On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  In the last two centuries, of course, Russians had come to dominate Crimea and decisively reversed the trend of predatory steppe empires. Even so, the exploits of the Tatars had, somewhat understandably, left a deep scar on the Russian psyche. The very term Tatar could still rouse heated emotion, and the return of the Tatars had incited fears of a modern invasion. As I would discover in coming weeks this had created a tinderbox of ethnic tension and triggered a dangerous cycle of revenge.

  For the last hour of the ride to Perevalnoe I felt my way down the mountains in the dark, relieved when a chorus of snarling dogs signaled my arrival at Edem’s farm. The outline of men conversing in a Turkic tongue grew out of the darkness. Then a floodlight flicked on and I was met with a steel-gripped handshake.

  “I’m Edem. Now c’mon, what are you sitting there for? It’s time to rest and feed your horses!” the man said in flawless Russian.

  In a rusty old worker’s cabin I sat sipping tea with Edem and six of his employees who had recently migrated from Uzbekistan. Under dim light cast by a bulb shrouded in a haze of mosquitoes, the men ranged from a sun-blackened teenager with Russian features to a bandy-legged elder with deep-set eyes and a large Turkic nose, whose dark, freckled face had been sculpted far more by the harsh Central Asian sun than it could ever be now by the coastal climate of Crimea.

  Edem himself was thickly built and balding with blue eyes, a narrow pinched nose, and a fine, pale mustache—classic features of his Tata origins. He sat wearing leather sandals and an immaculate white shirt unbuttoned to the belly, exhibiting both the air of an aristocrat and the machismo of a worker. He had been in Crimea for twenty-five years and, like many of his generation born in exile, had moved to Crimea to pave the way for his mother, who had been deported as a child.

  We had barely finished the tea when there came the roar of a truck grinding up the driveway. I went out and watched it come to a halt next to a half-constructed building before a bevy of women climbed down from the back laden with mops and brushes. The workers unloaded a bed, dresser, mirror, and mattress, while the driver personally carried a pot of hot plov (pilaf) to Edem.

  Only after Edem and I had finished eating did I understand the goings-on. “Tim, you can move your things in now. I have been building this hotel for two years … and I want you to be the first guest!” Edem said.

  In the light of morning I was able to get a better picture of where I had landed. Edem’s hotel and farmyards were built into the slope above the village of Perevalnoe. Below, on the valley floor, the main road to the resort city of Yalta snaked its way toward the coast. Somewhere down there Edem had apparently built himself a two-story family mansion. In the other direction mountain slopes angled up in ramps of rock and craggy trees to alpine pastures. The teenager from the night before was high above, whistling and calling as he pushed a herd of sheep into cooler, thinner air.

  After breakfast, when the yards were empty and the rising sun had taken the crisp edge off the morning, Edem and I sat in the shade with a cup of tea. To become this established as a Tatar in Crimea was a remarkable achievement requiring strong conviction—a fact not lost on Edem.

  “For Tatars who are returning now, life is hard, but it is a fairy tale compared to what it was like for us earlier,” he said, casting his gaze up to the high slopes. Edem had first tried to migrate in 1981—when it was still illegal for Tatars to live and work in Crimea. This discriminatory law had been enforced by denying Tatars a propiska, a residence permit, without which registration was not possible and employment prohibited.

  “At first when I arrived from Uzbekistan in Semfiropol,” the modern capital of Crimea, “I slept at the train station while I looked for a job. I was a communications expert and was offered work in the coastal city of Sudak. When my employer discovered I was a Tatar the police pursued me and I was beaten up and arrested. Eventually I managed to escape to the Ukraine,” Edem explained.

  Brutalization was a common experience of Tatars in those times and combined with the prospect of exile and imprisonment to create an atmosphere of desperation. Some returning Tatars had resorted to extreme measures to assert their right to live in Crimea, including acts of self-immolation. The most notorious case had occurred three years before Edem’s arrival in 1978, when a Tatar named Musa Mahmut had doused himself in gasoline and lit a match as officers arrived to arrest him. He later died in the hospital and had come to be seen as a martyr for Tatars making the bold decision to migrate to Crimea. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s many Tatars modeled their strategy on Mahmut’s, keeping gasoline and matches at hand as a means to prevent eviction from lands and homes they were reoccupying. This proved effective—but it also drew great contempt from Russians.

