans known as Aşlama, located several versts from Bahçesaray in the valley beneath Chufut Kale. According to cleric and historian Thomas Milner, who visited in the early 1850s, the palace had been the epitome of “oriental” splendor, replete with gardens and fountains, orchards, and birds. “So utterly did the stranger’s hand demolish it,” wrote the Englishman, “that the site is not to be identified without a guide.”^[32]
The summer palace was not the only structure to suffer ruin at Russian hands; nor did the demolitions end in 1783. Anthony Grant, another English visitor to Crimea, lamented that in the years since annexation:

“beautiful mosques and minarets; public fountains and aqueducts, the pride and the great glory of the Moslem; public edifices, however imposing and sacred, were overthrown; trees were cut down, tombs rifled, the relics of the dead cast abroad, swine fed out of coffins, and the monuments of antiquity annihilated.”^[33]

Grant’s taste for melodrama seems to have prevented him from noticing that in many cases, it was not wanton disregard for the Tatar cultural landscape that drove soldiers and others to tear down existing structures, but a far more practical motivation: the need for inexpensive building materials. Indeed there were precious few in the province who knew anything about – and would therefore see any value in preserving – architecture, let alone archaeology. Those that did focused their attention almost exclusively on the Classical and Byzantine legacies. The Prince de Ligne, for example, who accompanied Catherine on her journey through the southern provinces in 1787, was not blind to the Islamic aspect of the landscape. He was far more taken though with sites associated with the writings of Herodotus and Strabo, for he saw this part-mythic, part-historical legacy of Partenit and Chersonesus as key to the identity of the peninsula. “All the talents in the service of the gods of fable have exercised their empire here,” he wrote.

“If I quit, for an instant, fable for history I discover Eupatoria, founded by Mithridates; near-by, in Kherson, I pick up fragments of alabaster columns, I find the remains of aqueducts, and city walls inclosing a greater space than Paris and London put together.”^[34]

Like many Russians and Europeans, the prince also took careful note of the Christian antiquities of the peninsula, seeking out the Uspenskii monastery near Bahçesaray and the monastery of St. George near Sevastopol.
The vast majority of men – and they were mostly men – who settled Tavrida in the 1780s and 1790s were many things but not, as a rule, amateur archaeologists. Decades of war and strife had certainly taken their toll before 1783, but these soldiers and farmers prolonged the destructive tendencies of empire-building. Though many of them likely harbored no ill will toward the monuments and ruins they found, they had somehow to produce the large quantities of building materials needed for the houses, government offices, and churches of the new province. The large, cut stones and marble slabs of existing walls and foundations presented a far more attractive alternative than purchasing materials from local quarries or foreign imports. Russian settlers were, of course, neither the first nor the last to procure building materials from the secular and religious edifices constructed by fallen regimes – this was common practiced throughout much of world. However, the archaeological significance of the stones they used marked the reconstituted urban landscapes in a rather unique way. E. D. Clarke, an Englishman who visited Crimea in 1800, noted that the city of Kerch (at the easternmost point of the peninsula) was strewn with pieces of marble carved with elaborate bas-reliefs and others with Greek and Genoese inscriptions, which inhabitants used as doorsteps:

“without any knowledge of their real nature, or even common attention to the position of the figures; so that they are seen in all directions, sometimes lying sideways in a wall, or wholly inverted.”^[35]

Even the remains of the ancient and celebrated Greek city of Chersonesus were vulnerable. The city, founded in the sixth century B.C., had flourished under emperors and kings, and its ruins had survived under centuries of Tatar rule, such that the “vestiges of the walls, the gates, the dwellings of the inhabitants, and their sepulchres, Byzantine churches half buried in the soil, and shafts and capitals of columns” remained intact, if strewn about in haphazard fashion.^[36] But for decades after 1783, soldiers and settlers plundered its marble and stones in order to build nearby Sevastopol and, to a lesser extent, Balaklava. As one of the most careful observers of the landscape, P. S. Pallas, put it:

“the rise of Akhtiar has completed the ruin of [Chersonesus]. Modern builders, careless about the gigantic plans and noble designs of their ancestors, have removed those handsome square stones from the very foundations, and employed them in erecting hew houses, without evincing the least curiosity for drawing a single view, or taking the slightest architectural sketch.”^[37]

