On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  On the third morning of my stay Max came charging into the farm. “Have you heard the news? Those damn Americans are here! Their NATO ship arrived in Feodosiya port last night! We are rallying as many boys as possible. We are not letting them ashore!” This bluster served as a thin veil for the real reason Max had blazed in: his wife had kicked him out, and he was hoping to sleep in Ira’s barn for a week. But as Ira and I soon discovered, the ship had certainly caused a stir in Feodosiya.

  After catching a ride into the city we stepped into the mayhem. Several hundred protestors waving flags and banners were heaving forward to the gates of the port. An elderly man leading them chanted slogans through a megaphone: “We know you Americans! You are not taking our land, now get out!” It was a simplistic assertion of a deeply complex conflict.

  Although the Crimea had been gifted to Ukraine in 1954, it had been a Russian stronghold ever since 1783, when Catherine II defeated the Ottomans. Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Ukraine gained independence, the vast majority of the Crimean population remained Russian, with few cultural links to Ukraine. Critical to the issue was that Russia had always had its Black Sea naval fleet based in the strategic port of Sevastopol. Russia had signed an agreement with Ukraine to allow the fleet to remain stationed there until 2017, with the assumption that the lease would be extended. Viktor Yushchenko, however, the pro-Western leader swept to power on the tide of the Orange Revolution, had promised to make it his mission to break with Russian imperialism and join NATO. Not only were Russians facing the prospect of the fleet being expelled, but Yushchenko had refused to make Russian the second official language for Ukraine. So while Yushchenko and his prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, enjoyed popular support in mainland Ukraine, particularly in the west of the country, in Crimea they were detested.

  After we battled our way through the crowd, the sounds of the protest faded as Ira and I took a walk along the esplanade in the shade of regal trees. We then turned into the old quarter of town. Competing with tsarist and Soviet-era architecture was a fourteenth-century stone church, built no doubt with the riches of the slave labor trade. Further on we pushed uphill through tiers of old stone homes with terra-cotta-tiled roofs until we reached a labyrinth of paths that took us to an old rampart. I climbed to the top, from where the protest and the ship had shrunken to mere details. In the hills around the old quarter, remnants of stone walls ran along the edges like vertebrae wearing through the earth. Out at sea the water was calm and glassy.

  It seemed that through the millennia some things here had not changed. Whether threats of invasion came from the Mongols or NATO, Crimea remained a flash point in the geopolitical landscape. To bear witness to this land by horse felt like a way of bridging the past and the present day. And my adventure in Crimea had only just begun.5

  It was upon returning with Ira from Feodosiya I learned of news that crushed hopes of carrying on to the mountains any time soon. Tigon had run off after being violently kicked by a visitor to Ira’s farm. I found the dog lying semiconscious under some bushes and spent the ensuing night holding him in my arms. In the morning a veterinarian concluded he had internal bleeding and swollen kidneys.

  It was two days before Tigon began to eat again, and three weeks before we could contemplate riding on. By that time the rich green of the steppe had waned to yellow, the days were unbearably hot, and mosquitoes were descending like fog at night. It was a seasonal transition that once would have signaled to nomads of the Crimea that it was time to escape the heat and migrate to the cool alpine meadows of the mountains.

  I had long put the word out that I was looking for a guide, but most shied away when they considered the route. There were no Tatars in the area with knowledge of the mountains anymore, and the tracks in the forested approaches to the high plains were overgrown. The only man willing to try was Seryoga, a Russian friend of Ira’s.

  “The only thing to keep in mind is that Seryoga likes to drink,” Ira warned.

  On the day before my departure, I watched with anticipation as my companion-to-be arrived driving a horse and cart. From a distance his heavyset frame, weathered face, and tawny, sun-bleached hair cut a handsome figure. As he pulled in with a series of whistles and commands, though, my eyes were drawn to his disfigured upper lip.

  “This is my trophy from an accident a few years ago, when I was even younger and even more stupid!” he said, pointing apologetically to his toothless upper mouth. “I was drunk and fell off my horse at a full gallop on the pavement!”

