CHAPTER XIII

THE CRIMEA

The Crimea, the loveliest gem in the crown of the czar, is a trophy captured by Catherine the Great in one of the numerous wars of conquest that have been brought by the Russians against Turkey. These wars have been going on at intervals for centuries, and will continue to occur until the patriarch of the Greek orthodox church presides again at St. Sophia, the most famous of all Mohammedan mosques--once a Christian temple. The Turks let the sign of the cross remain upon the pediment over the entrance that faces toward Mecca as a reminder and a taunt to the Christian world.

After Catherine captured the Crimea she attempted to realize the dream of Peter the Great by chasing the Turks from Europe. She proclaimed her supremacy over all the northern shore of the Black Sea and made preparations to erect her throne in Constantinople. It was a magnificent scheme of conquest, and it might have been carried out but for the outbreak of the French Revolution and a national uprising under Kosciusko in Poland. Her attention was thus diverted from the south, and it was left for Nicholas, the “iron czar,” to subdue the Caucasus and extend the limits of Russia to the Caspian Sea.

In 1787 Catherine made a triumphal journey to visit her new possessions. She rode in a chariot covered with gold leaf and bearing her monogram in diamonds upon the doors. The axles of the wheels were studded with costly gems and never was such a splendid equipage used by mortal. It outshone the chariots of the fairies, and you may see it, if you wish, preserved with other relics of the most luxurious of all queens, in the Kremlin at Moscow.

The empress was received everywhere with great enthusiasm by the communities her soldiers had conquered. Festivals and illuminations were prepared to impress her with the loyalty of her new subjects and Prince Potemkin, her viceroy, built a road 200 miles long through the wilderness in order that her journey might be more comfortable. She was convinced of the glory and prosperity of her dominions and over the gate through which she passed into the city of Kherson, thirty miles north of Odessa, was this inscription:

“This is the way to Byzantium”--the Russian name for Constantinople.

By the same war Russia got Odessa and the north shore of the Black Sea. Alexander I renewed the struggle in 1855, for the purpose of taking the south coast and the northern provinces of Asia Minor from the sultan, when the intervention of England, France, and Sardinia provoked the Crimean war. It was not until 1877 that the conquest was resumed by Alexander II, and Russia then gained Batoum, and the eastern shore of the Black Sea, and a portion of Armenia; deprived the Great Turk of Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, and established the independence of Montenegro under the protection of the Powers. And the end is not yet. The advance of the Russian boundaries toward the Mediterranean and the winning of a port upon the Pacific as an outlet for the products of Siberia are the fixed policy of the Romanoffs and they will fight until they get it. The late war with Japan set back the pointer upon the dial of Russian conquest, and the results which had been accomplished by diplomacy in Manchuria were lost. That will all have to be done over again, and the task will be ten-fold more difficult, but it will nevertheless be attempted, sooner or later.

By the next war Russia expects to gain the south coast of the Black Sea, and the northern provinces of Asia Minor. In anticipation of early possession, Nicholas Cherikoff, the czar’s ambassador at Constantinople, has succeeded in concluding a treaty under which the Turkish government is pledged not to permit the subjects of any other nation but Russia to build railways, to buy mines, to secure control of any form of property, or engage in any form of enterprise in that territory. When an American syndicate was seeking a railway concession in Asia Minor not long ago its representatives were notified by the Turkish minister of public works that it could not build its tracks north of Sivas; that Russia claimed exclusive rights in the belt of provinces lying along the southern coast of the Black Sea. This humiliating confession is loaded with significance. It illustrates the foresight and the determination with which the Russian policy of conquest is conducted.

The Crimea is one of the loveliest spots on earth--“A Little Paradise,” the Tartar inhabitants call it, as fertile as it is beautiful, with a climate as attractive as its scenery, and every physical condition that is favourable to health, happiness, and prosperity. That is one of the reasons why the peninsula has been fought over so fiercely through all the ages by the dominating nations of the earth.