Eventually, tales of the varying degrees of abuse and neglect of the province’s antiquities reached the imperial capital, and in 1804 Alexander I 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, determined to convince St. Petersburg of the need to protect and preserve sites of archaeological, architectural, and historical value, from the largest of Genoese fortresses to the smallest of Byzantine coins.^[38]
Working at the expense of the Academy of Sciences, Köhler submitted his findings to the minister of education and spiritual affairs, Prince A. N. Golitsyn, in December 1821. In his report, he divided the Greek, Genoese, Tatar, and Turkish monuments of Crimea into two classes: those beyond repair but worthy of preservation, such as kurgans, graves, and the foundations of ancient buildings, and those that could be restored through “relatively small expenditures” of time and money (Table 1). “These monuments are particularly important for [the study of] ancient history and geography,” Köhler explained, “and must be preserved from the damage that might be rendered them out of ignorance.” The dividends, he promised, would have a political, as well as an academic aspect, for while the French and English, “have shown great enthusiasm for the homogeneity of the antiquities of their respective fatherlands,” these were nowhere near as numerous or as ancient as the “priceless monuments in Crimea.”^[39]

<img src=http://abimperio.net/pics/oneil.jpg>

Table 1: Köhler’s List of Monuments Requiring Restoration, 1821^[40]