  We spent the afternoon shoeing. Seryoga was particularly impressed with Taskonir. The walls of the horse’s hooves were so hard that when he tried hammering nails in, they bent and had to be pulled out. “That’s what you call a no-problem horse,” Seryoga exclaimed. “You could have boiled a cup of tea in his hooves and then ridden another ten thousand kilometres without shoes!”

  We agreed that such naturally hardened hooves would have been a big advantage for the Mongols when they rode into Europe. Their European counterparts, riding on large, hay-fed horses, would have been hampered by the need to constantly maintain their horses’ hooves and shoes.

  The next day we began our journey to the mountains in a fashion I came to learn was true to Seryoga’s character. Overnight Seryoga had shared four or five bottles of vodka with Ira and had not slept. Nevertheless, we rode eight hours straight in the heat, which at its maximum reached 38°C. Seryoga was bareback on his bony old mare, Zera, and wore nothing but a pair of cavalry jodhpurs and a rope tied around his waist. His lean, muscled torso was red with sunburn, and he smoked tobacco rolled in pieces of newspaper, stubbing them out one by one on the soles of his cheap Chinese-made running shoes.

  Late in the day we reached the forested foothills of the Crimean mountains and rode on to Seryoga’s parents’ home in the town of Staryi Krym. “Give me two days here, Tim. I have some things to sort out, then I will be able to come with you,” Seryoga promised. Two days soon became three, and then this grew to a whole week. Although I had initially counted on Seryoga only as a guide to see me through the mountains—where mostly I hoped to learn about Tatar heritage—he became a story in himself.

  Seryoga saw the journey with me as an opportunity to quit his job as a forest ranger, and each morning he would walk an hour into town with the intention of handing in his letter of resignation. On the way, however, he would buy a couple of bottles of beer. With each bottle his mood would turn, and ultimately he never reached the forestry department offices.

  On the eighth day, when I was on the verge of leaving alone, he picked himself up and promised I had to wait just one more day. That morning he walked 20 km to the coast to shoe a dozen horses at a trail-riding farm—they were poorly trained animals that no farrier would touch. He stumbled home after dark, nursing terribly inflamed cuts and gouges across his wrists and palms, but reassured me, “Don’t worry, nothing could be harmful to my body! Tomorrow morning, we leave!”

  We were joined for dinner by two local prostitutes who were a mother-and-daughter combination—they had heard on the grapevine that Seryoga had earned some money. Later on Seryoga vanished with them to a local bar, and finally the following morning he turned up ready to go.

  “Let’s go, Tim!” he yelled triumphantly.

  The morning air was cool as we packed and finally rode out among a mob of mooing cattle on their way to pasture. A babushka wielding a stick hobbled after them. “I’ll moo you if you don’t move, you bunch of bitches!’” she called affectionately.

  When we left the village behind and entered the forest, I rode behind Seryoga, enjoying the sense of protection the dense canopy of oak, ash, and beech provided. The sun drifted down in slender cascades, fragrant leaves tumbled, and red deer flashed through the undergrowth. Every now and then a gust of wind creaked through the trees, reaching us as a soft breath of air.

  For centuries, the forests of the Crimean mountains had been home to one of the three distinct subgroups of Crimean Tata
rs, the Tatas. The Tatas were renowned for their European features, believed to be inherited from Goths who had inhabited the same area in Crimea for well over a thousand years. The Tatas differed from their Tatar brothers on the steppe, known as the Nogais, who were descendants of a long line of steppe nomads, the Kipchaks. The Nogais in turn differed from the Tatars on the coast, known as the Yaliboyu, who lived as traders and fishermen. The existence of these distinct identities went largely unacknowledged by Russians, including Seryoga and Ira, who believed that Tatars had only ever inhabited the steppe regions.

  I kept my thoughts to myself while Seryoga smoked in silence, gently tapping Zera’s rump. Whenever he spoke it was about his beloved mare. “Oh, Zera, my love!” he would say with a heavy lisp. “We don’t need anyone else, do we? Just you and me … you should see her pulling carts of timber up and down the mountain. She is one courageous lady.”

