History of Alushta

The history of Alushta begins in the 6th century, and its first page was written in Greek. At the foot of the mountains, where 15 Aprelya Street and Gyaurova Street meet today, rose the walls of the Byzantine fortress of Aluston — one of the empire’s distant outposts on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Procopius of Caesarea, court historian to Justinian I, left a record of its construction. According to him, the emperor ordered this bay fortified in order to control coastal navigation along the mountainous shore and to keep the steppe peoples away from the narrow strip of warm land between the mountains and the sea.

Justinian’s Aluston: 6th–10th centuries

The town’s name is almost as old as its walls. Most researchers derive it from the Greek “αλυσίδα,” “chain”: the fortress closed off a mountain pass the way a link closes a chain. By the standards of Byzantine fortifications Aluston was modest, about a quarter of a hectare, but it was built in earnest. The masonry was rubble stone laid in lime mortar, with wooden beams embedded in the walls to dampen seismic shocks; the thickness reached three metres, the height nine and a half. A garrison of one to one and a half hundred men lived here permanently. For a small military post on the edge of the oecumene this was a considerable force.

By the end of the 7th century Byzantium had retreated. Power over Eastern Crimea passed to the Khazar Khaganate, and for a century and a half or two Aluston became a provincial stronghold of a foreign empire. Life did not stop: Greek villages stood nearby, herds grazed in the mountains, fishing boats put in at the bay. But few written traces of this period have survived. Archaeologists find layers of fires, rebuilt walls, coins of various rulers — the town passed from hand to hand without becoming anyone’s true capital.

Between Theodoro and the Genoese: 12th–15th centuries

From the 12th century Aluston came back to life. The Christian principality of Theodoro, with its capital on the Mangup plateau, grew stronger; its rulers regarded the southern shore as their outlet to the sea, and the seaside Lusta (as the town’s name sounded in those centuries) once again became a trading and harbour point. It is mentioned in lists of dioceses, in travellers’ notes, in commercial agreements. Through the bay flowed the local exchange: timber, leather, wine, salt, slaves.

In 1278 a Mongol wave swept through the town. The walls were destroyed and the suburb burned out. The town did not vanish, but recovered slowly, and meanwhile a new power arrived on the Crimean shore. In 1381 the Genoese, who had long held Caffa (today’s Feodosia), obtained from the Crimean khan the cession of a coastal strip from Cembalo (Balaklava) to Soldaia (Sudak). Lusta fell within this strip and became one of the links of the Genoese trading system of the Black Sea. In the early 1420s the Genoese rebuilt the fortress on the old Byzantine site, and by the 1460s they had rebuilt it completely: they added towers, expanded the perimeter, and adapted it for cannon. One of these towers, Ashaga-Kule, “the Lower Tower” in Crimean Tatar, still stands in the centre of town today, and it is the oldest building in Alushta visible to the eye.

Genoese rule was brief. In the summer of 1475 an Ottoman army landed in Crimea; Caffa fell, and the coastal fortifications fell after it. Lusta passed to the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate, lost its military importance, and gradually shrank to a small settlement with gardens, vineyards, and a mosque. The Byzantine tower stood among Tatar courtyards; its stone was taken for new buildings, and until the 19th century no one took much interest in the place.

In the Russian Empire: 1783–1900

In 1783, by the manifesto of Catherine II, Crimea was incorporated into the Russian Empire. Alushta, at that time a village of a few dozen households, found itself in the Simferopol Uyezd of the Tauride Oblast, later reorganised as a governorate. For a while only military topographers and the occasional traveller paid it any attention: the road from Simferopol to the southern shore ran through the Angar-Bogaz pass and was difficult even in summer. The turning point came in the 1820s–1830s, when military engineers laid a highway through the pass, the future road to Yalta. Post troikas, stagecoaches, and then the first carriages with guests from Simferopol began to use it.

In 1833 a project for a parish church was approved for the growing village, and in 1842 a church was consecrated in Alushta in the name of Theodore Stratelates and All Saints of Crimea, in neo-Gothic form with turrets and lancet windows; in this guise it has come down to our day. By the middle of the century Alushta was reckoned the centre of a volost bearing the same name. The first inns, shops, and Tatar coffeehouses appeared along the shore, and every summer brought more vacationers in search of sea air who did not want to pay Yalta prices.

The decisive shift came in the 1880s. In 1886 the geologist Nikolai Golovkinsky, former rector of Novorossiysk University, settled at the foot of Mount Kastel, a few versts west of Alushta. He bought land, Professor of Medicine Golubev settled next to him, others from the universities followed, and the quiet corner by the sea quickly filled up with dachas trimmed in lace-like woodwork. Thus appeared the Professors’ Corner: before the revolution it was called Kastel-Primorskoye, in Soviet times Rabochy Ugolok, and the old nickname returned only in recent years. This was Alushta’s first resort zone, with bathing, therapeutic walks, and literary evenings on the verandas.