The peninsula, which extends from the southern coast of Russia into the Black Sea, is almost circular in form, and measures 225 miles east and west and 155 miles north and south at its widest points. The total area is about ten thousand English square miles. The delightful climate and the scenic attractions have made the Crimea the playground of Russia, and the southern coast is lined with splendid villas belonging to rich nobles, merchants, and manufacturers, and hotels of all descriptions, villages of boarding-houses, and popular resorts for the accommodation of the ten thousand. The hotels are open the year around, the thermometer runs up to ninety degrees in midsummer, but the heat is tempered by cool breezes that play upon the Black Sea, and in winter the climate is ideal. The best months for comfort are May, June, October, and November, and the imperial family of Russia usually spend them here at a villa called Livadia, where the late Alexander III died several years ago.

A range of mountains called the Yallis runs parallel with the southern and eastern coast, culminating in Tohadyr-Dagh, a peak which rises 4,800 feet above the waters of the Black Sea, and is surrounded by other peaks between three thousand and four thousand feet in height. The southern coast is very abrupt and picturesque. The cliffs rise abruptly from the water to the height of 2,000, 3,000 and even 4,000 feet, and are crowned with domes, pyramids, pinnacles, and spires of rock as fantastic as the architecture of a dream. The cliffs are honeycombed with caverns caused by the decomposition of the limestone and are the delight of geologists, because of their stalactites and stalagmite formations. Other phenomena are abundant. Hot springs and mud volcanoes bubble up, spout steam, and indulge in other frightful manifestations, which made the Crimea uncanny and mysterious to the ancients, but in these prosaic days the hot mud is used to cure rheumatism and skin diseases, and the hot water to restore the digestive apparatus of Russian gluttons.

These caverns were once inhabited by a mysterious race called the Cimmerians and Troglodytes, who were supposed to live in darkness and worshipped a virgin goddess named Iphigenia. When a stranger landed on their shores they robbed him and sacrificed him on her altars. In modern times the hotel landlords carry on a similar business on a cash basis. They allow strangers to depart with their lives, but without their money.

The mountains of the Crimea are covered with dense forests and wild flowers grow there more abundantly than in any other part of Europe. The woods and meadows are carpeted with white and purple violets. The tulip, the veronica, the lily of the valley, the geranium, sweet peas, and other flowering plants reach perfection in a wild state, and are so plentiful that nobody thinks of cultivating them. In the northern part of the Crimea are salt lakes from which a hundred million pounds of salt are harvested annually by evaporation, and distributed throughout Russia, bringing much profit to the operators, and a large revenue to the government. The coast abounds in a great variety of fish, which furnish another profitable occupation for the people, and are shipped by train loads into the interior of Russia every day.

In ancient times the Crimea produced vast quantities of corn, which was exported to Greece and Rome and other Mediterranean countries, but agriculture has been supplanted by horticulture, and the sunny slopes of the peninsula are covered with orchards and vineyards and truck gardens. The Crimea is famous for wines, although they are too sweet and heavy for the American taste. Fruits of every kind, peaches, apples, pears, plums, gooseberries, strawberries, raspberries, and currants, walnuts, almonds, chestnuts, hazel nuts, melons, and vegetables of every variety are produced in enormous quantities and shipped to northern Russia. The Crimea is the hothouse, the conservatory of the empire, and supplies early vegetables to the tables of the rich residents of St. Petersburg and Moscow, as the truck forms of Florida provide for those of our northern cities.

The largest part of the population of the Crimea are Tartars--Crim-Tartars they are called, to distinguish them from other representatives of that race--Crim being the Russian form of the word Crimea. They are Mohammedans and have a streak of the savage left in them. No Tartar was ever thoroughly civilized. They resemble the Sicilians in character and habits--in their passionate natures, their jealous dispositions, their vendetta and love of revenge, but they are a sober, industrious, generous-hearted people, whose most sacred fetich is hospitality. They never turn a stranger, even a tramp, from the door. They are always courteous, always deferential and expect their kindness to be returned in good faith.

The Crim-Tartars have a genius for gardening. They love plants and trees and flowers. Whatever they sow brings forth a thousand-fold. They tend the orchards and the gardens of the peninsula, raise the fruit and make the wines, carry on the fisheries, furnish household servants for the hotels, boarding-houses and villas, and leave shop-keeping and trading to the Armenians and the Jews, who are numerous there as everywhere else in southern Russia, and control financial and mercantile affairs.