Remarkably, five of the eight sites Köhler included on this list dated from the Tatar period. He thus became the first Russian official to acknowledge, and in fact insist on, the value of preserving the cultural landscape of the khanate. Even Peter Köeppen, who was careful to note that Russian antiquities fell into five categories – Classical (Greek and Roman), Scandinavian, Slavic, Germanic, and Eastern – declined to discuss the latter. In his List of Russian Monuments published in 1822 he limited himself to describing 174 “Slaviano-Russkie” monuments; and in another of his most important works Köeppen avoided discussing the Islamic past by examining only the fortresses and fortifications of the region.^[41] It is not surprising then that Köhler’s opinion was not common currency in the imperial capital. Having reviewed Köhler’s report, Golitsyn issued his own opinion on the matter of Crimean antiquities. “Protecting the remains of Turkish and Tatar constructions is not as useful as protecting those of the Greeks and Genoese,” explained the minister, for the former could hardly be considered part of true “antiquity.” The fortresses at Balaklava, Mangup and Sudak therefore deserved the lion’s share of expenditures. In fact, instead of allocating funds for restoration, Golitsyn confirmed the official plan to convert the main mosque in Feodosiia into a church and tear down the Turkish baths in order to make way for an expanded city square. The mosques and burial sites at Eski Yurt, Eski Saraj, and Evpatoriia were simply not the concern of the imperial government: the Tavrida mufti was welcome, however, to solicit contributions for their restoration from the local population and, if need be, from the entire Muslim population of the empire.^[42] The Senate and State Council accepted Golitsyn’s proposals, leaving the fate of several major monuments squarely in the hands of private individuals – presumably beys or mirzas – who might have the requisite wealth and devotion necessary to spare them further ruin.
This policy of conscious neglect effectively dissociated the imperial government from the Crimean Tatar landscape, but did not destroy it. As a result, settlers and visitors alike found Tavrida to be composed of largely discrete cultural spheres: the Russian, centered in Sevastopol, and the Tatar, centered in Bahçesaray (“Garden palace”). Many visitors were struck by the latter town, “one of the most remarkable cities in Europe, for the novelty of its customs and costumes, which are absolutely oriental and offer no trace of European taste, as much as for the setting of the city itself.”^[43] Bahçesaray was the center of Crimean Tatar cultural and economic production. Officially decreed an exclusively Tatar town (all others needed special dispensation from provincial authorities to reside there), in 1793 it boasted thirty-two mosques, well over a hundred fountains, two churches (one Greek and one Armenian), two synagogues, three medrese, two public baths, three cemeteries, several dervish lodges, sixteen khans, twenty-one taverns, seventeen coffee houses, thirteen bouza houses, twenty bakeries, and over 500 other craftsmen’s shops. By the mid-nineteenth century Bahçesaray was home to over 600 master craftsmen, whose goods reportedly brought in more revenue than in any other town in the province save Berdiansk.^[44] The numbers of coffee houses, taverns, and eating establishments had all increased; there were over thirty fruit gardens and vineyards within the town supplying them with wine and brandy.^[45] Baron Haxthausen’s description just of Bahçesaray’s fountain system conveys the sense of productive energy pervading the town in the 1840s. “On every side were seen small watercourses, brought down from the surrounding heights, from which channels flow for the irrigation of the meadows, gardens, and even corn-land. Men and women were everywhere employed,” wrote the German political economist, “in damming up the water with planks and stones, and in other places letting it flow to water the land.”^[46]
But the true significance of Bahçesaray was its role as the religious and political capital of the former khanate. In fact, the Tatars continued to consider Bahçesaray their capital throughout the nineteenth century, looking to it rather than to distant St. Petersburg as the source of their identity. Considered together with the minor settlements immediately surrounding it – from Qırq Yer (Chufut Kale) in the east, to Salaçıq, and past the main town to Eski Yurt in the east – the Bahçesaray region was characterized by rather fluid boundaries separating the urban landscape from the theoretical wilderness of the rural, “unbuilt” environment. Contained within the valley floor, and hemmed in by the walls of rock sloping down from Chufut Kale, Bahçesaray’s terrain encompassed palaces, mosques, and medrese. Its periphery was edged with the more liminal spaces of tombs, cemeteries, and holy shrines arrayed along its edges, marking the boundary between civilization and nature, but also between the present and the remembered past, the religious and the secular worlds. This unique landscape, like that of any city, was “deeply implicated in [the] social and cultural values” of its inhabitants.^[47]
Almost by definition, the meanings inscribed in its monuments had both religious and political elements. Many of these sites functioned as pilgrimage destinations and shrines, particularly those associated with secular and spiritual leaders who earned their reputations in the early days of the khanate. The dervish lodge of Gazy-Mansur in the valley below Chufut Kale for example, which was supposedly built by Mengli Girey Khan on the spot where three dervishes died from battle wounds and were buried, was one of the most popular shrines in the region. The tomb of Devlet Girey Khan (ruled 1441-1466) was also located nearby, at Salaçiq. Built by his son, Mengli Girey I, next to the Zindjirli medrese, the tomb’s octagonal structure was richly decorated with arabesques and moldings, slender columns, and muqarnas. As the final resting place of both father and son, the tomb was naturally of significance within the cultural landscape. In addition, its architectural elements linked it to the tomb of Nenkedzhan Hanim, the daughter of Tokhtamysh Khan buried at Chufut Kale.^[48] The Tatars who visited these sites could not miss the symbolic connection thus created between the Girey dynasty and the Golden Horde, through which the former traced their Chingissid claims.
Just west of Bahçesaray proper was the settlement of Eski Yurt, a town that reached its apogee as a trading center of the Golden Horde and subsequently faded into relative obscurity. It contained two important cemeteries: Qırq Azizler (“forty shrines”) and Aziz. The former had been the site of an early Christian church before its conversion into a Tatar cemetery. The latter, a smaller but more important site, contained a mosque, four türbes (tombs) from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as the shrine of Malik Aşter, a seventh-century military leader in the army of Caliph Ali. Among the hundreds of shrines throughout Crimea, this was one of the most important and the most venerated, not least because a trio of khans – Mehmed III, Mehmed IV, and Saadet II (father, son and grandson) – was buried in one of the tombs, forging a direct link between the Girey dynasty and the golden age Islamic expansion.^[49] Sites such as these demonstrated the wealth and status of the former ruling house, as well as its connections to the Eurasian steppe, Islamic, and Ottoman worlds. Together, they demarcated a geography of religious and political authority that did not correspond to the administrative borders that circumscribed Tavrida.
Russian officials, scholars, and other travelers, though aware of the potency of the landscape, were generally unable to decode the layered symbolism of the monuments. This much was clear to the scholar F. Dombrovskii, who wrote in 1849 that:

“Along the entire canyon, which is filled with the town and its environs, are scattered an abundance of Tatar antiquities, almost all of which are worthy of examination because in addition to value of the inscriptions that decorate them, each of these monuments is connected to an important event commemorated in legend.”^[50]

