Mangup - The Lost World

The world, sea and land, lies spread out below. People came and settled on
Mangup when they were afraid or wanted to be alone with God, or both.
Neal Ascherson. "Black Sea", 1995.

Mangup was built on the top of a 584 meter high limestone plateau about 30 kilometres by road east and a little north of Sevastopol. One can get there by car along the spectacular mountain roads, or by small local buses, bringing you to the very bottom of the mountain where Tatar village of Haji-Sala is located.

There you can enjoy some traditional meals, like pilov (fried rise with meat) or manti (Asian dumplings with meat or cheese) and some great green or black tea with herbs, while sitting (or even lying) on the takhta, a raised bed-like platform covered with a Bukhara carpet anp pillows. But do not eat too much - the rise to Citadel of Mangup-Kale is really challenging. (Another option is to rent from Tatars an old Russian jeep with driver, which will take you to the summit.)

The footclimb from Haji-Sala to the summit of Mangup-Kale takes an hour, two thousand feet of struggling and sweating upwards until a broken city-wall looms up among the trees. From here the going is a little easier. But now the forest becomes a cemetery. Hundreds and hundreds of stone tombs drift on a sea of dead leaves, tilting, listing, capsizing, engraved with deep-cut Hebrew characters.

The tombs belong to the Karaim - a Jewish sect which began in Mesopotamia in the eighth century AD and broke with the mainstream of rabbinical Judaism two hundred years later.

Just below the rim of the Mangup summit, there is a spring of chill, delicious water. Then the trees part and you emerge into a tableland of flat, sort turf scented with thyme. Ruins stand about, some with towers and arches, others little more than the stone wall-footings which are all that remains of basilicas and gatehouses and synagogues and watch-towers. The plateau is about one square kilometre in general area. Right up until the end of the 14th century, and the foundation of Kaffa with the construction of a defensive line by the Genoese, Mangup, then known as powerful Principality of Feodoro was the largest fortress in the Crimea, successfuly competing with Genoeses over territories and towns along the Black Sea.

The Mangup fortress was a three-tiered defensive system. The main line of defence provided defence for the entire contour of the plateau. This line was built during the reign of Justinian I ( 540-560 AD). Unfortunately, it is very hard to see the ramparts of this first line because most of them are buried deep underground. The upper section of the walls are fully exposed now, but they were built under the Ottoman Turks in the beginning of the 16th century.

A second line of defence cuts across the two promontories on the plateau where the town developed. It has been established from archaeological research and the methods of construction that this line was built at the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century by the Feodorites. The third line was the Citadel of Feodoro itself.

The second line of defence is the focus of current archaeological excavations.The historical layer now under study is from the end of the 14th century, and right underneath are layers with artefacts dating back to the third century and up through the eight century. A historical period is missing in the time frame of the ninth to the fourteenth century, which is thought by some archeologists to have been linked to a cataclysmic earthquake at the turn of the 10th and 11th century. The only thing for sure is that Gothia went back to Mangup and left history for several hundred years.

Below this `Lost World' on its plateau, the world continued to change, but people of Feodoro kept on worshipping in its huge basilica and ignoring the turmoils at the foot of its cliffs until - in 1475 - the Ottoman Turks arrived.

Many legends and stories are spoken about what exactly happened then - here is a couple, where past strangely and wonderfuly mixes with today and even future - legend about last prince of Feodoro and a BBC story about old legends living out in the XXIst century.

After the Turks captured the citadel, they used this fortress for more than three hundred years. The Turkish garrison abandoned the fortress in 1774. In 1792 the last inhabitants left Mangup, these were the karaites.



TRIP-REPORT:
Tang Wee Cheng (Singapore) at Mangup


MORE ABOUT CAVE-TOWNS:
Eski Kermen ancient city
Chufut-Kale - Fortress of the Karaim