The Crimea is a fascinating field for historians and archæologists, for its original inhabitants furnished much material for mythology, and their remains abound in various parts of the little peninsula. The Cimmerians, the first inhabitants referred to in history, were known to Homer and Herodotus, and their gloomy situation is described in the “Odyssey” xi, 15:

“There in a lonely land and gloomy cells The dusky nation of Cimmeria dwells; Unhappy race! Whom endless night invades, Clouds the dull air and wraps them round in shades.”

The Scythians, an Asiatic tribe, drove the Cimmerians out of the Crimea in 680 B.C. The latter crossed the Black Sea and settled along the coast of Asia Minor. Thence they spread over Europe and were the founders of three races--the Welsh, the Milesians, and the Goths. Welsh names abound throughout the Crimea, and in the mountains of Wales the old families are known as Cymry.

The Strait of Kertch, which connects the Sea of Azov with the Euxine, or Black Sea, is labelled the “Cimmerian Bosphorus” on all the early maps. The word Bosphorus means, literally, “the passage of an ox,” and is an ancient designation of all streams and water-courses which will permit an ox to cross them by wading or swimming.

The port of Theodosia, the first important town on the Black Sea south of Kertch, dates back a thousand years before the Christian era and was known to Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny, and the historians and geographers of the Romans, Greeks, and the Egyptians under the name Caffa; afterward as Ardava, which means “the city of the seven gods.” This was the capital of the Milesians in the seventh century before Christ, and it was a place of great importance. Scattered throughout the country are tumuli, which are believed to be the graves of kings, and several of them have already been explored with surprising success. Herodotus, the Greek historian, who must have visited Crimea about 375 or 400 B.C., describes the peninsula in considerable detail, and tells about the burial ceremonies of Scythian chieftains. The same customs were followed by the Milesians in Ireland centuries afterward.

He relates that when a king died his body was embalmed and laid in a tomb surrounded by at least one of his wives and several of his servants and his horse, who were strangled for that purpose. His weapons, golden cups, and other articles of daily use were placed beside him in the sepulchre, in order that he might be properly equipped in the next world. Earth was then piled upon the tomb until it formed a miniature mountain. Several of these tumuli have been opened; one, in which Parisades I, who was king of Crimea in the fifth century B.C., was buried, contained the skeletons of his queen, of several attendants, a horse with helmet and greaves, various arms and utensils for eating and drinking, and the bones of a sheep.

In the neighbourhood of Kertch are extensive catacombs similar to those built by the early Christians in Rome. Excavations conducted under the direction of the Russian authorities several years ago disclosed rich ornaments of gold and silver, quaint arms and utensils of exquisite workmanship, which are now in the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg. The walls of the catacombs are plastered over and covered with cryptographs and paintings, containing the history of prominent people who are buried near by. They are similar to the inscriptions on the Egyptian tombs, and represent combats, hunting scenes, court ceremonies and various other human activities, with accurate pictures of horses, oxen, dogs, and other animals. The men are usually represented in shirts of mail, wearing trousers supported by belts and conical caps similar to the Turkish fez. These catacombs date back at least twenty-five hundred years, and in several cases the occupants can be identified as the early sovereigns of the Cimmerians and the Milesians.

In the sixth century B.C., a Greek colony from Ionia settled near Kertch and dedicated their city to the god Pan, calling it Panticapæum. Coins bearing the effigy of that divinity have been dug up in the neighbourhood. In the same century the Scythians sent a force of men into Asia Minor to assist in repelling the invasion of Darius. In the year 480 B.C. the king of the Crimea was Archæanax. His successor was Spartacus, who died 438 B.C. The people of the peninsula preserved their independence until 115 B.C., when Parisades, the last native king, surrendered to Mithridates, who was the sovereign of twenty-two nations, and able to converse with the inhabitants of all of them without an interpreter.

From that time on the Crimea was the scene of continual struggles. The Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Goths, the Huns, the Genoese, the Venetians, the Byzantines, and other races succeeded one another in control at intervals of a century or two. The Golden Horde of Tartars in the fourteenth century drove out the Genoese and retained control, although compelled to pay tribute to the Turks, until in 1771, when the Tartar khan, Sahym Ghyrey, surrendered to Prince Potemkin and the Crimea became a part of the Russian empire.

