Life is unfair to coastal cities in the sense that they are perceived as an adjunct to stereotypical southern entertainments. The city does not seem to exist beyond the resort season. Meanwhile, coastal cities have the same importance as capitals. Kerch is vivid proof of this. I had a conversation about Kerch with a person who is truly in love with this Crimean city — the poet, journalist, and traveler Ihor SID (SYDORENKO).
Is Kerch truly the oldest city in Ukraine?
“Definitely. Although there are no documented references to the founding of Kerch, there are certain cultural strata that belong to certain eras. I particularly like the following fact: in 2000 archeologists — they come from everywhere: Greece, America, and Russia — agreed that the city has a concrete age. The deputy mayor of Kerch met with the archeologists and asked them to provide a concrete date. When she talked to them, they specified that 2,599 years had passed since ancient Panticapaeum emerged. The very next year the city marked its 2,600th anniversary with great pomp. This is not precise dating; they simply came to an agreement about this.”
Well, that often happens with the founding dates of ancient cities.
“There are rare concrete references: for example, the first Cossack came to the banks of the Dnipro River in the vicinity of today’s Dnipropetrovsk on a certain day, and thus we have a precise date, or the first warrior of the Horde approached the coast of the Strait of Kerch in a particular year, marking the beginning of the existence of the Crimean ulus of the Golden Horde, which was later transformed into a separate nation. But I repeat: there are no doubts concerning the antiquity of our city.”
What are the other unique features of Kerch?
“It has unique border features. First of all, this is where Ukraine borders on Russia. When they talk about Kerch, my Russian acquaintances say: ‘Oh, that’s near our Taman,’ because when Lermontov was writing his short stories, he described the location of Kerch in a very indistinct way. He mentioned a boat sailing from Kerch to Taman as if they were located very close to each other. But it is also a place where Europe borders on Asia. The thing is that there is a division right down the middle of the Caucasus, so it turns out that Taman is also Europe. Earlier, however, a more ancient division between Europe and Asia went through the Cimmerian Bosphorus, i.e., the Strait of Kerch, via the Maeotyde, i.e., the Maeotian marshes — as the Sea of Azov used to be called — upriver along the Tanais River — now it is called the Don — and the Riphean Mountains, i.e., the Urals. So, Kerch is historically the outermost advance post of Europe. And, accordingly, the last 2,000 years brought waves of Eastern nomadic conquerors via the Strait of Kerch. This means that to a large extent Asia was penetrating into Europe through Kerch.”
What are some of Kerch’s European features?
“Do you remember Nabokov comparing the Italian Fialta with Yalta? It seems to me that Yalta is something that is part Italian, whereas Kerch reminds me of small Greek coastal towns, for example, the suburbs of Athens where the port Piraeus is located. In other words, while the southern Crimean coast resembles Italy, Kerch is a kind of Greece. The Hellenic civilization is everywhere. Whenever a steep slope crumbles, you can find metal plates with ammunition of Greek warriors, parts of horse trappings, and coins. By the way, the only living discoverer of the Hellenic city — Oleksii Kulykov — lives in Kerch.”
How is that possible?
“People were searching for the city of Akra for dozens of years. But Oleksii, who was a schoolboy in the upper grades and an archeology fanatic, discovered the remains of a city wall 15 kilometers from Kerch while he was snorkeling in water at a depth of several meters. For many years afterwards archeologists excavated the city according to plans that he drew up. If we talk about differences, they are very positive: Kerch is a city that has not found a new image for itself. Experts know that this is one of the most interesting cities on the planet: so many cultural strata are concentrated there. But the local population is not even proud of this. There are wonderful regional historians, but they don’t have any public exposure. Therefore, the task of cultural workers is to convey information to the population about the exciting place we live in. I returned to Kerch in January with the intention of becoming involved in this, and I am glad we are talking about it.”
What are your connections to Kerch?
