The Crimean War

flight of peasants frightened of reprisals by the Russians. But the Tatars were also encouraged to depart by a variety of other Russian measures, including the seizure of their land, punitive taxation, forced labour and physical intimidation by Cossack squads. By 1800 nearly one-third of the Crimean Tatar population, about 100,000 people, had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire with another 10,000 leaving in the wake of the Russo-Turkish war of 1806– 12. They were replaced by Russian settlers and other Eastern Christians: Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, many of them refugees from the Ottoman Empire who wanted the protection of a Christian state. The exodus of the Crimean Tatars was the start of a gradual retreat of the Muslims from Europe. It was part of a long history of demographic exchange and ethnic conflict between the Ottoman and Orthodox spheres which would last until the Balkan crises of the late twentieth century.²²

The Christianization of the Crimea was also realized in grand designs for churches, palaces and neoclassical cities that would eradicate all Muslim traces from the physical environment. Catherine envisaged the Crimea as Russia’s southern paradise, a pleasure-garden where the fruits of her enlightened Christian rule could be enjoyed and exhibited to the world beyond the Black Sea. She liked to call the peninsula by its Greek name, Taurida, in preference to Crimea (Krym), its Tatar name: she thought that it linked Russia to the Hellenic civilization of Byzantium. She gave enormous tracts of land to Russia’s nobles to establish magnificent estates along the mountainous southern coast, a coastline to rival the Amalfi in beauty; their classical buildings, Mediterranean gardens and vineyards were supposed to be the carriers of a new Christian civilization in this previously heathen land.

Urban planning reinforced this Russian domination of the Crimea: ancient Tatar towns like Bakhchiserai, the capital of the former khanate, were downgraded or abandoned completely; ethnically mixed cities such as Theodosia or Simferopol, the Russian administrative capital, were gradually reordered by the imperial state, with the centre of the city shifted from the old Tatar quarter to new areas where Russian churches and official buildings were erected; and new towns like Sevastopol, the Russian naval base, were built entirely in the neoclassical style.²³

Church-building in the newly conquered colony was relatively slow, and mosques continued to dominate the skyline in many towns and villages. But in the early nineteenth century there was an intense focus on the discovery of ancient Christian archaeological remains, Byzantine ruins, ascetic cave-churches and monasteries. It was all part of a deliberate effort to reclaim the Crimea as a sacred Christian site, a Russian Mount Athos, a place of pilgrimage for those who wanted to make a connection to the cradle of Slavic Christianity.²⁴

The most important holy site was, of course, the ruin of Khersonesos, excavated by the imperial administration in 1827, where a church of St Vladimir was later built to mark the notional spot where the Grand Prince had converted Kievan Rus’ to Christianity. It was one of those symbolic ironies of history that this sacred shrine was only a few metres from the place where the French forces landed and set up their camp during the Crimean War.

2

Eastern Questions

The Sultan rode on a white horse at the head of the procession, followed by his retinue of ministers and officials on foot. To the sound of an artillery salute, they emerged from the main Imperial Gate of the Topkapi Palace into the midday heat of a July day in Constantinople, the Turkish capital. It was Friday, 13 July 1849, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The Sultan Abdulmecid was on his way to reinaugurate the great mosque of Hagia Sophia. For the past two years it had been shut down for urgent restorations, the building having fallen into chronic disrepair after many decades of neglect. Riding through the crowd assembled in the square on the northern side of the former Orthodox basilica, where his mother, children and harem awaited him in gilded carriages, the Sultan arrived at the entrance of the mosque, where he was met by his religious officials and, in a break from Islamic tradition which specifically excluded non-Muslims from such holy ceremonies, by two Swiss architects, Gaspare and Giuseppe Fossati, who had overseen the restoration work.

The Fossatis led Abdulmecid through a series of private chambers to the sultan’s loge in the main prayer hall which they had rebuilt and redecorated in a neo-Byzantine style on the orders of the Sultan, whose insignia was fixed above the entry door. When the dignitaries had gathered in the hall, the rites of consecration were carried out by the Sheikh ul-Islam, the supreme religious official in the Ottoman Empire, who was (wrongly) equated with the Pope by European visitors.¹

It was an extraordinary occasion – the sultan-caliph and religious leaders of the world’s largest Muslim empire consecrating one of its most holy mosques in chambers rebuilt by Western architects in the style of the original Byzantine cathedral from which it was converted following the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. After 1453 the Ottomans had taken down the bells, replaced the cross with four minarets, removed the altar and iconostasis, and over the course of the next two centuries plastered over the Byzantine mosaics of the Orthodox basilica. The mosaics had remained concealed until the Fossati brothers had discovered them by accident while restoring the revetments and plasterwork in 1848. Having cleared a part of the mosaics on the north aisle vault, they showed them to the Sultan, who was so impressed by their brilliant colours that he ordered all of them to be liberated from their plaster covering. The hidden Christian origins of the mosque had been revealed.

Hagia Sophia, early 1850s

Realizing the significance of their discovery, the Fossati brothers made drawings and watercolours of the Byzantine mosaics, which they presented to the Tsar in the hope of receiving a subvention for the publication of their work. The architects had previously worked in St Petersburg, and the elder brother, Gaspare, had originally come to Constantinople to build the Russian embassy, a neoclassical palace completed in 1845, where he was joined by Giuseppe. This was a time when many European architects were constructing buildings in the Turkish capital, many of them foreign embassies, a time when the young Sultan was giving his support to a whole series of Westernizing liberal reforms and opening up his empire to the influence of Europe in the pursuit of economic modernization. Between 1845 and 1847 the Fossatis were employed by the Sultan to erect a massive three-storey complex for Constantinople University. Built entirely in the Western neoclassical style and placed awkwardly between the Hagia Sophia and Sultan Ahmet mosques, the complex was burned down in 1936.²

The Tsar of Russia, Nicholas I, was bound to be excited by the discovery of these Byzantine mosaics. The church of Hagia Sophia was a focal point in the religious life of tsarist Russia – a civilization built upon the myth of Orthodox succession to the Byzantine Empire. Hagia Sophia was the Mother of the Russian Church, the historic link between Russia and the Orthodox world of the eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Lands. According to the Primary Chronicle, the first recorded history of Kievan Rus’, compiled by monks in the eleventh century, the Russians were originally inspired to convert to Christianity by the visual beauty of the church. Sent to various countries to search for the True Faith, the emissaries of the Grand Prince Vladimir reported of Hagia Sophia: ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is not such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among them, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.’³ The reclamation of the church remained a persistent and fundamental aim of Russian nationalists and religious leaders throughout the nineteenth century. They dreamed of the conquest of Constantinople and its resurrection as the Russian capital (‘Tsargrad’) of an Orthodox empire stretching from Siberia to the Holy Lands. In the words of the Tsar’s leading