One of the early rulers, Pharnaces, son of Mithridates, A.D. 63, was in command of the forces that were whipped by Cæsar so easily at the battle of Zelah as to cause him to send his famous despatch to the Roman senate: “Veni! Vidi! Vici!”

Another of the kings of the Crimea, Polemo II, a pagan, married the daughter of King Agrippa of Bible fame and adopted the Jewish faith, which he afterward renounced when his wife deserted him.

The Tartar khanate, which dates from 1380, had its capital at Baghtchasarai, about thirty miles northeast of Sevastopol and the same distance northwest of Yalta. The Khan Sarai, or palace, was restored and refurnished according to the original style by Prince Potemkin for the reception of Catherine the Great when she visited the Crimea in 1787. It is a fantastic building of barbaric splendour, and it is said to be described in the famous poem “Lallah Rookh.” The Russian poet Pushkin rhapsodizes over its beauties in some pretty verses of description. It is by no means as beautiful or as extensive as the Alhambra in Spain, but resembles it in the arrangement and the decoration of the apartments.

There are several well-preserved tombs of the khans who reigned between 1380 and 1786, including a graceful mausoleum, similar to those at Delhi outside the walls, in which repose the mortal remains of Deliarah Bikeh, the beautiful Georgian wife of Khan Shahim Gherai. Her original name was Maria Potorzka. She was the daughter of a Georgian chieftain, a Christian by birth and training, and refused to change her religion. In one of the apartments of the palace is a fountain which her husband, Shahim Gherai, erected in her memory as a symbol of the tears he shed after her death. It is called “the flood of tears.” Outside the walls, in an octagonal mausoleum with a dome, she is buried, and over the door is written in Tartar characters:

“This is the tomb of Deliarah Bikeh, beloved wife of Shahim Gherai, died 1746 A.D. She was a Christian.”

The fountain bears the same date.

About four miles from the town, upon the crest of a lofty crag called Chufut Kaleh (“Jewish rock”) is another stately tomb. It is regarded as one of the finest specimens of Tartar architecture in existence, and was erected in 1437 in honour of a Jewess, Nene Kejeh, queen of Toktamysh, khan of the Golden Horde.

There are many Jews in this part of the Crimea, whose ancestors came there eight centuries before the Christian era. They are of the Karaim sect and follow the Mosaic laws strictly. They are supposed to have many old manuscripts of priceless value, but the Russian government has never been able to secure any of them for the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg, although repeated attempts have been made. The museums at St. Petersburg have collections of great value and interest illustrating the arts, industries, habits, and customs of the early occupants of the Crimean peninsula. There are also many interesting ethnological and archæological examples in a pretty little museum at Odessa; but only a few of the ruins of ancient cities have ever been excavated and many tumuli remain unexplored. It is a popular impression that the manuscripts carried from Jerusalem at the time of the captivity and brought to the Crimea shortly after, are numerous and of the greatest value, but the rabbis pretend to know nothing of them.

The Karaims in the Crimea have enjoyed full rights and privileges as citizens of Russia since 1802 and have never suffered from the restrictions and persecutions of their race elsewhere. They live in a suburb of Baghtchasarai, from choice and not from compulsion. The name means “the stronghold of Israel,” and it has been the headquarters of the community for 2,500 years. From this stronghold the sons of Karaim have scattered over the peninsula and along the northern coast of the Black Sea in pursuit of trade, and like most of their brethren, they are industrious, energetic, and successful competitors in every business in which they engage.

Their synagogue stands upon a hill called Mount Zion, their cemetery is in the valley of Jehoshaphat, where thousands of tombstones bear Hebrew inscriptions. The most ancient epitaph that can be deciphered commends the virtues and piety of a rabbi, Moses Levi, who died “in the year 726 after the exile,” which is the same as the year 30 A.D. Another marks the grave of “Zadok, son of Moses the Levite, who died 4,000 years after the creation, and 785 years after the exile,” which was 89 A.D.

There are many Karaims in southern Russia, and more in Egypt and Turkey. They are found in larger or smaller numbers everywhere along the coast of the Mediterranean. They adapt themselves very readily to their surroundings. In the Crimea they speak the Tartar language; in Odessa they speak Russian; in Athens they speak Greek, and in Egypt their language is the Arabic.