“My first contact with the city may have been accidental. After graduating from school, I started working when there were few institutes in the USSR that studied tropical countries. Since childhood I had wanted to go to the tropics, so in this sense the Crimea and Kerch have become not just a place where I study and work but a port from where I set out on my travels throughout the world. Then a network of institutes was founded, which were devoted to oceanography and the fishing industry all over the USSR, and I liked Southern Scholarly Research Institute of the Maritime Fishing Industry and Oceanography (YuGNIRO) in Kerch the most. Today, this is Ukraine’s main scholarly institute (PNDIRO) for the study of the world’s maritime fishing reserves. But in the mid-1980s the Kerch institute dealt mainly with the Indian Ocean and Antarctica. And my first expedition was not to the tropics, as I had dreamed, but to Antarctica. I ended up in the tropics later. At first, my perception of Kerch was too romantic, but later I became convinced that my enthusiasm was justified.”
What was your first, and perhaps your best, impression of the city?
“In the late 1980s I met, practically by accident, a man who had been a student at the Department of History at Simferopol University. He still had the key to the Kerch necropolis on Mt. Mithridates, which was closed to visitors. This is a famous place: Pushkin climbed it during his one-day visit to Kerch. It is a 100-meter high hill that has several additional summits that stretch deep into the peninsula. The mountain is located on the coast of Kerch Bay. The term necropolis is not a precise name because a necropolis is usually a totality of sarcophagi meant to be a single one. But in this case, there are hundreds of individual burials that were connected by 19th century robbers by means of underpasses. Burials were done by families of Bosporites, the residents of Panticapaeum, under the land beneath each courtyard.
“They were cells dug in loamy soil at a depth of nearly three meters. A narrow vertical passage led into them. When somebody died, the deceased was buried inside a cell, along with household utensils and jewelry for the journey to the other world. The entrance was carefully guarded. In the 19th century, when the Crimea was annexed by Russia, Russian adventurers started to plunder the tombs. They made a hole in each one with long chisels. Since the cells were located close to each other, this worked better than digging holes at random. Whenever a chisel revealed an empty space after being driven in a certain direction, a hole was made and both cells became connected to each other. The discovered cell was also looted, and from that cell the robbers would study the surroundings. Thus, countless cells became connected by means of a web of passages. Scholars named the whole thing a necropolis.
“I went down there three times. It is impressive: you find yourself in a quiet but frightening space where there are remains of skeletons, and the walls have farewell inscriptions proving that Christianity was already penetrating into this land, although in a transformed way: it was layering over the cult of the nomadic horseman god Sabazios. The residents of Panticapaeum were called sabaziasts. We crawled into every corner of that place on our knees. That made a strong impression. In general, Kerch is a very unusual place, and relations between man and space are very strange there.”
Which of the city’s names strike you as the most fitting?
“The thing is that the current name has a medieval Italian version, cercio, that interestingly enough coincides with a Russian euphemism, also from the Middle Ages, which was revived in the poetry of Pushkin and Barkov. I think Barkov uses the term kerch mokhnatyi, which means “phallus.” So, today’s meaning seems the most ridiculous and therefore the most interesting one. Seriously, Panticapaeum originates from the name of the river Pantykapa. Today it flows through the city of Melek-Chesme, which means ‘the wellspring of angels’ in Crimean-Tatar.
“The word Pantykapa meant ‘fishing route.’ This January, when a large part of the ice had not broken up yet, I witnessed a wonderful phenomenon: a herd of thousands of young gray mullet — large schools of fish are called herds — entered the mouth of the river, which has become very dirty in the last decades because the city sewage is dumped there in several locations. The river is narrow, some 10 meters at most, and the fish filled the first hundred meters of the mouth. It looked like a porridge of fish that was gleaming metallically; a moving surface. It was a fantastic sight. This may have happened before and that’s how the river and the city got their names. That’s my hypothesis.
“In fact, the Strait of Kerch is the only natural route for fish coming from the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea and vice versa. Herring come here to spawn; the redfish goes upward to the Sea of Azov and the rivers. During the last 2,500 years Kerch was given a total of 12 official names. The word ‘Bospor’ was changed to Bosporo and Bospro; it is very likely that the name Kerch is related to the Scythian variant Karkh. Kerch even had a possibility to become the capital of the Russian Empire: Tsar Peter I was thinking about this. But even today Kerch could become the cultural capital of Europe: it is one of the worthiest contenders.”
Are the residents of Kerch aware of this?
