Browse Items (9 total)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the scholarly appetite for such scholarship was considerable. Small wonder. Sifting through dozens of pages of transcriptions and translations yields tantalizing insight into thepatronage practices, literary…

The vast majority of the inscriptions that absorbed the energies of the Odessa Society for over a decade were located within the grounds of the Khan Palace at Bakhchisaray.

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…

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…

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…

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…

The tomb described in this inscription was no ordinary tomb. In fact, the burial place of Haci Giray Khan, who died in 1466 having founded the Giray dynasty, is one of precious few surviving examples of sixteenth century Crimean architecture. Its…

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…

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…