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Sites to See:
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Crimea has many historical and
beautiful sites. They are however, not for the faint at heart.
A number of places are not accessible by auto and require long and arduous hikes
to reach. Because of this they are also seen in their rustic and original
settings. Amazing!!
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 Cave
Towns of Crimea are wonderful places to visit. They are found on the mesas
of the inner ridge of the Crimean mountains. The towns were carved and
lived in because of incessant raids of nomadic tribes. The people
abandoned their valley dwellings and made for the mountains. The Cave
Towns provided natural defense because of natural obstacles, abrupt forbidding
cliffs and powerful fortification walls, sometimes up to 2 meters thick.
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 They
were build in the 6th-10th centuries by the multiethnic population which lived
in the area. In the 13th century Mongol Tatars invaded the peninsula and
settled it's administration in the town of Solkhat, a large trading
center. They gave it a new name - Crimea. In the 15th century the
Tatar administration moved westward and the name Crimea spread to include the
entire peninsula.
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 After
the annexation of Crimea by Russia 1783, the need for the inaccessible mountain plateaus
was abolished due to new agreements with the incoming
government. Those who still lived in the Cave Towns moved to nearby
cities. This photo shows a street at Chufut-Kale. The grooves are
etched into the stone after many years of horse and wagon travel.
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The
town of Chufut-Kale was a part of Bakhchisarai (a local town) and a place of
incarceration for aristrocratic prisoners of the  Tatars. Karaites were the
last to live in Chufut-Kale. They were the descendants of ancient Turkic
speaking Khazars. In the 8th century the Khazar Kaganate (leader) adopted
Judaism. Later they adopted Karaism, a doctrine which rejects all but the
Torah (first 5 books of the bible). The Tatars considered Karaites to be
Jews, hence the name "Jewish Fortress" (Chufut-Kale).
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This photo shows the mausoleum of
Djanyke-Hanym, the grand- daughter of Genghis Khan.
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 The
Cave Towns are great to explore and the views are fantastic. I also
visited Tepe-Kermen (fortress on the summit) which has about 300 man-made caves
arranged in tiers on no more than 1 hectare of base area. There is a
remnant of a Christian church cut as a cave into the rock and opened stone graves which
still contained some bone fragments. Human?
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