by Tim Cope
I pretended not to understand the hint, scribbled down the date, and carried on into immigration, where the veterinary officers were waiting. They were impressed with the thoroughness of my paperwork and told me, laughing, that it was the first time, to their knowledge, that anyone had completed all the required tests.
The last obstacle before boarding the ferry for Crimea was customs. Just as I pulled into the inspection bay, Ogonyok disgorged a gigantic turd. The junior officers laughed but their superior did not see the humor. “You are not leaving Russia until you clean that crap up!” he yelled.
“Okay, okay. But I’m not going to shift it with my bare hands. You will have to find me a shovel,” I replied, disembarking from the saddle.
While he sent some officers off in search of a shovel, most of the customs people on duty came out to look at the spectacle. Meanwhile, I went inside to be processed and breezed through the screening post to have my passport stamped. Back outside, nobody had found a shovel, and the boat was due to leave. Within minutes I was casting off into the Kerch Strait leaving behind the cluster of officials still gathered around Ogonyok’s parting present.
Crimea
19
WHERE TWO WORLDS MEET
A shadow swooped from the solitary cloud in the sky, and the whole sleepy mountain in front of us dimmed to olive green. As the salty breeze gusted, my sweat cooled and Ogonyok’s wild ginger mane flew in all directions.
From the saddle I watched Tigon’s tail and ears cut through the tall swaying grass like dorsal fins. He’d been on long-ranging missions all day, drifting back at times to check in, looking up at me with his tongue lolling about and his amber eyes alight. It wasn’t long before he reached the crest of the hill and stopped, ears bent forward, the sleek shaft of his snout fishing for scents on the breeze.
As the cloud shadow peeled back toward us I, too, was soon surveying the view. From a foreground of waist-high grass, red poppies, and white chamomile, the steppe dropped away in a sea of green, gleaming with the same vitality as my horses’ spring coats. Directly below, a narrow sandy isthmus cut a straight line to the west between the sea and a series of pinkish salt lakes. Immediately to our north, smooth, rounded peaks reached down to the lakes and surrendered to a plain beyond them.
By the time we’d descended to the beach, the wind had eased and the sun was losing heat and gaining color. I stepped stiffly down and walked along the ridge atop the isthmus. A pyramid-shaped hill was casting a flawless reflection in the lake, and as I shifted my gaze to the sea, a dark shadow shattered its glassy veneer. A school of dolphins surfaced, their shiny torsos rising and dipping effortlessly as they cruised along the shore.
By nightfall banks of dark cloud hung heavily over the sea. I pegged the horses out and watched as they buried their heads in the grass, feeding like a pack of hungry lions. Over dinner the western sky faded from peach to deep blue, then black. Tigon and I lay on my canvas duffle bag. I meant to write in my diary and study some Russian, but I woke at midnight with rain falling on my face. I’d managed to pen one line: We’re in horse heaven.
Two weeks earlier, I had sailed away from the cultivated lands of Krasnodar Krai in Russia and landed in the port city of Kerch. In making the half-hour crossing of the Kerch Strait, we had reached Crimea—a peninsula of historic renown that bulges southward via a bottleneck from the Ukrainian mainland into the Black Sea, forming a distinctive shape resembling a wide-bottomed vase. The dry steppe interior of Crimea, cut off from the coast in the southwest by a band of forested mountains, had long been a favored home for nomads.
Since my arrival I’d been looking forward to this moment when our little family could once again range free on unplowed grassland. Getting here had not been elegant. For three days from Kerch I had tracked along the southeast coast joined by a Ukrainian man, Giorgi. On the first day we’d been interrogated by the border patrol, Giorgi’s stallion had bucked him off, and finally we had been pursued by a runaway foal; when the foal’s owner tracked us down he accused Giorgi of stealing it.
On the second day we came to a dead end at a fenced-off military zone. We spent the evening camped at a Ukrainian outpost where an officer made us dinner and explained that it was from this base a rocket had accidentally been fired in October 2001 and infamously blown up an air-liner en route from Tel Aviv to Russia. On the third day both Giorgi and Buran were limping and turned for home.
