It was, however, a long time before the territory around present- day Taganrog became part of Russia. The Golden Horde had been broken up into four independent khanates when it had disintegrated - Kazan, Astrakhan, Sibir and Crimea. Ivan IV, the first Russian leader to be crowned with the Byzantine title of Tsar (Caesar), conquered Kazan and Astrakhan in the middle of the sixteenth century, and conquest of Siberia soon followed. But the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate were able to resist invasion through collusion with the Turks, and were eventually subsumed into the mighty Ottoman Empire Although the Turks did not really penetrate the steppe north of the Azov and Biack. Sea shoreline, their kingdom extended across the Crimean peninsula to encompass much of what is now southern Ukraine and Russia. Their main trading post and military stronghold was the fortress of Azov, built on the ruins of ana, which was successfully occupied for a few years in the middle of the seventeenth century by fearless Don Cossacks aware of its strategic importance. It was not until the accession of Peter the Great, however, that a Russian tsar was successful in conquering the southern lands of the Crimean Khanate, thus gaining prized access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.
Intent on making Russia a naval power, Peter sa'led a fleet down the Don and captured Azov from the Turks in 1696. His goal was to provide a harbour for his new navy on the Azov coast, and he chose nearby Tagan-Rog (Tatar for 'high promontory') as the most suitable location. In 1698 the first workmen were sent down from central Russia to build a fortress on the cape, to be eauipped with hundreds of cannons and other munitions. Taganrog was the first purpose-built port to be constructed in the Russian Empire, and for a while Peter even considered establishing his new capital on the sea here, but changed his mind when land in the Baltic became available at the opposi te end of his empire. By 1712, when Peter declared St Petersburg as his new capital, Taganrog could boast over a thousand dwellings and a population of about 8,000. The town's new residents had been forcibly settled here from towns on the Volga River, amongst them Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Saratov and Simbirsk. Other enforced colonijts included exiles and convicts and Turkish and Tatar prisoners of war, as well as captured Swedes once the Northern Wars started. Peter also thought to station Cossacks in Taganrog to provide defence against attacks from the Crimea, which was still in the hands of the Ottoman Empire.17
Peter wanted to make Taganrog beautiful as well as functional. As well as issuing orders to plant oak trees along the shoreline for protection from the wind and sun, and willows in the most attractive areas, he ordered lemon and orange trees to be imported from Constantinople, which were planted in the newly ploughed soi1 along with vines, other fruit trees and medicinal herbs. Foreign gardeners were among the many speoia\sts lured to Taganrog by prom'ses of high salaries and other pi' leges.18 Military peisonnei naturally made up the majoi iff of the town's population in the early years, but trade was aiso developed. The prod 'gious quantity of fish of a great many varieties had always attracted travellers to the Azov and Black Sea areas, and Pecer encouraged the development of a fishing trade. A century and a half later the young Chekhov would spend hot summer days fisl mg in the bay with his friends, and it bred in him a passion for fishing which remained with him for the rest of his life.
In 1711 the Turks decided to wrest their old territories back and declared war. Preoccup ed with the protracted war with Sweden up in the north, Peter was unable to defend the Azov shoreline and ordered
The statue of Peter the Great in Taganrog by Antokolsky (1898)
Таганрог*.
ШЯИШ ШшщЯЩу Ивхру I.
his admiral, Count Apraksin, to withdraw from Taganrog after destroying its fortifications. It was not until the next war with Turkey, waged in the 1760s by Catherine the Great, that Taganrog once again became Russian territory. Despite the fifty-year hiatus in the middle of the eighceenth century when Taganrog returned to Turkish rule, the town celebrated its bicentenary in 1898, and Chekhov took a prominent role in honouring its llustrious founder by liaising with the sculptor Antokolsky who had been commissioned to produce a statue of Peter the Great. He also took especial care in recommending the best location for the statue in Taganrog, bearing in mind that Antokolsky had produced an imposing-looking Peter standing characteristically before the sea, the wmd running through his hair.19 His suggestions were ignored. Initially, the twenty-foot-tall statue was placed on agranite plinch on Taganrog's main street by the entrance to the municipal park, but in 1923, amid revolutionary fervour, it was inevitably replaced by a statue of Lenin. Tsar Peter was hauled with great difficulty off his plinth and left in the vestibule of the first Chekhov museum in' aganrog, housed n the former gymnasium where he had gone to school. Then, when Russia's tsars were automa .cally declared enemies o^ the people in the 1930s, orders were issued to melt the statue down. This was the fate meted out to the town's statue of Alexander I, but the statue of Peter miraculously survived. After being moved to the city museum it was boxed up and left outside i i the yard. A few years later there was a move to restore the statue, and №r was achieved in 1943 - by the Naz s occupy ng Taganrog during the Second World War. It was only after the war that the statue was moved to its final resting place by the fort at the edge of the promontory overlooking the sea - the place Chekhov had originally suggested back in 1898.20
As Russia's main naval base, Taganrog became a centre tor sb p- building under Catherine II, and the first ships of the Don flotilla were launched in 1771. But when Russia acquired first the rest of the Azov shoreline, then the Crimea in 1783, Taganrog immediately lost ts strategic importance and Sevastopol was naturally chosen to become the headquarters of the newly formed Black Sea fleet. Taganrog now began instead to build up the international mar time trade for which it became famous in the nineteenth century, as witnessed by the fifteen foreign consulates established ;n the town. Merchants were ordered by the government to relocate there from other parts of Russia and, after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846,. the amount of wheat exported to England significantly increased. Along with wheat and other grams, as svell as ironware produced in the Urals, hemp, canvas and caviar were exported through Taganrog, while ships arrived in its port with cargoes of silk, fruit, nuts, wine and other coionial goods. The town's population inevitably became extremely cosmopolitan after Catherine began to entice large numbers of Greeks to the area; by the nineteenth century there was a population of about 30,000 expatriates, with their own weekly newspaper, The Argonaut.11
Taganrog flourished under Alexander I, with careful town planning influencing the building of rows of spacious streets radiating out ;n a grid along the peninsula from the fortv Churches and civic buildings appeared, as well as a public park - one of the oldest in Russia - which soon became the centre of the town's social life. The gymnasium founded in 1806, Chekhov's alma mater, was the oldest educational institution in southern Russia (the idea of the gymnasium, a state- controlled secondary school with an emphas j on the classics, had been adopted from Germany). Alexander I and hi; retinue visited Taganrog during h;s tour of Russia in 1818, and the Tsar dec ded to return to the town in 1825 when his sick wife Elizaveta was ordered to undertake an eight-month period of convalescence. The southern coastal cl'mate, the town's peaceful lifestyle, and the freedom from court protocol all played a role m luring the Tsar back. By order from St Petersburg, the town governor was ousted from his unassuming single-storey mansion on Greek Street built in the early nineteenth-century Russian classical style, and 25,000 roubles were spent on redecorating the property I iree days of celebratory illuminations marked Alexander's arrival in September 1825. Within two months, however, he had died m mysterious circumstances, and his widow ordered that the room in which he had passed away should be turned into a chapel. Shortly afterwards, the bu'lding (now referred to as a palace despite the manifest inappropriateness of such a title) opened as Russia's first memorial museum, guarded by clean-shaven Cossacks with sabres. After the Revolution the palace chapel was closed and the rooms of the museum turned into communal apartments. Since 1963 the property has housed a children's sanatorium.22