The market place of Baghtchasarai is one of the most interesting places in the Crimea. The display of fruits and vegetables makes the observer hungry. It also gives an unusually good opportunity to study ethnology, for representatives of the most ancient races in the world, which have exhausted themselves or have been exterminated elsewhere, may be found engaged in ordinary avocations, unconscious of the fact that, counting generations of ancestors, they are entitled to the distinction of being the aristocracy of the earth. The Jews, the Cimmerians, the Milesians, the Scythians, the Tauri, families in the Crimea, have pedigrees that run back farther than human history.

The habitations of European seashore resorts are very much alike, and consist of solid rows of masonry packed as closely as possible, with large windows fronting the water. The ground floors are always occupied by a series of gayly decorated show windows, with small shops behind them, restaurants, cafés, flower stalls, and confectioners. On the opposite side of the street there is always a sea wall, with a heavy stone balustrade, protecting a cement promenade, from which piers at intervals extend over the water and to the bath houses that are clustered on the beach. All the life and all the ardour of those who come for health or pleasure are expended upon this thoroughfare, which is crowded from ten to eleven o’clock in the morning until midnight, and the restaurants, tea pavilions and cafés are always filled with people eating and drinking and having what they consider a good time.

Yalta, which is considered the Newport of Russia, the most fashionable resort for both winter and summer in that great empire, resembles, in the way I have described, those of France and Spain, Italy and England, but here nature has also offered irresistible inducements for the rich people to build villas upon the slopes of the mountains that rise in the background, leaving a belt of about a mile wide to be thus occupied. There is a Greek church, with five gilded domes, numerous hotels and handsome residences belonging to grand dukes, princes and other dignitaries; rich merchants and manufacturers. They are mostly of very ornate architecture, built of rough brick or stone, covered with white stucco and embellished with elaborate mouldings over the windows and doors and along the cornices and the balconies. Some of them are painted, and, in two or three cases, the owners have their coats of arms displayed in brilliant colours on the walls.

One of the most attractive villas is that of the emir of Bokhara, a political protegé of the Russian government. He goes there every winter and sometimes in the summer, also, for he is glad to get away from home as often as the Russian government will permit him. His villa is a fine specimen of Saracenic architecture. He has a farm back in the hills, also, but seldom goes there.

The hotels are very comfortable, large rooms well furnished, good meals well served, and, during the summer months, the tables are placed on the lawn, a practice which the managers of the hotels at our summer resorts at home might adopt to the comfort of their patrons, instead of feeding them in hot, close dining-rooms, blazing with light. In the heat of midsummer a dinner will be relished a great deal more if it is served on a lawn under the shade of a tree in the soft twilight, than in a superheated dining-room. The charges are high, quite as high as they are at any of our fashionable resorts, but that is to be expected. European hotel people have discovered to their profit that tourists will pay whatever is asked, and there are no more ten-franc-a-day stopping places on the continent.

The bath houses are not so large nor so good as in America, and comparatively few people bathe. The women are afraid of spoiling their complexions and the men find more sport in other diversions.

There are lovely drives in every direction from Yalta, and waterfalls, gorges, highly decorated gardens, dense groves, observation towers, restaurants and all sorts of attractions scattered along the slopes of the mountains, which rise 2,500 or 3,000 feet behind the town. I am told that there is an average of about 7,500 visitors at Yalta daily the year around, for in that climate, like that of Monterey and Santa Barbara, California, one month is as pleasant as another. Hence, people from the north of Russia come in the winter and people from the south of Russia in the summer, and the hotels are always filled.

There is no railway, although they are talking of one to connect with the trunk lines that run between Sevastopol and Moscow. Everybody has to come on the steamers from Sevastopol, Odessa, Nicholaief, Rostov, Batoum, and other ports on the Black Sea. The visitors from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other northern points take a train to Sevastopol and then come around by steamer in four hours, or by carriage over a wonderful mountain road, a ten-hour ride. The steamers are not very comfortable because the state-rooms are all below the water line, so that the port holes cannot be opened, and there is no ventilation; but the voyage between Yalta and Sevastopol is made both ways in the day-time, in order to give passengers an opportunity to enjoy the magnificent mountain scenery along the coast, and they keep well in toward the shore for that purpose. I do not know of any other sea voyage that will equal it for scenery.