Now, finally alone, I sank into thoughts about the Crimean land around me—the same setting that in 1223 must have induced in the battle-weary Mongol army a feeling of jubilation. During Subodei and Jebe’s remarkable campaign through Central Asia and the Caucasus that culminated with defeat of Russia, they and their men had spent time in Crimea, where they had no doubt taken the opportunity to rest and fatten their horses. Somewhere in these lush grasslands the night would have been filled with revelry and the sounds of thousands of weary horses being set free to graze. As nomads whose moods, like mine, fluctuated with those of their horses, the sheer abundance of grass must have left a deep impression, and one can only imagine the tales they brought home to the harsher climes of Central Asia.
There was something more significant than pasture that had attracted the Mongols to Crimea, though, and which made this peninsula so unique. As nomads had known for millennia, the true wealth of Crimea lay in the strategic port cities on its coast where the Eurasian steppe greets the Black Sea. For the largely landlocked societies of the steppe, the coast provided unique access to trade, communication, and plunder.
Long before the arrival of Subodei and Jebe, a historical trend had been established whereby nomads of Crimea’s steppe interior both coexisted and clashed with the sedentary societies of the coast. Kerch had even been built on the ruins of the ancient city of Panticapaeum, the sixth-century BCE capital of a kingdom known as Bosphoria, which itself had been a fusion of Scythian nomads and Greek traders.1
The history of Crimea subsequently read like an almanac of both nomadic and European empires. The steppe interior had been ruled by Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Khazars, and Kipchaks, and the coast had passed through the hands of Romans, Bulgars, Goths, Byzantine Greeks, Venetians, and finally Genoese. The appearance of the Mongols in Crimea in 1223 was fleeting, but when the Mongols returned on their full-fledged conquest of Russia, Crimea would become a pivotal outpost of the Mongol Empire for well over a century.
In the morning I woke to a sky flooded with stormy gray. Rain eased down, gently brushing the poppies and chamomile flowers on its way to earth. I packed unrushed, marveling at how the petals righted themselves with a shudder after every drop. When the sun broke through we rode—or, rather, waded—on.
Visions of Mongols and Scythian horsemen had sunk in overnight, and without signs of the modern world, I savored the feeling that I had become part of a continuum of nomad history. We had only traveled a very short way, however, before the hulking shape of Soviet barns broke the spell.
Since the fracturing of the Mongol Empire, Crimea had weathered many winds of change. A Tatar of Mongol descent, Hajji Girei, had founded the Crimean Khanate on the steppe in the fifteenth century, and the Ottoman Turks had replaced the Genoese as rulers of the coast.2 In the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire expelled the Ottomans and forced the Tatars to submit to their rule. In the nineteenth century, Crimea was the stage for another struggle when the Russians fought a bitter war with the British and French. Next to arrive were the Nazis, subjecting the earth to the tread of angry tanks and laying siege to Sevastopol. When Crimea was reclaimed by the Soviets, the Tatars were accused as traitors and deported by Stalin en masse to Central Asia and Siberia. In 1954 Crimea was gifted to the Soviet state of Ukraine, finally emerging in 1990 as a semi-autonomous republic of an independent and democratic Ukraine.
Only fifteen years had passed since the collapse of the Soviet empire, but already the barns in front of us lay like lonely shipwrecks, overgrown with chest-high weeds and roofs folding in. The empty corr
als that had once sheltered hundreds of sheep and cattle were filled with nothing but breeze. Like so many empires before them, the Soviets had come and gone.
No sooner had the barn been eclipsed by the horizon than the figure of a horseman came charging toward us across the grassy plain. His whip flew in a frenzy on the left rump, then over his shoulder to the right, in Central Asian style. It was moments before his short black stallion stood in front of me, foaming at the bit, sweat-drenched chest convulsing.
Sitting straight-backed in his tattered saddle, this rider had all the confidence and authority of a custodian of this land. “Where are you going?”
I looked into his sun-blackened face but could barely make out his eyes, hidden in the shadow of a shabby baseball cap. As I began to answer he softened, and we rode on together for some time.
