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An authoritative introduction to the Crimean peninsula, This Blessed Land is the first book in English to trace the vast history of Crimea from pre-historic times to the present.
THE BLACK SEA is at once a homage to an ocean and its shores and an amazingly readable meditation on Eurasian history from the earliest times to the present. It evokes the culture, history and politics of the volatile region which surrounds the Black Sea. Ascherson recalls the world of Herodotus and Aeschylus; Ovid's place of exile on what is now the coast of Romania; the decline and fall of Byzantium; the mysterious fastness of the Chrisian Goths; the Tatar Khanates; the growth of Russian power across the grasslands, and the centuries of war between Ottoman and Russian Empires around the Black Sea; and in our own century the terrors of Stalinism and its fascist enemy, striving for mastery of these endlessly colourful and complex shores. This is a story of Greeks, Scythians, Samatians, Huns, Goths, Turks, Russian and Poles. This is the sea where Europe ended. It is the place where 'barbarism' was born.
The Black Sea and the coastal areas have played an important role in the history of eastern Europe and western Asia. Byzantium, Kiev Rus, the Golden Horde, Lithuania, Poland, the Ottoman Empire and Muscovy all tried to control parts of its area at various periods in history. From 1475 for three hundred years the Ottoman Turks controlled the Black Sea and the lands surrounding it. In 1783 Catherine annexed the Crimean peninsula, with its Muslim Tatar population, to the Russian Empire after a major Russian military victory over the Ottomans. The effect on the Ottoman Empire was significant. It lost its Tatar military forces when traditional means of securing recruits for the army had broken down; lost its secure northern frontier - the route to Istanbul itself was now open; it lost, for the first time, a Muslim province. This book provides a scholarly and balanced account of an important part of the transformation of the Muscovite state into a multinational empire. It also contributes to our understanding of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
In the most comprehensive survey of the Crimean Tatars—from the foundation of the glorious khanate in the fifteenth century to genocide and the struggle for survival in the twentieth century—Alan W. Fisher presents a detailed analysis of the culture and history of this people. The author clarifies and assesses the myriad problems inherent to a multinational society comprising more than one hundred non-Russian ethnic groups and discusses the resurgence of nationalist sentiment, the efforts of the Crimean Tatars and others to regain territorial rights lost during the Stalinist era, and the political impact these movements have on contemporary Soviet affairs.
This volume provides the most up-to-date analysis of the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars, their exile in Central Asia and their struggle to return to the Crimean homeland. It also traces the formation of this diaspora nation from Mongol times to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A theme which emerges through the work is the gradual construction of the Crimea as a national homeland by its indigenous Tatar population. It ends with a discussion of the post-Soviet repatriation of the Crimean Tatars to their Russified homeland and the social, emotional and identity problems involved.
Drawing on rich source material in several languages and three scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin), this book presents a broad picture of international relations in early modern Eastern Europe, at the crossing point of Genghisid, Islamic, Orthodox, and Latin traditions.