Strabo, Geographia, Book XI
Taganrog has the strongest resemblance to a Levantine town, so much are its Greek and Italian inhabitants in a majority over the rest of the population.
Ignace Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus, 1847
Returning to Taganrog in 1887 for the first time since graduating from Moscow University opened Chekhov's eyes to how Asiatic his home town was. Just after Easter, three days into his stay, a postman had come to deliver a letter for him and then had calmly gone into the kitchen, sat down and drunk a cup of tea, not in the slightest bit worried about all the other letters he still had to deliver. 'It's Asia here!' Chekhov exclaimed when he sat down to reply to the letter the following day; 'Everything here is so Asatic I can hardly believe my eyes. There are 60,000 inhabitants who just eat, drink, and reproduce, but they have no other interests.' The friends and relatives Chekhov had been visiting had offered him Easter cake and wine, and they all seemed to have
young babies, but none of them appeared to read newspapers or books. 'The town's location is superb in all respects, the climate is magnificent, there are fruits of the earth aplenty, but the inhabitants are ridiculously inert,' he commented. Their wit and imagination, their musical talents, their sensitivity were all wasted.14
Situated in a part of the empire as near to Tehran as to the Russian capital, and as close to Constantinople as to Moscow, Taganrog could indeed lay some claim to being at least geographically in Asia. Back in the first century the Greek historian Strabo had proposed the River Don, which lies just to the east of Taganrog, as the boundary between l;.urope and Asia. His contemporaries had been dissuaded from exploring the area back then because of 'the cold, the ice, the tumultuous tides which draw the waters miles away from the muddy shores, the mists and storms, the treacherous currents, the suffocating sultriness of summer and the swamps of mosquitoes'.15 This meeting point of two continents became a vital trading area in the Middle Ages, however, since it lay directly on one of the main Silk Routes connecting Constantinople with China. By the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, the Greek town of Tanais at the mouth of the Don had been destroyed by marauding Goths and Huns, and the Scythian territories of south-eastern Europe invaded by the Iranian-speaking Sarmatians (it was they who gave the River Don – meaning water – its present name). In the thirteenth century a new city was founded at the mouth of the Don, but this time the colonists were Italians rather than Greeks: Tana was built by the Venetians. It was trade with the Byzantine Empire which had initially made Venice wealthy. After establishing themselves as an independent republic, the Venetians then used their power to bankroll the Fourth Crusade, which resulted not in the recapturing of Muslim Jerusalem but in the storming of Christian Constantinople in 1204. This victory struck for the Latin West over the Greek East was very much to the liking of the Venetians, because what they were really after was trade links with Asia. They now, at a stroke, obtained a monopoly in the area by acquiring strategic territories belonging to the once powerful Byzantine Empire and, more importantly, maritime access through the Bosphorus to the Black and Azov seas.
In 1260 two Venetian merchants, the father and uncle of Marco Polo, set out from Tana to journey overland across the steppe to the
capital of the Mongol Empire. They became the first Europeans to visit the court of the great Kublai Khan, grandson and successor of Genghis Khan, and the ultimate conqueror of China. Tana became one of the most successful trading colonies founded by the Venetians in the Black Sea area.16 A few decades earlier, another of Genghis Khan's grandsons had led the invasion of Europe by Turkic-speaking Tatars. Tana and the entire Azov Sea area had become part of the most westerly khanate of the now vast Mongol Empire. With its capital in Sarai, on the lower reaches of the Volga some way off to the east, it became known as the Golden Horde and accumulated much wealth via its annual tribute from the Russian lands under their dominion. The empire began to collapse at the end of the fourteenth century when Tamerlane's armies invaded on their way to India, having already conquered Iran, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. And the oppressive 'Tatar yoke' was finally lifted from Russia in 1480 when Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, decided he could afford to stop paying taxes to the Golden Horde. Thus ended two and a half centuries of Russia's subjugation to the Mongols.
It was, however, a long time before the territory around present-day Taganrog became part of Russia. The Golden Horde had been broken up into four independent khanates when it had disintegrated – Kazan, Astrakhan, Sibir and Crimea. Ivan IV, the first Russian leader to be crowned with the Byzantine title of Tsar (Caesar), conquered Kazan and Astrakhan in the middle of the sixteenth century, and conquest of Siberia soon followed. But the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate were able to resist invasion through collusion with the Turks, and were eventually subsumed into the mighty Ottoman Empire. Although the Turks did not really penetrate the steppe north of the Azov and Black Sea shoreline, their kingdom extended across the Crimean peninsula to encompass much of what is now southern Ukraine and Russia. Their main trading post and military stronghold was the fortress of Azov, built on the ruins of Tana, which was successfully occupied for a few years in the middle of the seventeenth century by fearless Don Cossacks aware of its strategic importance. It was not until the accession of Peter the Great, however, that a Russian tsar was successful in conquering the southern lands of the Crimean Khanate, thus gaining prized access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
Intent on making Russia a naval power, Peter sailed a fleet down the Don and captured Azov from the Turks in 1696. His goal was to provide a harbour for his new navy on the Azov coast, and he chose nearby Tagan-Rog (Tatar for 'high promontory') as the most suitable location. In 1698 the first workmen were sent down from central Russia to build a fortress on the cape, to be equipped with hundreds of cannons and other munitions. Taganrog was the first purpose-built port to be constructed in the Russian Empire, and for a while Peter even considered establishing his new capital on the sea here, but changed his mind when land in the Baltic became available at the opposite end of his empire. By 1712, when Peter declared St Petersburg as his new capital, Taganrog could boast over a thousand dwellings and a population of about 8,000. The town's new residents had been forcibly settled here from towns on the Volga River, amongst them Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Saratov and Simbirsk. Other enforced colonists included exiles and convicts and Turkish and Tatar prisoners of war, as well as captured Swedes once the Northern Wars started. Peter also thought to station Cossacks in Taganrog to provide defence against attacks from the Crimea, which was still in the hands of the Ottoman Empire.17
Peter wanted to make Taganrog beautiful as well as functional. As well as issuing orders to plant oak trees along the shoreline for protection from the wind and sun, and willows in the most attractive areas, he ordered lemon and orange trees to be imported from Constantinople, which were planted in the newly ploughed soil along with vines, other fruit trees and medicinal herbs. Foreign gardeners were among the many specialists lured to Taganrog by promises of high salaries and other privileges.18 Military personnel naturally made up the majority of the town's population in the early years, but trade was also developed. The prodigious quantity of fish of a great many varieties had always attracted travellers to the Azov and Black Sea areas, and Peter encouraged the development of a fishing trade. A century and a half later the young Chekhov would spend hot summer days fishing in the bay with his friends, and it bred in him a passion for fishing which remained with him for the rest of his life.
In 1711 the Turks decided to wrest their old territories back and declared war. Preoccupied with the protracted war with Sweden up in the north, Peter was unable to defend the Azov shoreline and ordered
Tfee statue of Peter the Great in Taganrog by Antokolsky (1898)
his admiral, Count Apraksin, to withdraw from Taganrog after destroying its fortifications. It was not until the next war with Turkey, waged in the 1760s by Catherine the Great, that Taganrog once again became Russian