Rinat was born in Tashkent and had moved here in 1990, but soon after his arrival he had been imprisoned. He had been released three years ago. It was sad to see his proud sense of authority wither away as he recounted his story.
“There are three Russian men in my village who attacked me because I am Tatar. Finally they beat me so badly I decided to knife one of them. I wanted to get him in the butt but got him in the stomach.” He looked away and spat. “It doesn’t bother me now. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I have my cows and my sheep—I’m happy. Regarding those Russians—well, God sees everything from above.”
Rinat was the first Crimean Tatar I’d ever met, and, as it turned out, the only one I ever saw on horseback. The Crimean Tatars had only been allowed to return from exile in Central Asia beginning in 1989, just before the end of the Soviet era. What I would learn in time was that Rinat’s story reflected a broader conflict between local Russians and returning Tatars that belied the calm of this peaceful landscape. It was a conflict that echoed the pattern of Crimea’s complex history as a place of hostility and cooperation between nomads and sedentary society—a history that would ultimately dominate my stay in Crimea.
Before Rinat rode away he pointed to the distant radio towers of a Russian military exclusion zone. “That’s where my mother was born. Her village was there. God willing, I will see my true homeland again, but I doubt that will happen. The Russians won’t let me.”
That evening, a flotilla of Soviet apartment blocks on the horizon signaled the historic port of Feodosiya—a city with intriguing links to the curbing of the Mongol expansion and the eventual decline of the Mongol Empire.
Formerly known as Kaffa, the city had been an important slave trading post, through which the Genoese exported Slavic and Kipchak prisoners to the slave army of the Egyptian sultan. The Mongols benefited from this trade by demanding tribute from the Genoese, but what the Mongols could not have foreseen was that these Kipchak slaves—who were nomads with a wealth of experience in the tactics of Mongol warfare—would rise to become a powerful military caste in Egypt known as the Mamluks. In time the Mamluks would inflict the first serious defeats on the Mongol army, permanently halting Mongol advances into the Middle East and tarnishing their image of invincibility.3
The rise of the Mamluks is not the only historical event for which Kaffa became an unlikely catalyst. Although Mongol authorities had allowed the lucrative slave trading to continue during their reign, on occasion they had also sacked Kaffa and other Genoese cities in an attempt to shut it down. In 1345 a Mongol army had been preparing for one such attack when the plague reached the Golden Horde capital, Sarai, on the lower Volga. The plague decimated the Mongol armies and forced them to withdraw. According to one report, Yanibeg, the khan of the Golden Horde, ordered the dead bodies of the soldiers to be catapulted over the high fortress walls surrounding Kaffa. This tactic is unlikely to have succeeded in transmitting the plague, but it is believed the disease nevertheless spread from the Mongol camp into the city, and then via ships from Kaffa to Constantinople and on to Africa and Europe. Not only did the plague wipe out at least a third of Europeans, more than half of China’s population, and twelve million Africans, but some experts, including anthropologist Jack Weatherford, argue that it contributed to the disintegration of the Mongol Empire.
By the time the plague hit in the fourteenth century, however, it must be acknowledged that the Mongol Empire had already begun to break down. Genghis Khan had established a remarkably robust system of rule and conquer that would outlive him by generations, but his heirs were racked by division. During the latter half of the thirteenth century, the four khanates of the Mongol Empire—the Golden Horde, the Chaghatai khanate, the Ilkhanate, and the Yuan dynasty—were well on the path to being independent states. In the 1260s, in fact, the Ilkhanate fought a war with the Golden Horde, and in the east, Khubilai battled with his brother Arikboke for succession to the throne of the grand khan.4
Nonetheless, even if the plague wasn’t responsible for the fall of the Mongol Empire, then it certainly accelerated its demise. Ever since Genghis Khan proclaimed himself “the ruler of all those who live in felt tents,” the empire had relied on an efficient network of trade and communication routes. This not only provided military advantage but also helped prevent vassal states from revolting by keeping the people happy with stability and thriving economies. Just as this complex network could carry a messenger or Silk Road trader from Mongolia to Europe without affray, it equally aided the passage of the plague. Just like a global pandemic would do today, the plague paralyzed the flow of trade, isolating cities and countries, and eventually entire continents. Mongolian aristocracies found themselves with depleted militaries, unable to procure the same kind of taxes that had funded the empire, and more outnumbered by subjects than ever before.