  Edem had been more fortunate than many others. “After one year in Ukraine I had gathered enough money to buy a car and drove back to Crimea. I was lucky to avoid authorities—with my blue eyes and fair hair, few people suspected me. Eventually I made friends with a city councilor in Kerch. He was one of the few Russians I have ever met who believed discrimination against Tatars was wrong, and he agreed to help me get a propiska. I remember when the lady at the registration desk noticed that I was a Tatar. She said, ‘We can’t register him!’ but my friend yelled at her, ‘Just do it!’”

  This kind gesture had not been without consequences. Soon after Edem received the propiska, he was arrested and the Russian councilor was imprisoned. Nevertheless, Edem managed to escape following these events, and from that point on managed to find refuge in the Crimean mountains. Living up on the high plains I had ridden through, he had avoided the authorities for the better part of a decade, coming down “once in 1985 to get married to a Tatar girl.” Only in 1989 was he given legal status, and he immediately began arranging for his mother and other relatives to migrate.

  Nowadays, of course, Tatars had the right to return and were technically entitled to housing and land as compensation. Edem lamented, however, that Russian attitudes had not changed. In fact, he felt they might be growing worse. “These people who live in the homes that our fathers built, who eat the food of the trees that our fathers planted, drink water from the wells that were dug by our forefathers, of course they are not all that happy to see us again because it reminds them of what was done to us.”

  Edem was accustomed to insults from Russians and internalized most of his frustration. What he found most injurious these days was that his elderly mother, who had been the only survivor among her siblings during deportation, had to date been denied access to the home she had grown up in. “All she wants is to drink from the well that her grandfather dug himself, but the Russian occupants won’t let her past the front gate.”

  I spent a week under Edem’s wing, during which time I learned that while the struggle for early arrivals such as Edem was largely over, for many of those who had come later the battle had only begun. On the grassy flats by the Yalta road I visited one of hundreds of land claim sites established across Crimea. For four months Tatars had been living in an army mess tent, preparing to take the land by force. Surrounding the tent were hundreds of stacks of yellow bricks spread out over a large area. Each stack represented an individual family claim. The people here were waiting for a signal from Tatar leaders, at which point, according to the plan, building would begin at all sites across Crimea, and the numbers would be too vast for the authorities to contain. Inside the tent I spoke with aggrieved Tatars who complained that although the Ukrainian government had promised to provide homes, the program of resettlement had collapsed back in 1996, and of the 270,000 returned Tatars, more than half still had no land or housing of their own.

  I had also been told the Russian side of the story: that the Tatars who were making claims already owned homes elsewhere, and after taking this coveted land they would build a house and flip it for profit. Edem had admitted that some of these Tatars were in fact abusing the system.

  Whatever the truth, though, despite efforts by the Soviet regime to erase the identity o
f Crimean Tatars, it was clear that the Tatars’ passion for their homeland remained stubbornly alive. Tatars such as Edem had even been prepared to risk life and limb to return. Perhaps it was this dedication that troubled Russians most, because it challenged the premise they had been sold that these people were not deeply connected to the Crimea, that they belonged somewhere in the savage East. The status quo reminded me of a phrase in Tolstoy’s short novel Hadj Murat: “He [Tsar Nicholas] had done much harm to the Poles and to explain this it was necessary to believe that all Poles were scoundrels. Nicholas considered that to be so and hated the Poles in proportion to the harm he had done them.”

  Before leaving Edem’s, I spent one day in the Crimean capital, Semfiropol, where I met with the deputy minister of culture of Crimea, Ismet Zaatov. Ismet put me in contact with leaders of the mejlis, the independent Tatar government, which in turn offered me the support of the Tatar community wherever I might need it. The most important connection he arranged was with the director of Tatar TV, Islyam Kishveye.