German geographer J. G. Kohl also found them striking but puzzling. He was fascinated with “so many traces of humanity and piety,” which contrasted sharply with “the stories of the desolating ravages of the Tartars; of their plundering and murdering, of how often they have burned Moscow, and struck terror into Vilna and Warsaw” that filled the ears of every visitor to Crimea. The funereal monuments alone “might almost lead one to imagine that these wild khans had been all of them philosophers and original thinkers,” wrote Kohl. He was astonished to find that Devlet Girey built his grave without a roof because “he considered the Heavens so beautiful and sublime that even from his grave he would wish to look toward the firmament, the abode of God,” and that Selim Girey was buried under the eaves of a mosque roof so that “as the rain dripped down upon him, this water from heaven might wash away the foulness of his sins, which were as many as the drops falling from the clouds.”^[51]
Despite the fact that these sites forged a symbolic tie between Crimean Tatars and the steppe and Islamic worlds, both of which continued to challenge Russian authority along the empire’s frontiers, imperial officials did not disturb them. Descriptions made their way into the memoirs of travelers smitten with the perceived exoticism of shrines and tombs, but these pieces of the Crimean cultural landscape did not constitute a serious threat to the carefully cultivated link between the Russian Empire and the Greek past of its southern borderland. Others did, however, and in those cases imperial authorities applied a different policy meant to mitigate or, both literally and figuratively, to renovate their symbolic meaning. The renovation of culturally or politically significant monuments was not a Russian innovation – a fact that Orthodox Church leaders were particularly happy to point out. According to an 1812 report produced by the Ekaterinoslav Spiritual Consistory for the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod, when Mengli Girey Khan (ruled 1467-1515 with several brief interruptions) moved his capital from Solhat to Bahçesaray, he took several stones from the ruins of a Greek church in a nearby village to lay in the foundation of his new palace.^[52] Whether the khan brought the stones to Bahçesaray in order to symbolize his victory over the Christian Genoese, as the church officials would have us believe, the story highlights the ease with which ruins could be incorporated into structures built with an entirely different cultural or ideological vocabulary.
In some cases, “renovation” required the destruction of the original monument. While it is unclear whether he ordered the demolition of the khan’s summer palace, Potemkin insisted that the resulting stones and carvings of Aşlama be used in the construction of the governor’s mansion, thus in a very physical sense translating the seat of authority to Simferopol.^[53] The attempt to renovate the main mosque of Feodosiia was less successful. The “Sultan Selim” mosque dated from 1623, when its patron built it, appropriately enough, on the site of a Greek church. Many Russians and Europeans had extolled its beauty by the time Count Vorontsov took the reins as governor-general in 1823. “It is a noble specimen of simple architecture,” Pallas observed in 1793, “kept in a state of complete repair.” Dubois de Montpereux described it as “large, with elegant white marble columns and chess-board marble floors, thirteen cupolas, and two nine-sazhen high multicolored minarets” – a structure which “elicited a sense of wonder in the traveler.” The mosque enjoyed an advantageous location in the center of town, and perhaps for that reason a handful of influential men determined to convert it into an Orthodox church in the early 1820s. According to Felix Lagorio, the former Italian consul in Kefe, they convinced Vorontsov to tear down the mosque and to employ the Muslim inhabitants themselves to do the work. Outraged, the Tatars immediately sent a well-known mirza to protest on their behalf. The governor-general relented, but not soon enough: when word of his change of heart reached Feodosiia three days later, the once glorious minarets, domes, and columns lay in heaps on the ground. For unknown reasons the promised renovation funds did not materialize, and the site remained a ruin for years – not a church, but no longer a mosque.^[54]