There is a roadway around to Sevastopol from Yalta cut out of the side of the cliff, on a level averaging 300 or 400 feet above the water, and often running as high as a thousand feet on the slopes of the precipices, which was built by the late Prince Woronzoff. It is one of the most delightful and picturesque drives you can imagine. You leave Sevastopol at nine o’clock in the morning, lunch at the Gate of Baidar, which is the water shed, spend the night at Aloupka, and drive over to Yalta in time for luncheon the next morning. There is a procession of carriages loaded with tourists going both ways daily.

For nearly the entire distance a wall of rock rises from 1,000 to 4,000 feet almost abruptly from the Black Sea, being broken at intervals by gorges and narrow valleys which run back into the fertile fields in the interior of the Crimea. Wherever there is room for a handful of soil it is cultivated. There are Tartar villages every few miles, and between them orchards, vineyards, gardens, and truck farms, from which fruit and vegetables are shipped to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The tables of the rich people of those cities and other parts of Russia are supplied with early vegetables and fruit from this source.

Below the roadway and between it and the water many beautiful villas are located among the rocks and the trees. Hotels and sanitariums occur every few miles. The hard, smooth roads are kept in perfect order and decorated on both sides with sweetbriar roses, which continue to bloom through the entire summer. There are myriads of wild flowers also, for which the Crimea is famous, and it is said to have a larger variety than any other place in the world.

This coast is much more beautiful than that of Dalmatia, although it lacks the life and colour that is given the latter by the costumes of the women and the men. It is more like the drive from Cork to the Lakes of Killarney than any other place I know. The French Riviera is more finished and polished and complete, the villas are finer; the hotels are more imposing and the architects and landscape gardeners have embellished nature to a greater extent, but there is more natural beauty on the Crimean coast.

You cross the highest point, 2,200 feet, at Baidar Gate which occupies the site of an ancient fortification intended to protect the tax collector and to prevent hostile armies from passing along this coast, and there you eat your luncheon upon a balcony from which you can look down more than 2,000 feet upon the turquoise waters of the Black Sea.

Near by, upon a promontory projecting out from the precipice, a beautiful Byzantine church has been erected as a memorial to a tea merchant of Moscow named Kouzedneff, who had a winter villa on the coast immediately below. The interior of the church is extravagantly decorated and with much taste, and among the paintings is the Christmas scene in the manger at Bethlehem. A beautiful babe lies on a pile of straw in a stable, emitting a halo of light from its entire body, like a block of phosphorus or radium, while a girl and a young man in the costumes of Russian peasants look down in adoration upon their child.

Aloupka is not so fashionable as Yalta, but is more beautiful. The location is more picturesque and the surroundings are more attractive. It is an assortment of hotels, boarding-houses, and sanitariums collected around one of the most unique and fascinating country seats I have ever seen--the palace of the Woronzoff family, built in 1839 by a governor of the Crimea of that name. He was one of the most famous fighters in Russian history and one of the ablest executives, and contributed more to the glory of Catherine the Great than almost any other of her servants. He was viceroy of the Crimea and afterward of the Caucasus, and his grandson, Prince Woronzoff Dashkoff, is governor-general of the Caucasus to-day.

The Woronzoff palace occupies a terrace one hundred and fifty feet or so above the Black Sea, and a stately stairway, fit for any palace, extends from the threshold of the main entrance to the edge of the water, being guarded on both sides by marble lions, some of them asleep, some of them awake, some of them yawning and others in a playful mood. The façade was copied from one of the palaces of the Alhambra, which critics have pronounced very much out of place on a Tudor castle. Four Byzantine towers at the corners of the walls have also been objected to as untasteful intrusions. The rest of the architecture is in harmony and resembles that of an English castle of the period of Henry VIII. It was built by Sir Matthew Blore, an English architect.

There is a monumental hall and dining-room with wainscoting and ceiling of heavy carved oak; a drawing-room done in Wedgwood tiles of blue and white; a second drawing-room in empire style, a library that would not be out of place in one of the Oxford colleges, and other rooms of dignity and perfect order. There is a large courtyard upon which the offices of the estate and the stables open. The latter are now occupied by a battalion of troops, which have been considered necessary to protect the place since the revolution.

