Neglect (Narration fragment)
Title:
Neglect
Description:
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 Tatars), as well as the mayors and commandants of the towns of Bahçesaray, Evpatoriia,
Curiously, nothing turned up, save for sixty-five coins dating from the reigns of Timur (Tamerlane) and the first three Giray khans (14th-15th centuries). 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.”
In other words, from the earliest days of Russian rule, politics and ideology shaped the way antiquity would be defined and the way the built landscape would be managed.
Potemkin was not the only man with opinions on this topic. Some shared the prince's taste for the classical era. Peter Simon Pallas, the famous naturalist, for example, described his scramble over the narrow fortified cliffs at Dziva Rock and Kuchuk Issar and his subsequent exuberance at the discovery of an ancient ruin in a level clearing. He marveled at the white marble column standing in a glen and at the ignorance of the "superstitious natives" who chipped off small pieces and ground them into a fine dust to be consumed for unknown purposes.
Others lamented the seeming disregard for the cultural landscape - both Greek and Tatar - by Russian settlers.
Anthony Grant, an English visitor to Crimea, complained 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.”
Though many likely harbored no ill will toward the monuments and ruins they found, most farmers and soldiers were preoccupied with the task of producing the large quantities of building materials needed for building houses, government offices, and churches. 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 sources.
For nearly three decades, a proliferation of ruins was an unintended consequence of the construction of estates and towns across the peninsula, from Evpatoriia to Kerch.
Sources:
А. Стевен, "Дела архива Таврическаго губернскаго правления, относящияся по разыскания, описании и сохранения памятников старины в пределах Таврической губерний," ИТУАК (t. 13: 33-34).
Peter Simon Pallas, Travels through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire, vol. 2 (London, 1803): 148.
Anthony Grant, An Historical Sketch of The