The monument that represented the most serious obstacle to the creation of a Russian-dominated landscape though was the famous khan saray – the palace of the Girey khans at Bahçesaray. Unlike Aşlama, this palace had survived the turbulent decade between 1774 and 1784. Construction of the original structure began circa 1519 and continued under a series of khans. Perhaps the most detailed eighteenth-century account of its appearance is that composed by Cristof Hermann Manstein, an adjutant of Field Marshal Count Burchard Christoph von Münnich. Manstein described the palace as a sprawling complex laced with bridges, gardens, and galleries, pools and fountains carved of white marble, and chambers decorated in blue and gold mosaic. When Münnich’s army invaded Crimea in 1736, Cossacks set fire to it. Much of the structure nevertheless survived, and from 1737 to 1743 khans Mengli Girey II and Seliamet Girey II made thorough restorations.^[55]
The integrity of the palace suffered its next blow at the hands of the last khan. When Şahin Girey fled Crimea, he took everything of value with him – gold and silver items, expensive rugs, furniture and decorations – such that the apartments were left quite bare. Potemkin wasted little time rectifying that situation. As early as June 1784 he allocated 10,000 rubles and appointed first the English architect William Hastie, and later Major Joseph de Ribas (the future admiral and founder of Odessa), to carry out the restoration of the interior and exterior, including the surrounding gardens and fountains. The work, carried out by a small army of carpenters, masons, painters, and joiners, went on almost to the day of Catherine’s arrival in May 1787. By that time, the palace rooms were furnished with pieces carefully selected from merchants in Moscow and Constantinople as part of the prince’s effort to reconstruct the exotic eastern ambience conjured in no small part by Petersburg’s court poets.^[56]
Potemkin and de Ribas did not, however, seek to faithfully restore every nook and cranny of the palace to its previous state. It is easy to identify the political motivations behind the changes that they made, such as the transformation of the crescent decorating the main entrance into the palace complex. The prince replaced this symbol, which made explicit reference to the Islamic identity of the previous ruling house, with a two-headed eagle – the imperial symbol of the Romanovs.^[57] He also approved de Ribas’s proposal to violate the sanctity of one of the most famous graves within the palace grounds in order to reconstruct its semiotic value. Krym Girey Khan (1758-1764) had built a fountain fed by pure mountain springs within the mausoleum of his beloved wife, a Georgian woman named Dilara Bikech. The fountain fell squarely into the category of selsibil fountains in Ottoman architecture – fountains built on holy sites or tombs and named for the sacred water source in paradise. When in the course of palace renovations de Ribas found himself with a newly-constructed landing in need of decoration, he moved the inscribed marble fountain from the cemetery and assigned it – the “fountain of tears” made famous by Pushkin – a prominent place in this highly politicized space. The khan’s tribute to his beloved spouse thus became a monument to the power of a Christian woman to conquer the heart of a “barbarian” Tatar.^[58]
Catherine II arrived in the spring of 1787 along with her imperial retinue, eager “to be crowned Queen of Tavrida in the old capital of the khans” and “show the [Ottoman] sultan that she could have a bath if she chose in the Black Sea.” She apparently took great pride in seating herself on the throne of the Tatars, and must have been pleased by the gilt Arabic inscriptions that proclaimed “In defiance of Envy, the whole world is informed that there is nothing in Ispahan, Damascus, or Istanbul as rich as this.”^[59] Her ritual possession of the Tatar capital thus complete, Catherine departed. Nearly every subsequent tsar took in the wonders of the khan saray in her wake, their ceremonial visits reaffirming the dominance of the Romanov house over the previous occupants of the palace. As if to accentuate this, in the absence of the imperial family the palace served as a guest house for distinguished visitors, as well as for those “furnished with tolerable introductions.” Admiral N. S. Mordvinov and his wife even occupied the khan’s private apartments for several years, using his state audience chamber as a dining room.^[60] By manipulating symbolic elements of the palace architecture as well as transforming its function, imperial officials successfully converted the most potent political monument of the khanate into a symbol of Tatar submission to Russian rule. This conversion rendered the khan saray almost irrelevant to a landscape – and identity – that was increasingly dominated by the neo-Classical juggernaut of Sevastopol, the incredible luxury of many Russian noble estates, and the Orthodox churches beginning to appear throughout the peninsula, from Kerch to Sudak to Balaklava.