In 1902 Alushta officially received the status of a town. By imperial registry this meant the right to its own town duma, coat of arms, and budget; at the same time it confirmed what had happened over the past half-century: the former Tatar settlement had turned into a full, if small, seaside centre.

War, revolution, reconstruction: 1914–1941

The First World War and the revolution passed over Alushta heavily, as they did over all of Crimea. In 1918 there was fighting in the surroundings between Red detachments and Crimean Tatar formations. In April 1918 the so-called Alushta Republic, proclaimed by the Bolsheviks and swiftly crushed by the German advance, existed for a few days. In 1920, after the Wrangel forces withdrew, Soviet power entered the town for a long stay.

In the 1920s and 1930s Alushta was rebuilt for mass sanatorium tourism. Dachas were nationalised, the houses of well-known professors were turned into VTsSPS rest homes, and the first buildings of state health resorts appeared along the shore. The town grew, and electricity, running water, and paved streets were brought to it. By the end of the 1930s Alushta was counted among the district centres of the Crimean ASSR, with a seasonal population of several tens of thousands.

Occupation and liberation: 1941–1944

The Great Patriotic War reached the southern shore in the autumn of 1941. On 4 November German and Romanian troops entered Alushta; the occupation lasted almost two and a half years, until 15 April 1944. The town was not the scene of long battles, the front passed it quickly, but the price proved heavy: over five hundred residents perished, more than two hundred were taken to forced labour in Germany. In the mountains around Demerdzhi and Chatyr-Dag partisan detachments operated, based in inaccessible forest gullies; supply across the passes came at great cost.

In April 1944 the Crimean Front broke through the German defences, and on 15 April Soviet units entered Alushta. Exactly one month later, on 18 May 1944, by order from Moscow, the Crimean Tatars were deported from the town and from the whole peninsula — an entire ethnic community that had lived on this shore for centuries. The old Tatar quarters emptied in a matter of days; they were resettled by people from the central regions of Russia and Ukraine, and many place names were changed. This decision altered the face of Alushta as sharply as the Genoese conquest had once altered the face of Lusta.

Post-war resort: 1945–1991

The town’s reconstruction began immediately after liberation. By 1948 the first sanatoria were operating, the seafront was being put in order, ruined quarters were being repaired. The symbol of the new era was the white Rotunda with six columns and the inscription “Alushta-kurort,” set on the main seafront in 1951. Low and ornate, it proved so recognisable that it quickly became the town’s calling card and still appears today on stamps, postcards, and the logos of travel companies.

In 1959 the Simferopol–Alushta trolleybus line was opened; two years later it was extended to Yalta, and so the longest mountain trolleybus route in Europe came into being, on which trolleybuses climb to the Angar-Bogaz pass and descend to the sea. For townspeople and vacationers it was cheap, near-hourly transport; for Alushta itself, the end of its former transport isolation.

In the 1960s–1980s the town went through a resort boom. Dozens of sanatoria, boarding houses, Pioneer camps, and enterprise holiday bases from across the Union opened. The Professors’ Corner was built up with the large blocks of health resorts; along the sea ran a concrete seafront about seven kilometres long, the longest in Crimea. Filmmakers came to love Alushta: on the cliffs of Demerdzhi Leonid Gaidai shot “Kidnapping, Caucasian Style,” nearby they filmed “Sportloto-82,” and the seafront itself appeared in scenes of dozens of Soviet films and television programmes.

After 1991

In 1991 Alushta, together with all of Crimea, found itself part of independent Ukraine; the health resorts endured the difficult nineties, with a sharp drop in the flow of vacationers, partial privatisation, and changes of ownership. Since 2014, after the Crimean referendum, the town has been part of the Russian Federation, and over these years a considerable part of the seafront, the central streets, and the sanatorium parks has been reconstructed. Transport links with the mainland are provided by the Crimean Bridge and the federal “Tavrida” highway, which was brought to the outskirts of Alushta in 2020.

Over a millennium and a half the town has changed several names and many masters: Byzantium, the Khazars, Theodoro, the Genoese, the Ottomans and the Crimean Khanate, Russia in its two historical forms, Ukraine. Something has remained in the soil and the look of the town from each layer: the Byzantine tower in the centre, Genoese masonry beneath the plaster, Tatar place names, pre-revolutionary dachas with carved verandas, the giant Soviet sanatoria, and the 1951 Rotunda.