Authors: Neal Ascherson
Mount Mithridates looks down on Kerch, and out over the misty horizon of the Sea of Azov - known to Greeks and Romans as the 'Maeotian Marsh'. From a crumbling village, Kerch has become a city of dignified yellow-and-white imperial buildings, quiet boulevards, suburbs of little white houses with green board fences. Everything in Kerch lies open to the view of anybody standing on Mount Mithridates. In the naval base, the day I was there, a few small frigates flying the Russian flag were alongside, and a blue welder's spark glittered in the dry-dock. There were old tiled roofs, and the green dome of an Orthodox cathedral.
For most of the last fifty years, Kerch has been closed to foreigners. The naval base, used by Soviet coastal submarines, was sensitive and too visible from the hill, although for the last decade of the Soviet Union each parked car and each rifle carried by a shore patrol has been recorded by the cameras of American satellites. But when Ukraine became independent in
1992,
naval ports in Crimea like Balaklava and Kerch simply ceased to bother about who entered the town or strolled along the waterfront. Only Sevastopol, headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet and still effectively under Russian control, kept up its check-points across the highways leading into town.
Kerch is another 'Hero City', but its war memorials are discreet compared to those of Novorossisk, although terrible things happened here. The Germans - Ohlendorf's
Einsatzgruppe D
again -murdered the entire Jewish population of the town and anyone with a remote connection to the Soviet bureaucracy. Partisan resistance continued all through the three years of Nazi occupation, carried on by guerrilla soldiers hiding in a labyrinth of tunnels under Mount Mithridates. In
1944,
Kerch was shelled and bombed to ruins when the Red Army launched an assault landing across the Straits to begin the recapture of Crimea.
Little of this suffering shows now, except for a partisan memorial — obelisk and eternal flame - on the mountain summit. Kerch, resigned to the idea that its position at the eastern tip of Crimea has always made it a target for bombardment and piracy, takes an ironic, southern view of politics. Most of the inhabitants I met were Russians; they were satirical about their sudden Ukrainian citizenship, but equally indifferent to the 'Crimea for Russia' campaign banging its drum far away at the provincial capital of Simferopol.
When I was there, the main exhibition in the Kerch museum was entitled 'Presents for Brezhnev'. This touring show of some of the gifts laid at the feet of Leonid Ilyich by the toadies of the world catered in a distinctly un-Russian way to visitors assumed to have taste and humour. From the man-sized china vases with his portrait to the black boxes of lacquered Feduskino papier-mache showing Brezhnev's war deeds in the manner of Andrei Rublov, from the statuary groups of Leonid Ilyich solving problems for wondering foremen and scientists to the Vietnamese portrait with real medals and a suit of real cloth glued to the canvas, to the rugs from Central Asia embroidered with disgusting, servile inscriptions, the six-foot pencils from the Karl Liebknecht Pencil Factory, the models of machinery with love from the working people of Krasnodar... not one single object was desirable. Everything was hideous. We all agreed — the Russian, the Armenian, the Cossack and the 'British guest' — that even if we were begged to take away anything we fancied, we would take nothing. We left the museum with a new respect for ourselves.
Panticapaeum, capital of the Bosporan Kingdom, stood on the broad, flat summit of Mount Mithridates. Half-excavated ruins and foundations still cover the plateau, and most of the old houses at the top of Kerch are made of square stones looted from Hellenistic buildings. I clambered over a temple of Aphrodite and sat on the hot stone paving of the Palace of the Basileus. A green praying-mantis made its way along the footings of a wall, and a fritillary sunned itself on the palace threshold. Lara, poking about in the grass, found the handle and rim of a Scythian cooking pot.
To reach the hill-top from the town, you climb a marble staircase, a hundred steps whose landings are decorated with griffins. Once this led up to a fake temple, the Theseum', which held the main Kerch museum with all the finds from the excavations which had not been taken off for permanent exhibition in St Petersburg. Now there is nothing at the top of the stairs but thin air. During the Crimean War, the museum was broken open and looted by Allied troops, some of them British, and the contents — statuary, glass and pottery — were never seen again. When shaken scholars protested after the war, it was pointed out that Mrs Cattley, the British consul's wife, had bought a quantity of Greek jewellery, coins and architectural fragments from local dealers during her stay, and that when war broke out she had shipped her collection back to London and presented it to the British Museum. What more could anyone ask for?
Panticapaeum began in the usual way, as a Milesian-Greek colony established in the sixth century BC. But then, around
480
BC, trouble with the Scythians drove about thirty Greek colonies to combine for their own safety. Back in Greece, such a provisional league' would have been no more than an alliance of independent city-states, ready to dissolve again when the emergency was over, intending no permanent central government. But out here, in the colonies, city-state sovereignty seemed less important. The Greek expatriates set up a 'Bosporan' state (named for the Cimmerian Bosporus), and made Panticapaeum its capital.
This was already an un-Greek thing to do. This was not the normal pattern of small city-states, each set in its
chora
or hinterland. Instead, it resembled the Greek idea of a 'barbarian' kingdom, in which a single magical ruler and his tribe occupied a whole extended territory. Soon the resemblance grew closer. In
438
BC, a certain Spartocos, probably a Thracian mercenary officer, carried out a putsch and emerged as sole ruler. The Bosporan state began to expand; the rulers hired an army of Greek and Thracian infantry, with Scythian and Sarmatian cavalry, and soon controlled the shore of the Sea of Azov up as far as Tanais on the Don and down the other side to the Kuban and the Taman peninsula, bringing into their dominions most of the Maeotian and Sindi peoples on the eastern shore. Around
400
BC, the descendants of Spartocos declared themselves kings or 'tyrants', and Satyrus I and his son Leuco inaugurated the 'Spartocid' dynasty which ruled the Bosporan Kingdom from Panticapaeum for more than three hundred years.
