Searching for Christian Antiquities: Rethinking the Mediaeval Monuments of the Crimea in the Modern Period

Abstract

This article examines the interpretations of some architectural and archaeological heritage sites in the Crimea that appeared from the seventeenth to nineteenth century. It was the period when the travellers who described the Crimean Peninsula concluded that the most outstanding Friday mosques initially were the churches that experienced Muslim reconstruction. The travellers with their speculative ideas about architecture thought that the Muslims were unable to create these magnificent buildings. The speculations of the kind got an additional impetus when the Crimea was unified with Russia. The lack of knowledge on the early Christian history of the region and the history of architecture in general had an effect. Following the unification of the Crimea with Russia, some authors independently produced the idea that mediaeval “cave” towns and monasteries formed a link in the cultural and religious connections between Byzantium and Russia. This conclusion was based on the visual “similarity” between the artificial caves in the Crimea and the Sviatogorskii and Kiev-Pecherskii monasteries. The cases under analysis uncover the attempts of finding the “most ancient past” of Crimean Christianity, which, however, had no relation to historical realities. Nevertheless, the conclusions under analysis are typical of the thinking of the intellectual elite of the Modern Period.

Keywords

• средневековый крым
• историческая имагология
• записки путешественников
• пещерные города крыма
• соборные мечети
• исторические мифы