Zolotoordynskoe Obozrenie (Jun 2015)
Mahalle as a Territorial Unit of the Medieval Bakhchisaray: According to the Kadiasker Notebooks’ Materials »
Abstract
This study is based on the Kadiasker notebooks materials (Court registries), which represent a valuable source of the Crimean Khanate history. To date, these regulatory documents have been studied partially because they represent Ottoman arabografic manuscripts of the 17th–18th centuries, which makes them difficult to study. The topic will be considered in the context of the medieval (islamic) city of Bakhchisaray. Due to the extant Court Registries of the 17th–18th centuries, it has become possible today to provide the most complete picture of the social life of the medieval city and its neighborhoods. The study of revealed names of neighborhoods allowed us to successfully identify the citizens’ occupation and social structure of urban society. The conducted overview of the data for each block of the past century has shown that the name of blocks tend to be very durable, though did not remain unchanged. Tracing the century after century changes in the composition and names of the urban neighborhoods by the use of matched written and ethnographic (questionnaire) data as well as observations of the historically appearance of the city of Bakhchisaray, lead the author to the conclusion that the formation of residential areas was one of the manifestations of the city development. The locations of some of the neighborhoods were determined based on the information of court registries and extant monuments of medieval Bakhchisaray. Unfortunately, identifying of approximate boundaries of all blocks is a challenging task, due to the fact that not all the mosques, fountains, madrassas and other architectural buildings, which are guides in our study, are preserved. In turn, the Kadiasker notebooks are also partially preserved, and they are one of the few sources that allow detailed study of ethnography issues, muslim law and history of the Crimean Khanate.