The kingdom grew into an empire, an early Byzantium of the north whose merchants, shipping magnates and urban governors were Greek but whose rulers and soldiers were Thracian, Scythian and, increasingly, Sarmatian. In its first years, the Kingdom had been a satellite of Athens, an outpost of the short-lived maritime empire established by Pericles, and its importance was as a source of food. Half the wheat sold and distributed in Athens came from the Bosporan Kingdom, and until the power of Athens was crippled by defeat in the Peloponnesian War in
404
BC, all grain exports to Greece from the Black Sea had to be shipped to the Athenian market. After
404
BC, the kings at Panticapaeum were free to sell to anyone they pleased, and the kingdom entered an enormous wealth boom which lasted for almost a century.
When Olbia weakened and grew beleaguered, as the Sarmatian advance spread unrest and instability across the Dnieper steppes, Panticapaeum took over its markets. Wheat remained the great export commodity. Grown in eastern Crimea or the plains round the Sea of Azov, on huge estates leased from Scythian or Sarmatian rulers and worked by slave labour, the production costs were minimal and the profits enormous. But fish from the Sea of Azov was almost as important, and near Panticapaeum the ruins of a fish-processing factory with twenty-four tanks for salting Azov herring have been found. Caviar from Black Sea sturgeon was exported to the Mediterranean, with furs and slaves brought from the forest zone far to the north.
The grain trade transformed the lives of the Scythian and Sarmatian steppe lords, and of the settled peoples in the plains east of the Sea of Azov. The cash economy burst over them like a flood. Even after the grain dealers and shippers in the port-cities had taken their cut, the profits were colossal. They could afford to buy anything which the ancient world had to sell. But what did they really want? They already had all the slaves and livestock they could use. This is a familiar colonial problem, and it was solved in a way which was to become equally familiar. The Greeks invented new needs for them. They supplied the up-country chieftains with luxuries: above all, with the most magnificent goldwork and jewellery ever produced in the classical world.
At first, the gold and silver articles seem to have been produced in Greece itself or in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, although the gold itself came mostly from Transylvania, from Colchis or from as far east as the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. The form of the bowls of vases and their decoration were Greek, and made no allowance for alien tastes or habits.
Then a change set in. New craftsmen in gold and silver opened up workshops in Panticapaeum, next to their clients and markets, and the product itself started to alter. An example of that change was the gold-covered wooden
gorytus
(that very Scythian article which was a combined bow-case and quiver) found under one of the Five Brother
kurgans
near Rostov - under the very mound which I had discovered to be still in use as a modern Russian graveyard. This
gorytus
had been made by Greek or Greek-trained goldsmiths in the fourth century BC, probably in Panticapaeum. The repousse scenes on it were impeccably Greek, but the object itself, the main item of a steppe horseman's armoury, was an entirely Iranian form.
Soon the Bosporan goldsmiths and silversmiths took another step. They began to produce custom-made work for rich Scythians, whose decoration showed Iranian rituals and celebrations rather than Homeric myths. At the same time, the style remained absolutely non-Iranian: the human figures and animals are naturalistic and physically detailed in the Greek manner, and owe nothing to the magical stylisation - the 'animal style' - which the nomads had brought with them out of Central Asia.
The result, for us, is what Rostovtzeff called 'illustrations to Herodotus': scenes from Scythian life. The globular electrum bottle from the tomb of a prince at Kul-Oba, just outside Kerch, shows bearded warriors in trousers apparently after a battle: talking, stringing bows, bandaging a leg wound, even extracting a tooth. The Gaymanova Mogila bowl, of gold-plated silver, has two pairs of fat, expansive little chieftains in flapped tunics exchanging stories, while servants creep towards them with a skinbag of
kumis
(fermented mare's milk) and a live goose. On a huge gold pectoral from the Tolstoya Mogila barrow near the Dnieper, Scythians are milking sheep and shaping a fleece into a coat, while a silver amphora from Chertomlyk is decorated with scenes of men with horses: a bald old servant hobbling a saddled horse for grazing, a young cavalry trooper with a
gorytus
training a recalcitrant pony to lift its forelegs.
The Panticapaeum goldsmiths not only represented daily life. They were trusted with Iranian religious subjects as well, like the mounted god giving a 'communion' drink to a mounted king on a drinking-horn from Karagodeuashkh, or the strange ceremony shown on a huge gold tiara-plate from the 'queen's grave' in the same complex, where an enthroned goddess holds the sacred cup and an androgynous figure -probably one of those gender-crossing, transvestite 'Enareis' shamans - prepares to serve her from his bottle. (Most of these treasures can be seen in the Hermitage at St Petersburg, and nobody has seriously challenged Rostovtzeff's attribution of them to the craftsmen of the Bosporan Kingdom.)
This symbiosis of Greek (or Greek-trained) artists and Iranian nomad patronage is an extraordinary moment. Nothing quite like it has happened before or since. As Timothy Taylor writes: 'uniquely in the ancient world, and perhaps within the history of art in general, literate, urban colonisers produced their greatest art-works to the order of a nomad
élite
... It is somewhat as if Velazquez had heroised native Mexicans in his major commissions.'
Rostovtzeff, seventy years earlier, had made the same point, but he related it to a profound change in the Greek world-view which was setting in even before the imperial conquests of Alexander of
Macedón.
This is the dawn of Hellenistic art ... which was influenced by the interest taken by science and literature in the hitherto barbarian peoples who were now entering into the great family of civilised, that is, Hellenised nations ... an art which was glad to place itself at the disposal of foreign nations.'