  In an office at the back of the Tatar TV studio in Semfiropol—which Islyam later claimed was bugged by Russian and Ukrainian secret services—Islyam played me a video he had recently recorded in the old Crimean capital, Bakchisaray. It was there, he said, that the front-line battle was now being fought by Tatars.

  Islyam skipped forward to footage of a wall of burly Russian men steaming toward a group of Tatar protestors. As they collided, the crowd exploded in fistfights. Some men were knocked to the ground and kicked, while others were chased away and beaten. Islyam had been attacked, too, and as his camera jerked from side to side there were flashes of bloodied faces and sounds of hysterical, wailing women.

  At one point he paused the video on the image of a man with a shaven scalp in a gray suit. He had just moved in to kick a Tatar man who lay on the asphalt. “This is Medvedev,” Islyam said. “He is the director of the market where this whole battle is taking place. He has hired these thugs that you can see now.”

  I didn’t yet understand the reasons for the conflict I had seen, but I couldn’t wait to get back to my horses and on to Bakchisaray.

  From Edem’s farm I rode for three days along mountain and forest trails. It was the peak of summer, my third on the steppe, and a part of me was mentally weary and comforted by the thought it would be my last in the saddle. The mosquitoes stressed the horses, and the heat increased the risk of saddle sores. Additionally, I was beginning to feel claustrophobic in Crimea. In wider spaces, people bearing historical grudges with each other were separated by the muting qualities of distance. Here, trapped on such a small, sought-after chunk of land, cultures, layers of competing histories, and even environments were compressed, and I found myself bandied from one to another. There was no let-up, and ahead of me, things were only about to get more intense.

  In the evening of my third day out from Edem’s farm a Russian horseman led me as far as the edge of the forest, where oaks gave way to an old Tatar walnut orchard. Pressing on, I took the opportunity to enjoy a passing moment of aloneness. I slowed the horses to a walk, soaking in the way their hooves shifted quietly along a track of powdery white clay. I leaned back in the saddle, watching the outstretched branches of the walnut trees and their broad leaves glide over us. Like Tatar elders who had survived deportation and returned, these elegant trees had outlived the Soviet years and were obstinately rooted in Crimean soil.

  Beyond the orchard we emerged from the shade and descended into the head of a gorge-like valley. Ears pricked and tongue out, Tigon craned his neck to look at the high slopes that now blocked much of the sky. Rising above were limestone bluffs running like ramparts along both our sides. The rock high up to our left was honeycombed with caves—the remnants of a seventh-century Byzantine stronghold that was taken over by the Tatars in the fourteenth century. The farther on we rode, the deeper we sank into this curious landform, and as the gorge narrowed we began to pass homes, stables, and even an Orthodox monastery carved out of the rock at the base of the bluffs.

  Where the gorge seemed to have run its course, the cliffs converged and the track shrank to a narrow cobbled alleyway between old stone houses. Then, unexpectedly, it hooked sharply to the left, and a valley opened up, filled from wall to wall with a riot of minarets and red ceramic-tiled roofs. Right in front of us they mingled majestically with the bustle of cars and pedestrians in the dusty summer evening.

  Bakchisaray was formerly the capital of the Crimean khanate and once an important crossroad of the Silk Road, where traders met from across the Black Sea, the steppes of Central Asia, Russia, and eastern Europe. In its heyday during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the town had boasted eighteen mosques and several important madrasas. Nowadays, it is the cultural center for returning Tatars and, as I would learn, a bottleneck of tourism, religion, and conflict. I would spend more than a week in Bakchisaray, but within the first twenty-four hours I had been introduced to the main settings and protagonists that came to dominate my stay.

  Nestled among the cobbled streets of the old part of town lay the khan’s palace. Known in Tatar as the hanssaray, it had been the seat of power for generations of Crimean khans dating back to the sixteenth century. On the one hand, the palace represented the sophistication of the Crimean Tatar khanate, which had once wielded much power, but on the other, now that it was a museum and part of a heritage park with a Russian director, it symbolized the passing of the Tatars’ way of life into the archives of history and its once proud empire into subservience to Russia.

