The Myth of the Chersonesus Destruction: An Episode of the Literary Development of Crimea

In travel literature of the 19th century (P.I. Sumarokov, V.B. Bronevsky, I.M. Muraviev-Apostol, E.D. Clark, F. Dubois de Montpere, K. Omer de Gell and others), there was a legend that ancient Chersonesus was destroyed to extract building materials for the construction of Sevastopol. The objective data analysis shows that it is a literary myth that originates from the work of P.S. Pallas “Observations Made During Traveling Over Southern Provinces of the Russian State in 1793–1794” (1799–1801). The scholar argued that the “destruction” of Chersonesus was a consequence of the active construction of Sevastopol in the 1780s–1790s. In 1818, P.S. Pallas’s viepoint was supported by N.M. Karamzin, whose History of the Russian State tells (with reference to P.S. Pallas) that Chersonesus was destroyed “to take stones to construct houses in Sevastopol”. Since then, this version of the events has become a commonplace in almost any text about Chersonesus. At the same time, some European authors (E.D. Clark, K. Omer de Gell) used this “common place” as an instrument of political propaganda. It has been documented that only four objects of modest scale were built out of Chersonesus stone in 1783: a chapel, a smithy, a pier and an admiral’s house. Then, they started to produce building materials in F.F. Mekenzi’s estate and in the Inkerman quarries, which made the industrial extraction of stone in Chersonesus impractical. Why did the experience of the first city constructions entail such generalizing conclusions in P.S. Pallas’s book? The reconstruction of the historical situation allows to single out two main reasons. That time Crimea was considered a fragment of classical antiquity acquired by Russia. The remains of ancient constructions became the primary object of literary and research interests. However, the first travelers were deceived in their expectations, since in Crimea they mostly found medieval monuments erected on the site of ancient ones. Modern archaeologists know that in the 6th – 7th centuries ancient Chersonesus was completely rebuilt, which explains the scantiness of ancient traces. However, in the era of P.S. Pallas, it was easier to explain the absence of antique artifacts by the destruction caused by those who built Sevastopol. Yet there was another reason. Sevastopol quickly became the most populous city on the peninsula. This led to spontaneous development and unauthorized extraction of building materials, including the territory of Chersonesus. It was impossible to tackle the problem of protecting ancient monument at the level of local initiatives and funds. The exaggerations found in P.S. Pallas’s writing can be explained by the awareness of the spontaneous threat to the ruins of the ancient polis. A small fragment of the text written by P.S. Pallas about the destruction of Chersonesus was rather a signal of alarm calling for measures to preserve the settlement, than a strictly historical statement. This signal, relayed by many literary texts, eventually caused the required reaction – Chersonesus became an object of historical heritage protection. However, at the same time, P.S. Pallas’s text turned into a mythologeme, firmly entrenched in literary ideas about the history of Chersonesus and Sevastopol.