However, after recent study in more auspicious circumstances of the thousands of pieces of pottery which have washed up on the shore since those early finds, Russian and German archaeologists now believe that the ancient city that i.es under the sea _n the bay of Taganrog may be Cremni ('the Cliffs'), the city mentioned by Herodotus in his famous History of the Persian Wars. Taganrog is, after all, situated on a high peninsula with steep cliffs on either s.de. The relevant passage is in book four, where Heroaotus talks about the nomadic Scythians who lived in these areas:
On the opposite side of the Gerrhus is the Royal district, as it is called: here dwells the largest and bravest of the Scythian tribes, which looks upon all the other tribes in the light of slaves. Its country reaches on the south to Taurica, on the east to the trench dug by the sons of the blind slaves, the mart upon the Palus Maeotis, called Cremni (the Cliffs), and in part to the river Tanais.10
To the ancient Greeks, the area where Chekhov grew up was the end of the known world. Following in the footsteps of Odysseus, Greek settlers first set out to explore the unknown areas to the north of their empire at the end of the seventh century ВС, while other colonists sailed east to Asia Minor and west to Italy. They called the Black Sea the Axine Pontus, or Inhospitable Sea, because of the dangers they faced both in navigating often stormy and uncharted waters and in encountering unfriendly nomadic tribes when they finally reached their destination. A<ter the Black Sea littoral had become home to numerous new centres of Greek civilization, however, the Axine Pontus was renamed the Euxine Pontus, or Fnendly Sea.11 The next stage was to sail further north through the Kerch straits to conquer the even remoter Sea of Azov, which proved to be so shallow it was given the name of Palus Maeotis, or Maeotis Lake. Its waters also froze over in the winter, which posed an addi ional challenge to sailors accustomed to the warm seas of the Mediterranean.
It has been hitherto thought that the first Greek settlement on the Azov shores was Tan; is, founded n the third century ВС at the mouth of the River Don, just outside the present-day city of Rostov, some fifty miles to the east of Taganrog (Tanais was also the name the Greeks gave to the Don).12 But it now seems that the Greeks had been more intrepid, and had established their most northerly colony several centuries earlier, at the very beginning of their first voyages to new lands. The Azov seabed has never before been excavated, and the underwater explorations to be started in the bay of Taganrog in 2004, the centenary of Chekhov's death, may yet yield sensational results, even prompting some journalists to speculate on the discovery of a Russian Atlantis. What is already clear is that archaeologists will have to revise prior perceptions about the Hellenization of the nomadic Scythian tribes who dominated the steppe territory north of the Black Sea between the Carpathian Mountains and the River Don. It now seems that the first contacts between the Scythians and the Anc'ent Greeks were probably made in the Taganrog area.13
II
Venetians, Turks and Russian Tsars
I have taken the Tanais RiVer as the boundary between Europe and Asia.
Strabo, Geographia, Book XI
Taganrog has the strongest resemblance to a Levantine town, so much are its Greek and Italian inhabitants in a majority over the rest of the population.
Ignace Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Travels in the Steppes of the Caspian Sea, the Crimea, the Caucasus, 1847
Returning to Tc.ganrog _n 1887 for the first time since graduating from Moscow University opened Chekhov's eyes to how Asiatic his home town was. Just after Easter, three days into his stay, a postman had come to deliver a letter for him and then had calmly gone into the kitchen, sat down and drunk a cup of tea, not in the slightest bit worried about all the other letters he still had to deliver. 'It's Asia here!' Chekhov exclaimed when he sat down to reply to the letter the following day; 'Everything here is so Asatic I can hardly believe my eyes. There are 60,000 inhabitants who "ust eat, drink, and reproduce, but they have no other mterests.' The friends and relatives Chekhov had been visiting had offered him Easter cake and wine, and they all seemed to have young babies, but none of them appeared to read newspapers or books. The town's location is superb in all respects, the climate is magnificent, there are fruits of the earth aplenty, but the inhabitants are ridiculously inert,' he commented. Their wit and imagination, their musical talents, their sensitivity were all wasted.14
Situated in a part of the emp re as near to Tehran as to the Russian capital, and as close to Constantinople as to Moscow, Taganrog could indeed lay some claim to being at least geographically in Asia. Back in the first century the Greek historian Strabo had proposed the River Don, which lies just to the east of Taganrog, as the boundary between Europe and Asia. His contemporaries had been dissuaded from exploring the area back then because of 'the cold, the ice, the tumultuous tides which draw the waters miles away from the muddy shores, the mists and storms, the treacherous currents, the suffocating sultriness of summer and the swamps of mosquitoes'.15 "his meeting point of two continents became a vital trading area in the Middle Ages, however, since it lay directly on one of the main Silk Routes connecting Constantinople with China. By the ime of the fall of the Roman Empire, the Greek town of Tanais at the mouth of the Don had been destroyed by marauding Goths and Huns, and the Scythian territories of south-eastern Europe invaded by the Iranian- speaking Sarmatians (it was they who gave the R1 fer Don - meaning water - its present name). In the thirteenth century a new city was founded at the mouth of the Don, but tKs time the colonists were Italians rather than Greeks: Tana was buiit by the Venetians. It was trade wi'h the Byzantine Empire which had initially made Venice wealthy. After establislrng themselves as an independent republic, the VeneL ins then used their power to bankroll the Fourth Crusade, which resulted not i the recapturing of Muslim Jerusalem but in the storming of Christian Constantinople in 1204. This victory struck for the Latin West over the Greek East was very much to the lining of the Venetians, because what they were really after was trade links with Asia. They now, at a stroke, acquired a monopoly in the area by acquiring strategic territories belonging to the once powerful Byzantine Empire and, more ;mportantly, maritime access through the Bosphorus to the Black and Azov seas.
In 1260 two Venetian merchants, the father and uncle of Marco Polo, set out from Tana to journey overland across the steppe to the capital of the Mongol Empire They became the first Europeans to visit the court of the great Kublai Khan, grandson and successor of Genghis Khan, and the ultimate conqueror of China. Tana became one of the most successful trading colonies founded by the Venetians n the Black Sea area.16 A few decades earlier, another of Genghis Khan's grandsons had led the invasion of Europe by Turkic-speaking Tatars. Tana and the entire Azov Sea area had become part of the most westerly khanate of the now vast Mongol Empire. With its cap. ;al in Sarai, on the lower reaches of the Volga some way off to the east, it became known as the Golden Horde and accumulated much wealth via its annual tribute from the Russian lands under their dominion. The empire began to collapse at the end of the fourteenth century when Tamerlane's armies invaded on their way to India, having already conquered Iran, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. And the oppress ve 'Tatar yoke' was finally lifted from Russia in 1480 when Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, decided he could afford to stop paying taxes to the Golden Horde. Thus ended two and a half centuries of Russia's subjugation to tne Mongols.