* * *

In 1825, Russian policy toward several important Tatar monuments seemed about to change. Tavrida Governor D. V. Naryshkin received 10,000 rubles from the Ministry of Finance earmarked for the restoration of the major mosques in Feodosiia, Evpatoriia, and Eski Saray, as well as the mausoleums at Eski Yurt. While this sum was well short of the 32,500 rubles Köhler had requested for the same scope of work, many provincial officials were pleased at the opportunity to make even limited improvements to the condition of sites held dear by the majority of Tavrida’s inhabitants. Within months however, Naryshkin received orders from Vorontsov to turn the money over to the governor-general’s chancellery. Vorontsov promptly diverted the funds to projects closer to his own heart, such as the excavation of kurgans in his favorite Crimean city, Kerch, as well as the opening of archaeological museums in Kerch and Odessa.
Two years later, the minister of internal affairs sent out a circular informing all governors of Tsar Nicholas I’s desire to know the location and condition of all ancient ruins in the empire. He ordered provincial architects and other officials to collect plans and sketches of each site, along with all relevant information from local archives. Although Naryshkin had trouble eliciting responses from district officials, by August he had compiled a report “on the antiquities of Tavrida province” based solely, he explained, on the memory of the people, since the archives inherited from the khanate contained no relevant records.^[61] The resulting list – essentially a popular map of the cultural landscape – included thirteen Greek and Genoese, and seven Tatar sites. Among the latter group, the Friday mosque in Evpatoriia received the most detailed treatment in the report. This particular mosque, designed by the famous Ottoman architect Sinan, is still famous today both for its beauty and for having survived Russian and Soviet rule relatively unscathed.^[62] Commissioned by Devlet Girey Khan in the 1550s, the mosque boasted a series of large and small domes, and at least two minarets. Scholars noted the structure’s ability to draw the eye despite the interference of neighboring buildings, which seemed to encroach on the space of the mosque.
The cost for restoring this lovely monument was, according to the provincial architect, 19,828 rubles and 20 kopeks – a sum far in excess of what the pious endowments supporting the mosque could afford. In an incredibly rare gesture, Nicholas himself broke with tradition and produced the necessary funds from his personal coffers.^[63] Clearly, the tsar felt that the days of mullas climbing the minarets to incite the Tatar population to revolt against Russian rule had passed.^[64] Surely the respect he would earn from his Muslim subjects by preserving and restoring this single internationally-renowned mosque would far outweigh the disapproval of those who sought to define this borderland terrain in exclusively Orthodox terms. Church building – a tried-and-true method of empire building – was proceeding apace throughout New Russia, and Crimea was no exception. Most important, plans were already underway to build a cathedral on the legendary site of Prince Vladimir’s baptism to Christianity at Chersonesus in 988. As Gregory Bruess has pointed out, borderland churches of this kind functioned as more than simply venues for religious rites; in fact, they were no less than proxies for imperial power and mechanisms for transcending the physical and symbolic distance between St. Petersburg and Simferopol.^[65]
To a certain extent, these churches represented the success of the complex and ongoing processes through which officials sought to implement Russian rule in Tavrida. The “civilizing” power of empire had certainly had some effect, transforming what had been perceived as the wilderness of the khanate by the early 1840s such that ladies and gents could sip tea and catch up on the latest news out of Paris while sailing from Odessa to Yalta. Once there, they could admire Russian noble estates set like a string of pearls along the southern coast and “adorned with vineyards and orchards and handsome houses, varied by thickly-wooded mountain declivities, and groups of rocks, and views of the sea.” The informed visitor would be suitably impressed by Vorontsov’s estates at Alupka and Massandra, and even more so by the expanses of orchards, vineyards, gardens, and villas in the valleys of Magaratch and Baidar. However, these pleasant vistas, which were shaped and in turn fed the image of Crimea cherished in the imperial capital, did not completely reflect reality. Imperial administrators, archaeologists, and image-makers had not, after all, eliminated the Tatar legacy from either the cultural landscape or the provincial-imperial identity it articulated. Tavrida remained a distinctly Muslim terrain, with over one-third of all mosques in the Russian empire within its borders, the majority of them on the peninsula itself.^[66] Constrained by anemic annual revenues, even the major towns like Simferopol could barely support the police and courts, let alone fund construction of the government buildings, barracks, and mansions that would provide tangible proof of, and enhance the legitimacy of, Russian rule. Mosques far outnumbered churches in the countryside, and the “architectural disorder” and the continued presence of “Asiatic” buildings marred Crimean towns.^[67]
It is not surprising then that while six decades had passed since the khans walked its halls, when Baron von Haxthausen spent a night at the palace in 1843 he found himself pondering the fate of the khans rather than the glorious achievements of the tsars.^[68] Indeed, the imperial identity reflected in Tavrida’s built environment was not distinctly Russian, at least not in the way most nineteenth-century thinkers and writers came to understand that term. It was instead an imperial identity modified by the provincial cultural context: a composite of discrete Tatar, Greek and Russian elements that coexisted but did not necessarily merge.^[69] This unique character was the product of a series of policies that sought to renovate – with varying degrees of violence and/or subtlety – the physical and semiotic content of monuments that threatened the legitimacy and coherence of Russia’s authority over not just the inhabitants of Crimea, but the cultural space in which they lived.