History of Yevpatoriya

The city on the western coast of Crimea has lived through about twenty-five centuries and in that time has changed its name three times. Kerkinitis, Gözleve, Yevpatoriya — each name belongs to its own era and its own way of life, and traces of all three are still visible in the districts of the modern resort.

Kerkinitis: a Greek polis on the Kalamita Gulf

The first permanent inhabitants appeared here in the middle of the 6th century BCE. They were settlers from Ionian Miletus — the same city that stood on the Asia Minor coast and founded colonies throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea region. The settlement they founded was named Kerkinitis and occupied a small cape on the shore of the Kalamita Gulf, on the very spot where the Yevpatoriya embankment begins today.

The polis lived by the sea and by the land. The Kerkinitians ploughed the surrounding steppe, raised livestock, fished, fired pottery and, above all, traded. Through them Scythian grain went out into the Greek world, while wine, oil, jewelry and ceramics from Chios, Rhodes and Heraclea Pontica came in return. By the 4th century BCE Kerkinitis had become independent, was minting its own coin and had joined the ranks of the prominent cities of the northern Black Sea coast. Later it passed under the protection of a stronger neighbor — Chersonesus Taurica — and remained its outpost in the western part of the peninsula until the end of the Hellenistic era.

In the middle of the 2nd century BCE the Scythian Kingdom under Skilurus and his son Palacus drove the Greeks out of Kerkinitis, dismantled the city walls and adapted the harbor for its own needs. Chersonesus turned for help to the Pontic king Mithridates VI Eupator. He sent the general Diophantus to Crimea, and at the end of the 2nd century BCE the Greeks briefly managed to reclaim the city. There was no revival, however: the inhabitants did not return, the walls were not restored, and Kerkinitis gradually disappeared under a layer of earth and sand. The ancient city was excavated only in the 20th century, during earthworks in the center of Yevpatoriya. Today its remains are sheltered by a pavilion in Karaev Park.

Gözleve: the Khanate’s fortress and slave market

For more than a thousand years nothing significant arose on this shore. Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Khazars and Cumans came and went across the steppe, and after the Mongol invasion Crimea was divided among the uluses of the Golden Horde. Only by the middle of the 15th century did the Crimean Khanate of the Girey dynasty take shape, and in 1475 it recognized the protectorate of the Ottoman Empire. The treaty between Khan Meñli I Girey and Sultan Mehmed II allowed the Ottomans to establish themselves on the coast, and in the late 1470s the Turks built a fortress on the site of former Kerkinitis. The Crimean Tatars named it Gözleve — “house-eye” or “watchtower.” Later, in Russian chancelleries, the name was transformed into Kozlov.

Gözleve quickly became the main sea gate of the Khanate. The port belonged to the Sultan, not the Khan, and through it pilgrims, craftsmen and goods from across the Ottoman East arrived in Crimea. In the 16th century the city was surrounded by a double stone wall with five gates; the layout of the quarters inside this fortress has survived to the present day. In 1552 Khan Devlet I Girey commissioned the chief Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan to build the great Friday mosque Juma-Jami. Work dragged on into the 1560s and became the northernmost building by the master, known for the Istanbul mosques Süleymaniye and Selimiye.

Along with trade in salt, grain and horses, Gözleve held the largest slave market on the peninsula. Captives taken by the Crimean Tatars in raids on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian lands passed through it. Buyers from Turkey and North Africa also came here for the “living goods.” It was this market that many times served as a pretext for the campaigns of Russian, Lithuanian and Zaporozhian detachments against Crimea in the 16th–17th centuries, though the walls of Gözleve were never taken by storm.

Together with the mosque and the market, other communities also lived in the city. In the 16th century the Dervish Tekke appeared next to Juma-Jami — a small Sufi monastery, the only one preserved in Crimea to our day. The Karaites, a Turkic people of Jewish faith, kept trading yards and schools here. Their quarter became the center of the community after the Karaites finally moved here from mountainous Çufut Qale at the end of the 18th century. Armenians and Greeks built churches closer to the port. This multiconfessional pattern was passed on by Gözleve to Yevpatoriya almost unchanged.

From Kozlov to Yevpatoriya: the Russian 19th century

In 1771 the Russian army under the command of Prince Vasily Dolgorukov occupied Crimea, and in 1774, under the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, the Ottoman Empire renounced its claims to the peninsula. In October 1778 General Alexander Suvorov set up his headquarters in Gözleve for several months. And in 1783, after the manifesto on the annexation of Crimea to Russia, Russian garrisons entered the city without a single shot.

On January 19 (30), 1784, Catherine II signed a decree on the reorganization of the peninsula. The county town of Kozlov was given back its Greek heritage and the name Yevpatoriya — in honor of that same Mithridates VI Eupator whose troops had once liberated Kerkinitis. Thus ancient memory was linked to the new Russian geography.

For the first decades Yevpatoriya remained a quiet port town. In 1793 a military quarantine and the first state-run eye hospital in Crimea opened here. The city became a full-fledged resort slowly. Sea bathing in the Kalamita Gulf came into fashion from the 1820s. By the 1840s the first dachas and furnished rooms for visitors had appeared in Yevpatoriya, and in winter the population reached eleven thousand.