  By evening we were lost, and for the next three days we pushed on along winding trails laden with fallen trees, with little clue as to where we were. The slopes grew steep, giving way to gullies that twisted and turned, choked with ferns and cascading streams. At one point we stumbled into a small sunlit meadow where a stone memorial to Soviet partisan fighters stood masked in moss and grass.

  “It was in these forests that the Soviet partisan heroes lived during the Great Patriotic War,” Seryoga said reflectively. As I looked at him sitting on his sheepskin saddle blanket, wearing khaki jodhpurs, chaps, and a commando vest, it wasn’t hard to picture the partisans he spoke about. For almost three years they had famously fought against the Nazi occupation of Crimea until the Red Army retook the peninsula in 1944.

  From a word etched into the memorial stone, we were able to locate ourselves on the map. As I remounted to leave, Seryoga remained standing there. His expression had turned to one of bitterness. “But those traitor Crimean Tatars, Tim, they fought against us, the partisans. If you speak with the old-timers here, you will hear the truth of what they did. They slaughtered innocent women and children—anyone, in fact, who was supporting these brave partisans.”

  In my short time in Crimea, I had learned that this was a point of contention. Stalin had ordered the blanket deportation of Tatars to Central Asia and Siberia on the basis that they had collaborated with the Nazis. Word-of-mouth stories about violence meted out by Tatars abounded, yet modern-day evidence suggests that only a minority of Tatars ever sided with the Nazis. According to what I had read, a large percentage of partisans were in fact Tatar but changed their last names to Russian versions during the war to avoid suspicion. I wanted to point out to Seryoga that even those who did fight for the Nazis should perhaps be forgiven; after all, between the Bolshevik revolution and 1941 the Soviets had banned Islam and murdered, starved, or deported around 160,000 Tatars—about half the Tatar population at the time. Could anyone really blame some of the Tatars for choosing not to fight on behalf of the Soviets? I said nothing, however.

  Sensing my sympathy for the Crimean Tatars despite my silence, Seryoga continued. “I know one good Tatar, but mostly, Tim, they are bad people … It’s not for nothing they were deported by Stalin, you know.”

  It took a full week to reach the steep forested slopes just below the high alpine plateau. By this stage Seryoga had run out of cigarettes and we were down to the last scraps of food.

  Just as we were preparing to retreat down the mountain—we were once again lost—the sun speared through the trees uphill from us and we walked, blinking, onto the Karabi Jayla. The largest alpine plateau of the Crimean Mountains, the Karabi was a place so renowned for its pasture that nomads once traveled here from as far as Moldavia to fatten their sheep and cattle. Echoing the important role this high pasture played in nomad life of the region, jayla is a Crimean Tatar word with Turkic roots, similar to the Kazakh term jalau, meaning “summer place” or “summer pasture.”

  We rode on to where the plateau fell away in dramatic cliffs to the Black Sea about 1,000 m below. In camp I gazed out over broad grassy slopes, imagining huddles of yurts and the fragrant smell of burning dung. In the seventeenth century, European travelers Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan and Pierre Chevalier had painted a picture of a nomadic culture here that was essentially unchanged since the time of Genghis Khan. The Crimean Tatars lived in felt tents, were feared horseback archers, and, according to the Europeans’ observations, rode small unshod horses, described by both as “ugly”—although Chevalier qualified this by saying that “nature hath very well repaired their ugliness by their swiftness.”6

  Russian occupation of Crimea in the eighteenth century saw Tatars making migrations of a different kind—primarily across the sea for refuge in Turkey. Suspected as collaborators with the Turks, a hundred thousand fled during the annexation in 1783, and even more in the 1860s in the aftermath of the Crimean War. Many drowned during the risky sea crossings.

  Come the twentieth century, in 1944 any Tatars who had remained and survived Soviet persecution were shipped away by train across the vast ocean of steppe to Central Asia. According to some, the very last camels—descendants of those used by Crimean Tatar nomads on migrations—were herded out of Crimea in 1941 during the Nazi invasion.

  I was lifted from my thoughts by Seryoga. “If we have run out of cigarettes and vodka, and we have almost no food, there is nothing for me to do but sleep!” He crawled inside the tent, covered himself with a horse blanket, and collapsed.