The grounds, which are unique, are always open to the public and attract many visitors to the town. They include a dense artificial forest of thirty acres at the foot of a precipice 4,000 feet high, filled with enormous bowlders that during the ages have fallen from the cliffs in odd shapes and lodged in positions which the landscape artist has utilized in an ingenious and artistic manner. There are said to be 1,140,000 plants. Every tree was planted by hand and 127 varieties are represented. Every plant and flowering shrub that will grow in that climate may be found upon the grounds, and we were told that some of the varieties cannot be found elsewhere in the Russian Empire.

Everything seems to be unique. For example, a large bowlder shaped like an irregular pyramid, with the narrow end upward, has been converted into a fountain. A hole has been drilled through it and a pipe has been laid which throws a stream of water an inch in diameter to the height of fifty feet, but strangest of all is the tomb of a pet dog, whose precious bones occupy a marble sarcophagus large enough for a child, placed in the centre of a cave formed by two enormous bowlders which lean against each other. Chiseled upon the rock at the side of the entrance is this epitaph:

CHEMLEK Born in Brussa, May 20, 1861. Died Aloupka, Nov. 24, 1874.

Near by is a grotto fitted up as a chapel, with an altar and the stations of the cross, where, the old bearded Tartar who showed us around said, the Princess Woronzoff-Dashkoff used to pray for the soul of her dog.

The owners seldom visit this beautiful estate. The prince has been viceroy of the Caucasus at Tiflis for many years and affairs there have been so troublesome as to require all of his attention.

In front of the park at Sevastopol is a monumental sea-gate called the “Grafskaya Pristan,” or “landing place of the nobility.” A stairway of white marble fifty feet wide leads from the edge of the water to the summit of the bluff, where is a classic marble pavilion, supported by twelve Ionic columns. Here the czar and other distinguished visitors are received with ceremony. This pavilion was erected as a memorial to Prince Mihail Simonovitch Woronzoff who, next to Potemkin, was the empire-builder of southern Russia. Traces of his ability and evidences of his energy and enterprise are found everywhere. He was one of the earliest governors of Odessa, where he founded numerous educational and charitable institutions and gave an impulse to trade and commerce. He was equally a benefactor to Sevastopol and the Grafskaya Pristan was a tribute of the people to the permanent benefit he conferred upon them.

Another interesting place near by is called “Gaspra,” where three notorious women who had been banished from the Russian Court at St. Petersburg took refuge and not only repented of their sins but attempted the impossible task of converting the Tartar population to Christianity. One of them was the Princess Galatzin, whose amours were more notorious than those of Catherine the Great; another was the Baroness de Krudener, who told Alexander I, to his face, in a crowded ballroom, that he was an awful sinner. The third was the Countess de la Mothe, who was publicly whipped and branded in Paris as an accomplice in the theft of a diamond necklace from Marie Antoinette.

Another beautiful estate in that neighbourhood, which belonged to Gen. Leo Naryshkin, was laid out by Joachim Tascher, said to have been a natural half-brother of Josephine, the first empress of France. When Napoleon became emperor, Josephine offered Tascher a position suitable to his rank and relationship, but he declined and begged to be allowed to remain in obscurity, to follow his favourite pursuit of gardening.

Alexander III, emperor of Russia and father of the present czar, died October 20, 1894, in a pretty little villa near Yalta, on the southern coast of the Crimea, overlooking the Black Sea. It was his favourite residence, as it was that of his father, Alexander II, before him. At Livadia he could throw off those dignities which hedge about a king, and live like an ordinary man. A stately chapel of the Byzantine type of architecture, with five gilded domes, stands on the hillside near by as a memorial to this man whose piety and devotion were among his most marked characteristics. He was a stern, relentless, implacable autocrat, very different in character and disposition from his father and his son, men of amiable disposition and great forbearance.

It is a singular fact that every alternate czar has been a tyrant and every other one a broad-minded man of liberal views. But Alexander III was embittered by the assassination of his father, who was the most generous and benevolent of all the czars. He emancipated the serfs and gave them land and a draft of a constitution giving Russia a parliamentary government, which he intended to confer as a voluntary gift upon his subjects, lay upon his desk the morning he was assassinated. He was gentle and considerate and unselfish as McKinley, and died the same way. No assassination was ever less excusable.