By the end of the fourteenth century, Mongolians in Asia had returned to a nomadic lifestyle in their homeland or were absorbed or killed by the rebelling Chinese. In Persia, the last Mongol successors to the Ilkhanate had vanished. The Golden Horde would hold together for much longer than elsewhere, but ultimately Mongols here became part of fractious Turkic nations, such as the Crimean khanate, which eventually fell to Ottoman and Russian rule.
Compared to laying siege to a city of slave traders, my designs on Feodosiya were more routine. The main obstacle of my journey through Crimea was a set of rugged, densely forested mountains, which I would have to traverse as far as the old Tatar capital, Bakchisaray. To do this I would need someone to guide me. I also required a farrier—my horses had gone barefoot for the last eighteen months, but with the rocky terrain of the mountains, they needed to be shod. I’d been given the name of a Russian lady named Ira who ran a horse farm called Argamak near Feodosiya. She had promised not only to help with the challenges of the mountains but also to show me around the city.
I found Ira’s sprawl of stables and yards in the open steppe about 20 km shy of Feodosiya. Locating Ira proved another matter. A wafer-thin woman with stringy, meatless arms, and a look of grit in her eyes stepped from a stable, and when I told her whom I was looking for, she said, “You must be Tim! Wait here.”
Half an hour passed before the woman appeared again and led me to a muddy yard strewn with horse tack, empty vodka bottles, and half-eaten cucumbers. It was then I noticed a leg dangling out of a car door. I followed it up to a mop of curly blond hair slumped forward on the steering wheel.
Just then a burly man with balding white hair and an unruly beard approached. “Ira! You have a guest!” he shouted. The man swayed on his feet, hands fumbling with the buttons of his shirt, which was open down to the last sunburned rib. His name was Max, he explained, and it was Ira’s birthday.
The foot dangling from the car wiggled. Then the car door swung violently open and the woman who had been collapsed against the steering wheel staggered into life. “It’s very … very nice to meet you,” she slurred.
Ira may have been blind drunk, but after steadying herself against me she charged past and ran her hands up and down the legs of my horses.
“Yep, sure thing, we will shoe them,” she said, sitting down in the dust.<
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My stay with Ira was meant to be brief, but as had happened so many times before on my journey, I became engrossed by the goings-on of the place, and a sequence of events—namely, a misfortunate mishap with Tigon—saw me delayed for much longer.
The first evening was a precursor of how I would spend most of my time with Ira and her friend Max. I’d had my first shot of vodka even before my backpack and chaps were off, and we fell into a conversation that orbited around all things horse.
Ira had a background in equestrian sport and had moved out onto the steppe in the 1990s to pursue her dream of running a stud farm. Max, on the other hand, was a grazier whose father was a descendant of Bashkirian nomads in Siberia; he had set up a farm on neighboring land. By virtue of their divergent approaches to life on the steppe, they were of very different schools of thought when it came to horsemanship—Ira kept her horses in stables, while Max believed in the virtues of a fence-free life. It was a point of endless baiting.
“Fancy cooping her horses up like this in this glorious steppe!” Max told.
“Well, with thieves like you around, what choice do I have?” Ira tossed back.
Despite their differences—and their passion for horses, which to me embodied the spirit of nomads—they were united on one front: neither of them was fond of my interest in traditional steppe cultures, particularly when it came to Crimean Tatars.
Ira said to me, “Tim, Crimean Tatars are not to be trusted. They are not like you and me. The only reason they are coming back to Crimea is to steal our land and make lots of money. I watched a Tatar on horseback once—he was so cruel to the horse, no style at all. Never again will I invite a Tatar onto my property!” Over the coming days—and, as it turned out, weeks—I learned to avoid the subject.