  When he woke I offered him dried curd, peanuts, and dried meat that had been floating about in the bottom of my pack boxes for over a year. We picked some wild herbs for tea and went to bed immediately to mask our hunger.

  By the time we got moving the following day, Seryoga had sobered up. The heaviness that surrounded him had evaporated and he seemed to have lost years from his face. “If I don’t come all the way to Hungary,” he said, “which I would like to do, please promise me one thing: if you aren’t able to get the horses over the border, let me know and I’ll be sure to travel there and ride them back. Don’t think about giving that Taskonir to anyone else!”

  I agreed, and for the next couple of days we rode on in high spirits. I felt that we had become good friends. For a short time I even began to believe that he might come with me as far as Hungary, but his positive state of mind lasted only until we descended to the village of Aromatnoe for food. There Zera pulled up lame and Seryoga was back on the booze.

  The next morning he hugged me goodbye and began the long walk home.

  20

  THE RETURN OF THE CRIMEAN TATARS

  Crimea, Crimea, Mother Crimea,

  We did not forget our name,

  We did not, Mother Crimea,

  Exchange our isle for another’s.

  —Rustem Ali, Crimea (1992)1

  After leaving Aromatnoe I rode for nine hours over a pass before reaching the village of Perevalnoe. There, against Seryoga’s advice, I had prearranged to meet with a Crimean Tatar farmer named Edem.

  Given the animosity expressed to me about Tatars, I was all the more curious to meet Edem and learn firsthand about the Tatars’ return to the Crimea.2 Not so secretly, I was already partial to the cause of these once nomadic people, and I had spent much of the past few weeks pondering the underlying reasons for the hostile attitudes.

  The vilification of Tatars seemed cruel to me given the tragic circumstances of their exile. On May 18, 1944, without warning, around 191,000 Tatars had been escorted by soldiers from their homes and deported in livestock train cars to Siberia and Central Asia. Many died during the harrowing journey, their bodies, according to witnesses’ accounts, often hauled out on the order of guards and left in open graves by the tracks in the deserts of Central Asia. The survivors of those chilling events—for whom the trauma was still raw—had waited all their lives to return from exile.

  Ostensibly, the antipathy harbored by Russians stemmed from the Tatars’ alleged collaboration with Nazis.3 I’d decided, however, that attitudes probably reflected a deeper,
more enduring prejudice, hints of which had been explicit in Stalin’s strategy. When Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars he had labeled them not only traitors but descendants of Mongol invaders. Soviet authorities had even falsely reasoned that Crimean Tatars were Mongol in origin and therefore belonged in Central Asia. After deportation the category “Crimean Tatar” was removed from the official encyclopedia of the Soviet Union’s peoples, and evidence of their history in Crimea—including cemeteries, literature, and even place names—was erased. The homes, livestock, orchards, and grain stores they had left behind were seized, and unlike other deported peoples such as Kalmyks and Chechens who were allowed to return to their homes in 1957, Crimean Tatars were forbidden to return to Crimea until 1989.

  In associating Crimean Tatars with Mongolians, Stalin not only justified indefinite exile but preyed on Russian hostility toward Crimean Tatars that dates to the founding of their khanate in the fifteenth century—a hostility that, in all fairness, is worthy of consideration. Like a series of nomadic powers before them, the Crimean Tatars had been renowned for riding up through Russia’s southern borders to take captives for trading as slaves through the port of Kaffa (present-day Feodosiya). Slave trading was in fact at the core of the Crimean khanate’s economy, and in 1571 during one raid alone Tatars managed to burn Moscow to the ground and take up to 150,000 Slavs into captivity.

  Many historians point out that hostilities between nomads and Slavs have been overemphasized. Evidence suggests that nomads and Slavs often inter-married, engaged in mutually beneficial trade, and struck military alliances. Nonetheless, the historic propensity for Crimean Tatars to inflict terror on the Russian people is undeniable, and something I was perhaps guilty of not paying enough attention to in my broader evaluation of nomad society.