“One of the city’s main parameters is a kind of amnesia. This is a city with a great past. But because during World War II the city’s party leaders decided not to evacuate most of the population and practically drove the people into the quarries to engage in a partisan war, and the Germans were hunting them down and destroying them, the majority of the city residents perished. Afterwards, vacant or restored houses were settled by people from Taman or other regions of Russia. There are very few residents who remember pre-war Kerch. In the 1920s the so-called Bosphorus University was located in Kerch. Few people today remember it. The university lasted only a few years, but wonderful scholars and professors from the capital would lecture there.
“My friend, who is a historian, has discovered another very interesting episode. It appears that the history of the futurist movement ended in Kerch when, during a tour called the Olympiad of Futurism, Maiakovsky, who founded Cubo-Futurism, and Igor Severianin, the head of the Ego- Futurism fraction, had a permanent falling-out. There is an older example: in the times of the Bosporan Kingdom, in one of the ancient cities now united by the territory of Kerch, there lived two well-known philosophers, Spherus and Diphilus. Their works have not been preserved, but according to their contemporaries they had a serious intellectual influence on the Hellenic world, reaching all the way to the basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Here’s another fact for you: Demosthenes was a lobbyist of the Kerch-Bosporan cultural-political space. He promoted the interests of the Bosporan Kingdom among the Greek elite. Hardly anyone is aware of this.”
I can’t avoid asking. You mentioned pollution. What impact will the recent oil spill involving a good dozen Russian ships have on the city’s ecology?
“I must instantly reassure you: with the help of strong currents everything will be quickly washed away from most areas of water to the Black Sea. By the summer this will only be a memory.”
Kerch has clearly seen plenty of nations passing through, and each made an impact on the city. Which culture had the strongest impact?
“There is a dramatic story here. I remember the director of a bookshop on the main street. Of course, there is some sort of boutique there now. Her name was Lambrozo. Until my arrival in 1985 Kerch was the center of the Italian diaspora in the Crimea. Italians are not a typical phenomenon for Kerch and in general for the Crimea, but they have lived there for nearly 500 years. They are the descendants of the citizens of two Italian republics, the Venetian and Genoese, proof of which is the famous site known as the Genoese Fortress.
“In the last 200 or 300 years Italians from the entire Crimean coast came to Kerch to live in a compact way. During the Second World War Italians as well as Crimean Tatars, Germans, and Greeks were repressed. They were all brought to Central Asia and Kazakhstan, and many of them died en route. As far as I know, they are the last of the repressed peoples of the Crimea who have not been rehabilitated. Very few eyewitnesses of the repressions are still living, but their children are waiting for a legal solution to this question.
“The Greeks are a well-known ethnic group in Kerch. Mt. Mithridates got its name in the New Era (after Christ) from the famous Mithridates IV Eupator, who died during the siege of Panticapaeum, where his troops were fighting. This king of Asia Minor dreamed of creating the Circum-Pontus Empire and tried to resist Rome, which he did in a rather successful way. But his troops’ defense was broken.
“There is a legend about his death. It is common knowledge that throughout his life he used different kinds of poisons in homeopathic doses so that nobody could poison him. So he could not poison himself when his troops were destroyed. He asked his friend — according to other sources, his servant — to stab him. ‘Pylades would dispute there with Artrides/ Mithridates stabbed himself there,’ Pushkin wrote.
“A beautiful copy of Theseus’s temple in Athens, built out of white stone in the early 19th century in the middle of Mithridates, on a little square that was seen from dozens of kilometers away, was wrecked in the 1950s. I have seen old photographs of it: it was a miracle. The building was destroyed, and a restaurant was built on its site, but it burned down within a year. Something ridiculous is standing there now. But for 150 years Kerch was recognized from the sea thanks to that building. I won’t even mention the Greek city-states on the coasts of the Strait of Kerch, which extends for over 30 kilometers, and their amazing names: Mirmekion, Nymphaion, Tiritaka, Porphmium, Porpheneum, Germisium. These are all cities headed by Bospor, which was located near Mt. Mithridates.”
What is Kerch like today? Is this a veteran of many wars, a post-Soviet province exhausted by problems, a museum-city, or a light-hearted resort?
“You have very precisely defined the several faces of the city. All this is present at the same time. Today’s Kerch is searching for its face; its resort image is beginning to emerge and occupy a place in the thoughts of both the residents of Kerch and guests of the city. Since the city coffers are filled thanks to tourism, it is very important from the economic point of view and in general to accept oneself as a European city: the more Kerch communicates with the external world the more useful it is.
