Bakhchisaray - Tatar Source

While leaving genteel Yalta we met possibly one of the most ungentle person in town. Having bought our bus tickets for Simferopol the evening before, we thought we only had to turn up the following morning. The trouble started when we had to board. It wasn't a bus, but a marshrutka with limited storage facilities. The inconvenience would be minimized with an accommodating driver. He turned out to be a chain-smoking boar.

Above: marshrutkas line up at the Yalta bus station.

When we approached him to have baggage stowed behind, he brusquely showed us what passed for the boot (turned out to be the narrow space beneath the rearmost passenger seats) and snarled something to the tune of I don't know, the space is already filled and you have two big suitcases (ya nye znayu, ya nye znayu, blah blah blah in Russian with pointed fingers alternating between luggage and boot). We weren't the only ones with stuff to stuff. Mary felt that some creative rearrangement would have freed up a little more space and made life easier for everybody. But our driver only stood by and continued his splenetic outbursts.

With the clock ticking, we did what the other passengers did and placed our two suitcases in the aisle. There were only two seats left on board - Mary took the more accessible one right at the front, while I clambered over myriad obstacles to parachute into mine all the way at the back. Our fellow passengers were good-humoured and it made the journey easier to know our driver managed to antagonize everybody else too.

Our destination this time, via yet another transit in Simferopol, was Bakhchisaray, the one-time capital of Crimean Khanate, nestled in a valley amongst low tufa plateaus. Crimean Tatar roots are mixed, emerging first in the thirteenth century out of an amalgamation between inhabitants of the Turkish steppe north and the more cosmopolitan coastal south.

The Khanate first established itself under Haji Giray in the geopolitical vacuum left behind by Timur's (that's Tamerlane to those of you who've read Marlowe) destruction of the Golden Horde, some time in the middle of the fifteenth century. The Golden Horde was one of the successor khanates to Chinggis Khan's sprawling empire. In fact, Haji Giray claimed to be a scion of Batu Khan, the founder of the Golden Horde.

Crimea would remain under Turkic domination for the better part of the following three hundred years. The Crimean Tatars conducted frequent raids on their Slavic neighbours, sometimes as far north as Muscovy (Moscow), and sold their captives on the thriving Black Sea slave market. Even when Tatar power waned, it persisted under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty. In a reversal of historical precedents, they became Slavic subjects when the Russians took over in the late eighteenth century.

Two factors acted as catalysts in the later crystallization of the notion of a Crimean Tatar nationality - the modernizing movement of the Crimean Tatar intellectual Ismail Gasprinski, which came to be known as Jadidism, and the harrowing events of the Sürgünlik ('exile' in Tatar). Strictly speaking, Gasprinski was not a Crimean Tatar nationalist. But his active promotion of modernization amongst the Turkic-speaking peoples, particularly in education, laid the ground for the subsequent formation of an identity linked not to Islam but to ethnicity, language and territory. The Sürgünlik involved the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia during the Second World War, on allegations of wartime collaboration with the Nazis. The post-Stalin campaigning for the right of return, which was denied until the days of glasnost and perestroika, provided another focal point around which national identity coalesced.

We checked into the Meraba Guesthouse upon arrival. Snow and negative temperatures conspired to produce a glacial landscape and a town full of ginger waddlers. It didn't help that the route to our accommodation involved negotiating two tiny sloping glaciers.

Below: the local glaciation process.

Our first stop in town was the Khan's Palace, which gave Bakhchisaray (palace in a garden in Crimean Tatar) its name. We shared its pleasant grounds with a slew of other Russian visitors. The palace - domes, minarets, towers, all - was built around a central courtyard. All the usual winter accoutrements were present - bare boughs, snowscape and silence. No doubt there would have been more cheer and comfort in bygone days, even if Christmas wasn't celebrated before in these parts.

Below: our Khan's Palace ramble, in descending order, 

Below: a statue of Alexander Pushkin in the centre of Bakhchisaray's Old Town. Pushkin's poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray told the tragic love story of how Haji Giray's love for a Polish concubine incurred the jealous wrath of his queen, who eventually had the concubine murdered. It captured perfectly the Russian fascination with the Oriental exoticism offered in Crimea. In fact, the muezzin's frequent calls which echo even today reminded me more of the Middle East than a country which today clamours to be a part of Europe. Not that Islam and Europe are mutually exclusive, of course.

Heading back to the guesthouse in the dark proved to be a comedy. Street lighting being almost non-existent, Mary and I deliberated whether we should get a cab for the absurdly short distance or brave the passage. We settled for the former, and the streets being empty too, went to the nearby Alie Cafe to ask if they could help us get a taxi. Moving hospitality accompanied mutual unintelligibility, as in the end two of their waitresses decided to walk us back, literally shining the way forward.

How we would manage the following evening was the question on our minds when we got back. It made us look terribly primitive, but the answer? Flashlight apps, which worked perfectly.