In 1836, Governor General Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov commissioned the translation (into Russian) of the Arabic and Ottoman inscriptions at Bahcesaray as one of the first scholarly projects of the Odessa Society of History and Antiquities. The lion's share of work fell to A. A. Borzenko and F. M. Dombrovskij who, between them, translated 130 inscriptions.
The fruit of their labor was vetted in 1842 by Khristian Danilovich Fren (Christian Martin Joachim Frähn), the leading Orientalist at the Russian Academy of Sciences and first director of the "Eastern Cabinet" (later known as the Asiatic Museum), and by V. P. Kuz'min, Professor of Eastern Languages at the Richelieu Institute in Odessa. Fren extolled the work of Borzenko and Dombrovskij as a rare service to the scholarly community; the Odessa Society proclaimed the set of translations as nothing less than "a monument of the dominion of the khans at the Alhambra-Bakhchesaray; one that attests to the genealogy and chronology of the Crimean Khans and to the sources of their enlightenment". It appeared, at long last, under the title "Arabic and Turkish Inscriptions of Bakhchesaraj" in the second volume of the Proceedings of the Odessa Society (1848-1849).