“The worst holdover from Soviet times is its provincialism. I find many of them in myself and I am fighting this, and Kerch is fighting this. By the way, the current leadership of the city has decided to do something bold, and I personally support this. They are changing the species of trees in the city’s plantings. Many elms and lindens have been cut down and replaced by typically southern subtropical species, like platens and cypresses. This is very important. Because of the earlier flora, Kerch looked like an ordinary part of the Russian middle belt. Now, step by step it is becoming a true Mediterranean city. We have everything here except palm trees. Unfortunately, unlike in Yalta, strong winds blow in Kerch during the winter, and palm trees cannot grow here. However, there is a fig tree growing in the yard of my alma mater YuGNIRO, which is a typical tropical plant related to the banyan, a sort of rubber plant, and I am proud of this.”
Which are some other typical features of the city landscape?
“The strait is very rocky because its shores are constantly eroding. In general, Kerch Peninsula is a hilly steppe, and most of the hills, especially in Kerch, are artificial. There is a term Yuz-Oba — ‘a hundred summits’ — that’s how the Tatars called Tauride and the Tauride- Scythian tombs. Many of these burials, including the famous Golden Barrow, are located in the city. I like this rugged country very much. There is also an absolutely fantastic phenomenon: mud volcanoes. There are the Bulhanak mud volcanoes with curative mud, and in the city, about 10 minutes from my apartment there is a volcano called Dzhardzhava, which means ‘enemy ravine.’ When it exploded in 1984, two-meter-large pieces of clay flew into the air and a humming was heard for several days. The hot clay poured out and created a new hill.
“As for the cultural landscape, this is a typical seaside town, according to the architecture of its buildings. Some nice sites are located on Bosphorus Alley and Esplanadna Street. I have discovered a very interesting detail: in the streets along Mt. Mithridates, until recently the gateways and arches of houses featured small stone columns that were knee-high and thick as an elephant’s leg, almost touching the corners of the gates. It looks as if the gateway is the mouth of a hippo with huge tusks. These are traces of the medieval tradition of using such columns to protect the white- washed gateways from the wheels of carts entering the yard. By the way, I myself have taken part in changing the Kerch landscape.”
How?
“In 1993-95 my friends and I held the Bosporan Cultural Forum. On Mt. Mithridates we created a small barrow with the help of excavators and called it Yuz-Odyn-Oba, which translates from our macaronic language to ‘Summit Number 101.’ The participants of the forum — the well-known Russian writers Vasily Aksenov, Timur Kibirov, and Fazil Iskander — threw their creative talismans into it. This was a kind of semi-artistic and semi-mystical action: we said that we had sowed something clever, good, and eternal. Each person invented something of his own. The Simferopol poet Yurii Poliakov threw his girlfriend in, but he pulled her out immediately. Iskander threw in a sheet of a rough draft. Kibirov threw his unused pepper spray with a spell ‘for general disarmament.’ And Aksenov threw his gold pen into it. We thought it was a gold Parker pen, and he didn’t deny the fact that 15 years earlier he had written his famous novel The Island of Crimea with this pen. I talked about this at Radio Liberty, and when I returned to Kerch, the tumulus had been dug up. Later I heard that several people claimed to own Aksenov’s gold Parker.”
Speaking about islands, Tuzla is right near Kerch.
“Kerch is inseparable from this wonderful bit of land. All the famous participants of the forum — writers and artists — organized actions on Tuzla. Actually, this small island used to be the end of a spit of land stretching from Cape Tuzla to Russia’s territory. Afterwards the split eroded, and in Soviet times this part of the former Asian coast was transferred to the jurisdiction of Kerch. Since there is an all-European postulate about the inviolability of borders, one should not debate the question of whom it belongs to. In 2003 it was important for Ukraine to defend this territory, and now Ukraine can offer this island for various artistic actions. By the way, I agree with my high-ranking partners about this.”
Who lives in Kerch today?
