became emptier and emptier and the queues outside them ever lengthier, disaffected citizens jokingly used the phrase to refer ironically to the Soviet Union, parodying hyperbolic Communist propaganda.
As well as the disastrous year spent at the Greek school, Chekhov also had to endure several years of getting up in the small hours to sing at the Greek Monastery in Taganrog before he was ten years old. The Greek archimandrite in the Monastery's large white-walled church decided to introduce early morning services in Russian on Sundays in order to increase the income raised from collections, and Chekhov's
Petrovskaya Street, Taganrog
over-zealous father leaped at the chance to lead the choir. Apart from attending the lunch at the Monastery's feast day every year, along with Taganrog's most important Greek dignitaries, the only entertainment for the three miserable young Chekhov boys, stuck in their cleros up on the first floor, was watching birds feed their young in nests they had made inside the grilles covering the church's round windows.6
At the end of his life Chekhov claimed to have no memory at all of the modern Greek he once learned, and when he was fifteen he had to stay down a class because he failed his end of year exams in ancient Greek. Although his writings are sprinkled with occasional phrases in Latin, a language which came in useful for his medical studies, there are almost none in Greek, perhaps due to the unpleasant associations. And it was perhaps to exorcize some ghosts that many years later he created the character of the tyrannical Greek teacher Belikov in his famous story 'The Man in a Case', for whom the classical languages are 'just like his galoshes and umbrella really, hiding him from real life': ''How resonant and beautiful the Greek language is!' he would say with a sweet expression; and as if to prove the truth of his words, his eyes would narrow and he would raise his finger and say 'Anthropos!'' So Chekhov was not exactly a Greek fan. But even he would have probably been amazed by recent archaeological discoveries in his home town, which suggest that Taganrog was the site of the oldest and most northerly ancient Greek colony in the entire Black Sea area.7
Sometimes during particularly cold winters up north, Chekhov started to dream of retiring to Taganrog so that he could spend his old age sitting in the sun. He told his younger cousin Georgi that he wished he could buy a little house by the sea, then he regretted not having the money to build a castle by the flight of vertiginous stone steps which descends from Greek Street all the way down to the shore.8 Built in the 1820s in imitation of the famous Acropolis steps in Athens by one of Taganrog's wealthy Greeks, they served as a model for the staircase in Odessa later immortalized by Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin? Chekhov was obviously thinking about the turreted mansion by the top of the steps lived in by Tchaikovsky's brother, which had a fine sea view. Ippolit Tchaikovsky was a retired naval officer with a shipping business, and after he moved back to St Petersburg in 1894, Chekhov told Georgi he would buy his house if he was rich. Tchaikovsky had been taken by his brother out to sea and driven around town in his cabriolet on the
if-V
The Stone Steps
i
occasions when he had come to visit, and the Taganrog connection undoubtedly played a role in cementing the friendship that he formed with Chekhov in 1889; Georgi was later to work for Ippolit's shipping agency.
If Chekhov had not become infected with tuberculosis and had indeed been able to retire to his castle with the sea view in Taganrog, he would probably have still been around when the city began installing a proper sanitation system in the 1930s, following the belated provision of running water. It was when a sewage pipe was laid in the bay of Taganrog below Ippolit Tchaikovsky's house that fragments of pottery started washing up on the shore and were deposited at the foot of the stone steps. Perhaps if Chekhov had been able to understand the stories he had heard about Odysseus in his first year of school, he might have been interested to know that these fragments of pottery turned out to be Greek, and very old indeed – about seventh-century ??. Archaeologists took an immediate interest because there was no record of any ancient Greek settlement in the Taganrog area, but plans to carry out serious excavation were impeded first by the war, then by ideological problems. Finally they were forgotten about.
However, after recent study in more auspicious circumstances of the
thousands of pieces of pottery which have washed up on the shore since those early finds, Russian and German archaeologists now believe that (lie ancient city that lies under the sea in the bay of Taganrog may be Cremni ('the Cliffs'), the city mentioned by Herodotus in his famous / Ustory of the Persian Wars. Taganrog is, after all, situated on a high peninsula with steep cliffs on either side. The relevant passage is in book four, where Herodotus talks about the nomadic Scythians who lived in these areas:
On the opposite side of the Gerrhus is the Royal district, as it is called: here dwells the largest and bravest of the Scythian tribes, which looks upon all the other tribes in the light of slaves. Its country reaches on the south to Taurica, on the east to the trench dug by the sons of the blind slaves, the mart upon the Palus Maeotis, called Cremni (the Cliffs), and in part to the river Tanais.10
To the ancient Greeks, the area where Chekhov grew up was the end ol the known world. Following in the footsteps of Odysseus, Greek set I lers first set out to explore the unknown areas to the north of their empire at the end of the seventh century ??, while other colonists s.nled east to Asia Minor and west to Italy. They called the Black Sea the Anne Pontus, or Inhospitable Sea, because of the dangers they faced both in navigating often stormy and uncharted waters and in encountering unfriendly nomadic tribes when they finally reached their dcsi mation. After the Black Sea littoral had become home to numerous new centres of Greek civilization, however, the Axine Pontus was renamed the Euxine Pontus, or Friendly Sea.11 The next stage was to viil lurther north through the Kerch straits to conquer the even remoter Se.i of Azov, which proved to be so shallow it was given the name of I'.ilus Maeotis, or Maeotis Lake. Its waters also froze over in the winter, which posed an additional challenge to sailors accustomed to the warm seas of the Mediterranean.
Ii lias been hitherto thought that the first Greek settlement on the ?/i ›v shores was Tanais, founded in the third century ?? at the mouth ol ilu' River Don, just outside the present-day city of Rostov, some fifty miles to the east of Taganrog (Tanais was also the name the Greeks gave in ihe Don).12 But it now seems that the Greeks had been more Intrepid, and had established their most northerly colony several
centuries earlier, at the very beginning of their first voyages to new lands. The Azov seabed has never before been excavated, and the underwater explorations to be started in the bay of Taganrog in Z004, the centenary of Chekhov's death, may yet yield sensational results, even prompting some journalists to speculate on the discovery of a Russian Atlantis. What is already clear is that archaeologists will have to revise prior perceptions about the Hellenization of the nomadic Scythian tribes who dominated the steppe territory north of the Black Sea between the Carpathian Mountains and the River Don. It now seems that the first contacts between the Scythians and the Ancient Greeks were probably made in the Taganrog area.13
II
Venetians, Turks and Russian Tsars
I have taken the Tanais River as the boundary between Europe and Asia.