The Crimean War of 1853–1856 interrupted this peaceful development. On September 1 (13), 1854, a combined Anglo-French-Turkish squadron — about four hundred ships — stood off the Yevpatoriya shore. Within a few days more than sixty thousand soldiers were landed on the beach. Meeting no resistance, the allies occupied the city, turning it into a rear base for the siege of Sevastopol. An attempt by a Russian detachment under General Stepan Khrulyov to retake Yevpatoriya on February 5 (17), 1855, was unsuccessful: the assault stalled before the fortifications of the Turkish garrison of Omer Pasha. The city remained under allied control until the end of the war, and after their evacuation in 1856 it emerged in ruins: with plundered quarters, burned warehouses and a deserted port.

Recovery stretched over two decades. The city’s genuine resort history began after the telegraph, and then the railway to Simferopol, was brought here. The decisive year proved to be 1886: the physicians Semyon Khodzhash and Stanislav Tsetsenovsky built the first mud-bath clinic on the shore of the salt Moynak Lake, and as early as 1887 it began to give treatments. The warm brine and the black healing mud of Moynak quickly made Yevpatoriya known throughout the empire: people came here in the hope of curing joint ailments, skin diseases and the after-effects of wounds.

By the beginning of the 20th century the city had acquired an embankment, a park, a gymnasium, dozens of boarding houses and mansions in the Moorish, Empire and Art Nouveau styles. In 1899 the Odessa architect Alexander Bernardazzi completed the great Cathedral of St. Nicholas — an Orthodox answer to Juma-Jami across the road. On May 10, 1914, a narrow-gauge tram (1000 millimeters) began running through the streets — the first and only one in Crimea, built to a German design by the Nuremberg firm MAN. And in May 1916 Emperor Nicholas II visited Yevpatoriya with his family: they called on the wounded in the infirmaries and by evening departed for Sevastopol. This was the last visit of the Romanovs to Crimea.

The 20th century: two wars and the “All-Union Children’s Health Resort”

The Civil War rolled through Yevpatoriya in waves: the city passed from hand to hand until, on November 14, 1920, units of the Red Army under the command of Mikhail Frunze entered it. The breaking of the old order began — nationalization of mansions, closure of houses of worship, repressions against the Karaite and Tatar nobility. At the same time the Soviet authorities saw in Yevpatoriya something the new country lacked: a ready sanatorium infrastructure and a mild sea climate.

Already in the 1920s the former dachas and hotels were converted into sanatoriums for workers and Red Army soldiers. In 1936 Yevpatoriya officially received the status of an “All-Union Children’s Health Resort.” By 1941, of the city’s thirty-six sanatoriums, eighteen admitted children, and the course of treatment included Moynak mud, sea bathing and grape therapy. In this way Yevpatoriya gained its reputation as a children’s resort, which it retains to this day.

The peaceful rhythm was interrupted by the Great Patriotic War. On October 31, 1941, German and Romanian troops occupied Yevpatoriya. On the night of January 5, 1942, a Soviet tactical landing came ashore here: about seven hundred Black Sea sailors tried to divert enemy forces from besieged Sevastopol. For three days the landing party held the center of the city, but because of a storm reinforcements did not come. By January 8 the resistance was crushed, and most of the fighters were killed. In retaliation the occupying authorities carried out mass executions, wiping out around twelve thousand civilians — almost half the city’s population. Yevpatoriya was liberated on April 13, 1944, by the forces of the 2nd Guards Army, and as early as May 18 the deportation of the Crimean Tatars began. The old town stood empty for a long time, and its houses stood with boarded-up windows.

Post-war reconstruction returned Yevpatoriya to its sanatorium profile. By the end of the 1950s dozens of health resorts were operating, the “Moynakskaya” mineral water well had been drilled (1959), and along the sandy spit between the sea and the lake the buildings of children’s camps rose up. In 1960, in the steppe outside the city, in the settlement of Vitino, the Deep Space Communications Center began work with its ADU-1000 antennas. From here the flights of the “Venera” and “Mars” stations were controlled, and on November 19, 1962, it was from Yevpatoriya that the first Soviet radio message — “Mir, Lenin, USSR” — was sent toward Venus. By the 1980s the resort was already receiving more than a million holidaymakers a year.

After 1991

After 1991 the Soviet sanatorium model fell into decline: many health resorts closed, others were repurposed as private boarding houses. Between 1991 and 2014 Yevpatoriya, as part of independent Ukraine, shared the fate of most Crimean resorts: frequent changes of owners and the gradual dilapidation of facades became its new reality.

Since 2014, after the peninsula became part of the Russian Federation, the city has once again been integrated into a single administrative system with Simferopol and Sevastopol. In parallel, the revival of the historic center began: the Juma-Jami mosque, the Karaite kenassas, the Gözleve Gates and the Dervish Tekke were restored.

Today about 105,000 people live in Yevpatoriya. Here ancient Kerkinitis lies beneath the city park, the quarters of medieval Gözleve still surround Juma-Jami, and the Moynak mud-bath clinic has been receiving guests for almost 140 years. It is a rare example, for a Russian resort, of continuity in which the features of all three eras stand out distinctly.