“This is a very interesting thing because the post-war type of city resident was dull and uninteresting. But because Kerch is a port and partly because Kerch is a center of ocean research, the mentality of the residents of Kerch has been extraordinarily altered. The residents of the Crimea are sailors in many respects. Kulykov recounted that in Soviet times sailors from merchant and fishing fleets, wearing foreign clothing, would promenade along Lenin Street, formerly Dvorianska, with their wives and children, who would come to see them for a short time between voyages. They would stroll and show off the things they had bought in foreign ports and the Kerch-based Berizka shop. This was a kind of subculture: with their bright clothing they resisted Soviet dullness, which gradually disappeared from the space surrounding them.
“The fact that Kerch was more multicolored already in Soviet times is very important. Here one should thank maritime sailing. Now things are different. In those days there was a single institution of higher education, a branch of the Kaliningrad Fishing Institute. Today the city has nearly 10 institutes, and young people are living actively in the Internet. Interestingly, the photo-documentation of the space is very developed. So it seems to me that the process has begun: today’s residents of Kerch are falling more in love with their own space, both geographically and culturally. During our Bosporan Forum we took the participants to the sites of ancient Greek towns, where they absorbed the aura of Hellenic coastal life. Archeologists talked to them about their recent finds, and during the second half of the day, scholarly and artistic discussions were held. This served to change the guests’ awareness, which is very important. The famous guests still remember the forum 15 years later.”
Has there been a continuation?
“A very interesting theater festival called the Bosporan Games is being held now. It is absolutely clear to me, as an expert, that several forums dedicated to various topics can take place in this fantastic city.”
There ought to be a lot of mystics in such a city.
“Twice in the outskirts of Kerch I experienced the mystical feeling that past eras appeared like vague images in the surrounding space. Both times this happened to me at sunset, when my friends and I were walking over the hills to the sea. Sunset is a strange time of day, which changes one’s perception. I seemed to see bullock-carts, carts, bulls, and warriors moving next to me. The endless lines of people from various nations were moving; it was a wave into which I had landed. I don’t have any great love for esoterica, but of course all these things exist. As for historical places that are linked to mystics, Maksymylian Voloshyn, who lived in Koktebel, took his friend Marina Tsvetaeva, who was very young then, to Kerch and showed her the entrance to the Kingdom of Hades.”
Where can this be?
“I think these are quarries that are located in the city. They are rather fearsome places, and they have exits in different places. Tsvetaeva talked about this many times. The thing is that the Kingdom of Hades, according to Greek mythology, was a huge space, but the entrance was located in the Bosporus. This is confirmed by geology. Geologists say that the Kerch and Taman peninsulas have a common system of underground currents of hot clay. I recently heard a story that in Bulhanak someone threw a bottle with a message inside and it jumped out of the volcano on Taman Peninsula. This is brilliant, but it’s definitely a lie, which proves how these places influence one’s imagination. And I think it’s truly not important whether it is a lie. Many mythological things should not be tested for veracity.”
Finally, a simple question: why do you love Kerch?
“I will be egotistical to the max. This is the place where I was formed. I came here as an absolutely infantile student, and I immediately went on exciting expeditions. Between trips I fought against the Crimean Nuclear Plant, meaning, I matured politically. I went to the necropolis and learned incredible things about our history. This was the richest period of my life. Since 1995 I have lived in Moscow, where many things were taking place as well, but they did not have this magical power over me because I was already formed then. I went there already as a resident of Kerch. I am happy that I came back, because this is a place where you have to work a lot. This is a huge set of puzzles that should be put together: cultural facts and phenomena. This is material for people who think artistically, whom I am going to invite. In Kerch one should play — in the sense of Hesse’s glass bead game — with its own history, without setting external tasks. At our forums we combined our ancient history of antiquity with our guests’ postmodern and avant-garde thinking. We forced extreme experimenters to talk about ancient times, eternal topics. It turned out to be very interesting. In a word, Kerch is a huge task standing before me and many other people.”
With what or with whom would you compare Kerch?
“This is a sort of treasure that we have nearly located. We are robbers, who have knocked around many times in different corners of the planet, and suddenly we find something big and exciting. In a more literal way, Kerch can be compared to a palimpsest. A palimpsest is a text written over another text that has been scraped off and used again. A large proportion of the population died, including many educated people, who remembered not just pre- war but pre-revolutionary Kerch. Then the city was populated for the most part by people without a higher education, and it turned out that the new cultural space beneath us has huge strata that have been erased.”
