The Crim-Tartars have a genius for gardening. They love plants and trees and flowers. Whatever they sow brings forth a thousand-fold. They tend the orchards and the gardens of the peninsula, raise the fruit and make the wines, carry on the fisheries, furnish household servants for the hotels, boarding-houses and villas, and leave shop-keeping and trading to the Armenians and the Jews, who are numerous there as everywhere else in southern Russia, and control financial and mercantile affairs.
The Crimea is a fascinating field for historians and archæologists, for its original inhabitants furnished much material for mythology, and their remains abound in various parts of the little peninsula. The Cimmerians, the first inhabitants referred to in history, were known to Homer and Herodotus, and their gloomy situation is described in the “Odyssey” xi, 15:
“There in a lonely land and gloomy cells
The dusky nation of Cimmeria dwells;
Unhappy race! Whom endless night invades,
Clouds the dull air and wraps them round in shades.”
The Scythians, an Asiatic tribe, drove the Cimmerians out of the Crimea in 680 B.C. The latter crossed the Black Sea and settled along the coast of Asia Minor. Thence they spread over Europe and were the founders of three races—the Welsh, the Milesians, and the Goths. Welsh names abound throughout the Crimea, and in the mountains of Wales the old families are known as Cymry.
The Strait of Kertch, which connects the Sea of Azov with the Euxine, or Black Sea, is labelled the “Cimmerian Bosphorus” on all the early maps. The word Bosphorus means, literally, “the passage of an ox,” and is an ancient designation of all streams and water-courses which will permit an ox to cross them by wading or swimming.
The port of Theodosia, the first important town on the Black Sea south of Kertch, dates back a thousand years before the Christian era and was known to Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny, and the historians and geographers of the Romans, Greeks, and the Egyptians under the name Caffa; afterward as Ardava, which means “the city of the seven gods.” This was the capital of the Milesians in the seventh century before Christ, and it was a place of great importance. Scattered throughout the country are tumuli, which are believed to be the graves of kings, and several of them have already been explored with surprising success. Herodotus, the Greek historian, who must have visited Crimea about 375 or 400 B.C., describes the peninsula in considerable detail, and tells about the burial ceremonies of Scythian chieftains. The same customs were followed by the Milesians in Ireland centuries afterward.
He relates that when a king died his body was embalmed and laid in a tomb surrounded by at least one of his wives and several of his servants and his horse, who were strangled for that purpose. His weapons, golden cups, and other articles of daily use were placed beside him in the sepulchre, in order that he might be properly equipped in the next world. Earth was then piled upon the tomb until it formed a miniature mountain. Several of these tumuli have been opened; one, in which Parisades I, who was king of Crimea in the fifth century B.C., was buried, contained the skeletons of his queen, of several attendants, a horse with helmet and greaves, various arms and utensils for eating and drinking, and the bones of a sheep.