This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Crimea's southern coast, Sudak to Feodosiia

This page has annotations:

This page is referenced by:

Kozy There were 59 orchards and 72 vineyards at Kozy, previously owned by Greeks and Tatars.

According to Vladimir Bronevskii, Kozy had been emptied by emigration. A few Tatars remained and a few Mariupol Greeks had returned. “The Greek church," he wrote (page 126),
standing in between two mosques (the best example of religious tolerance in Russia), the ruins of an ancient Goth khram, the cracked walls of the remaining homes, vacant plots of land, broken pieces of marble which once decorated the fallen buildings, give the village a sepulchral aspect: one might think that it was not long ago seized and destroyed by enemies.
Sudak Sudak was a garden paradise. Its thirty-two orchards and thirty vineyards - with over 56,000 grapevines - had been owned and tended by Tatars.

Petr (Peter) Keppen spent 5 years living in Crimea while serving as assistant to the chief of silk production. During that time he traveled obsessively, collecting material for his geographical and archaeological projects. According to Keppen, Sudak was not so much a town as it was a sprawling vineyard sewn with little houses occupied by their owners during the autumn harvest. (page 124) Writing at nearly the same time as Keppen, Bronevskii claimed that Sudak once had over 100,000 inhabitants but that the population had dwindled by 1815 to 100 invalids settled in poor quarters. In spring though, and in autumn, approximately 2,000 workers and manufacturers came to work the land and harvest the grapes.(page 123)