In 1656, Turkish traveler Elvia Celebi arrived in Oziu,
known as Ochakiv in the history, an important center of the Ottoman Empire
on the Black Sea northern littoral. What caught his eyes were its impregnable
walls, a wooden bridge over a deep moat, which was drawn up every night,
and the gun muzzles sticking out of all the battlements.
Coming to the town center, he noted with satisfaction the
careful planning of buildings and the cleanliness of the paved streets
along which two-story adobe houses huddled next to each other. Then he
saw the palace of the Pasha and his retinue, the slender minarets of mosques,
fountains, and, of course, a multitude of tender southern roses. Numerous
ships from various countries lay in the harbor. It is they that flooded
the town with the crowds of multilingual sailors and traders. A Turkish
garrison was stationed in the fortress; there also were craftsmen and merchants;
even overseas engineers, Germans and Frenchmen, who had come to take part
in building the fortifications.
Ukrainian Cossacks were also frequent guests — not only
to raid but to trade as well, bringing hide, tobacco, tallow, flax fabric,
yarn, timber, coal, dried fish, and fish glue from Ukraine. Our merchants
would buy and take to Ukraine wines, salt, spices, dried fruit, olive oil,
incense, oranges, cotton print, Moroccan leather, horse harnesses, and
sheepskins.
In peacetime, Armenians and Greeks, Wallachians and Ukrainians
could find shelter here. Each was free to pray to his god according to
his own custom: a Christian (Orthodox) Moldavian church conducted service
not far from the local pasha’s palace and the mosque. The Ochakiv pasha
hired many Cossacks to maintain law and order in the town, guard the sea
routes, and sometimes even calm some excessively uninhibited janissaries.
Beyond the town walls, there were hundreds of reed-thatched
Wallachian structures, Nogai yurts, small retail stores, inns, mills, and
warehouses. Vegetable gardens spread out well into the boundless steppe.
Unfortunately, the town’s further destiny was far from
happy. A Russian army assault in 1788 transformed the fortress and the
town quarters into terrible ruins. The Russian Empire replaced the Ottoman,
leaving reconstruction plans never fulfilled, and the garrison commander
lived in the lower, intact, part of the pasha’s house. Gradually, residents
scavenged the remains of fortress walls and other structures and made use
of them in their households.
In the early twentieth century, this was a small steppe
town which, however, did not lose its military and strategic importance
due to its location, and large military units were stationed there under
both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
All of historical value in Ochakiv was left under the cobblestones
and houses, but it constantly revealed itself as researchers continued
to find old coins, smoking pipes, clay vessels, and numerous mysterious
hollows in the downtown. The past comes back in the local legends of the
untold wealth of the Turkish treasury hidden in the town’s underground
labyrinth. Sometimes, to the utter astonishment of residents, brick structures
sink underground overnight, as with half the two-story building of a travel
bureau in the early 1990s. Mountains of crushed rock and sand, brought
over by powerful dump trucks, could vanish, like sand, into the subterranean
galleries.
The town erected, according to some sources, by Mengli
Girey in 1492 at the place of older, perhaps pages of its history to assume
distinctive outlines as museum exhibits or library books. On the initiative
of the Ochakiv residents themselves, area researchers, and local authorities,
who turned for help to the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy
of Sciences, a systematic study of the town began in 1989. Tremendous work
was done in 1989-1996 by the Ochakiv expedition of the Institute of Archeology
and, in later years, by the joint Ukrainian-Turkish expedition of the institute
and the Turkish Historical Society.
Gradually, the 4-6 meter deep cultural layers revealed
more and more new outlines of Ochakiv from the fourteenth through eighteenth
centuries, including those described by Evlia Celebi, in Istanbul archival
documents, and in contemporary accounts. It became possible to localize
on the modern city’s map the place of the ancient and medieval centers
and its separate parts, and to compare them with the eighteenth century
maps and plans.
Exposed were the remains of the walls of the former palace
complex, the basements of monumental buildings in the Old Fortress, fragments
of residential houses, ruins of a Turkish tower, an aqueduct, fortifications,
and a cemetery of soldiers who defended the fortress. A small yurt- like
structure was dug out beyond the fortress, with the remainders of reed-
lined structures described by the same Celebi.
All fortress items bear the marks of terrible ruin: numerous
bomb craters, dozens of cannonballs sometimes stuck in the house walls,
bomb fragments, broken horse bones, and iron pellets baked together in
a blaze.
The town’s former prosperity emerges in the shape of architectural
details and the chipped-off pieces of marble tombstones, thousands of various
objects once belonging to soldiers, craftsmen, and, of course, society’s
upper crust. There are exquisite faience articles made by well-known masters
from the Ottoman Empire’s art centers: quaint little coffee and tea cups,
saucers, plates, and ceramic tiles. A huge collection of finely-ornamented
smoking pipes with imbedded marble, gold, and the masters’ personal hallmarks.
In addition to clay masterpieces, pipes were also found, made of jade and
meerschaum, snow-white, carved, imbedded with tiny royal-blue glass beads,
traditional Turkish “eyes” to protect against evil spells. Various adornments
of semiprecious stones, including a unique carnelian ring insert adorned
with a highly artistic miniature depicting lush chrysanthemums and bearing
the caption Ismail and the date 1749 in the center. Glass vessels also
strike one by their perfect shapes. Burgeoning transit trade is testified
to by finds of copper, bronze, and silver coins, including those struck
in Istanbul. Special pointed sticks remind us of Koran readers.
Ochakiv’s mysterious cave-ins and mazes have become the
object of test pits and archeological excavations under the guidance of
Candidate of Sciences (history) T. A. Bobrovsky. The researchers have drawn
up the first map of the underground city and identified the most dangerous
areas where cave-ins could occur. However, this is only the first step.
The trouble-free development of the town requires further research and
special serious efforts of speleologists, archeologists, builders, geologists,
and other specialists. And all this requires money...
The monuments discovered by archeologists and a richest
collection of material culture artifacts laid the groundwork for establishing
the Historical and Cultural Preserve, initiated by the Institute of Archeology
and Ochakiv city council members in 1996, but very much is still to be
done to strengthen and develop it.
The results of Ochakiv research became the object of scholarly
papers at a 1997 international congress in Ankara, Turkey, and a number
of international and Ukrainian conferences. Great assistance in the coordination
of Ukrainian-Turkish studies was rendered by the Embassy of Turkey in Ukraine
and the Ambassador of the Turkish Republic, Ali Karaosmanoglu. Thanks to
his personal initiative, the presidents of our countries were also informed
about the results of cooperation between the Turkish and Ukrainian researchers,
when President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey visited Kyiv in May 1998.
As recently as ten years ago it was impossible even to
think about joint Turkish-Ukrainian excavations, but, despite all the current
hardships of Ukrainian science, such cooperation has itself become a historical
fact.
№14 April 25 2000 «The
Day»
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