  Out of sight of tourists at the other end of town—but still little more than a kilometre from the palace—lay the market. Here an ugly stand-off between Tatars and Russians was under way in which the same clashes of history documented at the palace were still being played out.

  Lying between these two places, and caught in the crossfire, were my host, Volodya—impoverished, fiery, half Tatar, half Russian—and a Ukrainian girl named Anya, with whom I fell in love.

  Ismet had arranged for Volodya to look after me in Bakchisaray, and so I carried on down the steep cobbled street into the old town, where he led me through the grand wooden gates of the khan’s palace. Inside, I rode Taskonir through an archway into the courtyard, where the last fragments of the evening sun cast golden light from over the cliffs above. As Tigon took the opportunity to bathe in a fountain, I lifted my gaze to the high wall of the palace and let my eyes wander down. Towering minarets inscribed in Arabic cast lean shadows across a courtyard of rose gardens, fountains, lawns, and shady trees. Adjoining the outer wall was the two-story palace itself, adorned with arches, long verandahs, and walls decorated with Islamic murals. In these luxurious headquarters the Crimean khans—blood descendants of Genghis Khan—had ruled one of the most powerful empires of eastern Europe. There was without question a sense of authenticity about the palace that transcended time and invited thoughts about what might have once been. At a closer look, though, tourist information signs nailed onto walls and museum-style displays were a reminder of the modern reality.

  In 1736 Bakchisaray had been burned to the ground by the Russians, and when Catherine II’s army completed the conquest of the peninsula in 1783, the last khan, Sahin Giray, took refuge in Turkey, where he was eventually executed. The palace had long become a defunct relic paraded by its captors as accommodation for important guests, including Catherine II herself. Two centuries on it was a major tourist attraction to which thousands of Russian tourists flocked each summer to marvel at the lair of their historic foe.

  It was while the guards test-rode my horses that I noticed Anya. She stood by a rose garden in the back corner of the courtyard, busy brushing strokes onto canvas, her easel set up between us. Just from a glimpse of her bare, slender arms and golden hair I recognized her as a girl who had approached me as I had ridden down into the town. In fact, the image of her was still firmly entrenched in my mind: carrying an easel and a bag of paintbrushes, her blue eyes lit up by the low-angling sun, she ha
d walked up to me and asked about my horses.

  As I approached now she looked my way and put her brush down.

  “About time you noticed me! You just walked into my painting!” she said, as we both struggled in vain to hold back smiles.

  Anya was a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian art student from Kiev. She had been given special permission to stay in the palace after hours to paint. I offered her a ride on Taskonir and for the next half hour nervously led her around the courtyard. Before I left, Anya and I agreed to meet in the city in the coming days.

  At Volodya’s house that night a rabbit was slaughtered in my honor, and we celebrated with cheap Russian vodka. My spirits were high: I had fallen for Anya, and in light of the last few hard days of riding, the rabbit was a veritable banquet.

  Come morning, my feelings for Anya hadn’t changed, but the reality around me was a lot more sobering. Volodya had been born in exile and now lived in a hovel he had built out of mud, reeds, scrap wood, glass bottles, and a few token bricks. Inside, there was just the one room with an old Russian divan that doubled as a bed for him, his wife, and their two children.

  Volodya’s mother, a Tatar, had been born in a house in the center of Bakchisaray, but on return from exile Volodya had been forced to settle in what had became known as the “seventh micro-region”—a self-proclaimed Tatar enclave (known in Russian as a samozakhvat) on the barren steppe above the gorge. To support his family, Volodya worked shifts at a tile factory in town, and his wife, who was Russian, made cushions stuffed with juniper shavings for tourists, receiving thirty kopeks for each. Their cross-cultural relationship did not make life any easier. “It’s hard to hear when Tatar children tell my kids things like, ‘We will butcher you. All Russians should be loaded up in cattle wagons and sent out, just as they did to us,’” Volodya’s wife said. Compounding the difficult situation, as I would learn, was Volodya’s addiction to cigarettes and alcohol.