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 Mountains." The author, a man named Peter Keppen, dedicated his work - the "weak fruit of decades of research" - to the Romanov heir, Alexander Nikolaevich, who was about to make his first journey to Crimea.
Keppen had traveled through Crimea in 1819 but settled there permanently in 1827. In 1833 Vorontsov provided him with "the means to compose an archaeographical and topographical study" of southern Crimea and the 1837 publication was to be the first installment of such a work. In it he documents the ruins of churches, Greek and Armenian inscriptions, and Greek, Karaim, and Tatar tombs.
But the lion's share of pages are devoted to the ruins of fortifications; (Greek and Genoese) fortifications that prove that "the inhabitants of Tauride mountains took every measure to protect themselves from the peoples of the steppe." “From the northern side," he wrote, "at every gorge/canyon that pierced the mountains there was some kind of fortification or observation post, a tower, etc., and on the coastal cliffs defenses were arranged in systematic order, so that from a given fortress it was often possible to maintain watch over several fortified positions.”(Keppen, 2)