Alexander III was naturally of a reticent, morbid disposition, without the slightest sense of humour, but lofty aspirations and a keen appreciation of his imperial prerogatives and power. He conceived it to be his duty to punish the entire 135,000,000 population of Russia for the crime of a few fanatics, and thus arrested the progress of Russian civilization during the entire period of his reign. He even went so far as to issue an edict forbidding the education of the peasants, because it made them discontented, closing all the schools in Russia to the children of the labouring class and permitting the attendance only of those whose parents had a certain income and paid a certain amount of taxes. This decree was revoked by his son Nicholas II, who has few of his characteristics, and is as different from him as one man can be from another.

Alexander III sent more poor creatures to Siberia than all the other czars. He was neither merciful nor just; his heavy hand fell upon the innocent as well as the guilty. No modern monarch has caused so much grief, so much suffering, or was guilty of greater cruelty and injustice in his administration.

No Oriental king of the Middle Ages was more fond of display, or more rigorous in his requirements concerning the ceremonies and the etiquette of his court, yet the man loved to escape his imperial splendour and seek rest and recreation in a cottage of not more than twenty rooms, with his wife and children and a few Tartar servants. There he lived the simple life and enjoyed it. There was no ceremony; there was no etiquette; there was no imperial prestige to maintain. There he became the husband and father instead of the king.

In the palaces of St. Petersburg he was always surrounded by Cossacks, policemen, and detectives, even in the family circle, and never crossed the threshold of his apartments without a military guard. At Livadia, fearless of anarchists, he wandered about the village with his wife and children, talked familiarly with the Tartar peasants, and often visited the villas of his friends. There was a guard at the gate and a sentinel at the door of the cottage, but he never had an escort when he went out for his walks or drives.

There are thousands of more spacious and pretentious country villas in Russia; there are hundreds of thousands in the United States more beautiful, more luxurious and better equipped than that in which he lived and died. Every village in America has homes equally elegant and comfortable, but Alexander III found it the most satisfactory and the most restful of all the places in the world. In the little red cottage, with its broad verandas and its walls half hidden with vines, he could forget the affairs of state that made his reign so stormy.

Alexander II, his father, fled to Livadia every winter for two or three months for relaxation from the stern and tragic life he was compelled to lead. The present czar has spent his happiest days there, also, and during his childhood was brought every winter to escape the arctic climate of St. Petersburg, with his governesses and tutors, and the rooms which he and his brothers occupied remain very much as they were in those days. They open immediately off a small hallway in the centre of the cottage on the ground floor, and the windows, which are only breast high from the lawn, overlook the garden. They are small and cosy, but very plain. Boyish traps are still hanging on the walls; tennis rackets, fencing foils and masks and rubber-soled canvas shoes.

There is an ordinary hat rack, a table and two plain chairs in the entrance hall. Two or three hats that belonged to Alexander III still remain where he hung them when he wore them last. The children’s schoolroom and the bedrooms of the boys occupy one half of the ground floor. On the opposite side is a dining-room, a very plain apartment, with a polished floor and a rug and sideboards, carving tables, high-backed mahogany chairs and a table that will seat twenty.

Back of the dining-room is the kitchen, and over it, on the second floor, is the drawing-room with handsome and tasteful but inexpensive furniture. There is a grand piano, a Swiss music box, upon a stand in the corner; a collection of fans and other feminine trifles in a cabinet; several presentation books and albums, and rather ordinary paintings upon the walls.

There is a suite of three rooms for the emperor and a corresponding suite for the empress. Her sitting-room is very pretty, with a Brussels carpet on the floor and hangings and upholstery of cretonne. Her bedroom is furnished with the same material and is similar to those you can find in every country-house of well-to-do people and much more convenient than any palace apartment I have ever seen. The bedstead is of brass with a canopy and curtains of cretonne. Between the sitting-room and the bedroom is a dressing-room, with several large wardrobes and a storeroom for linen with chests of drawers.

The czar’s library contains two desks of plain, ordinary white oak, one for himself and one for his secretary or military aide. It is furnished with substantial leather tufted furniture, cretonne hangings and an ordinary Brussels carpet upon the floor, while the walls are hung with family photographs, including a group taken on the front porch of the cottage when the late King Christian, Queen Alexandra of England, King George of Greece and other relatives of the Dowager Empress were there. There are several photographs of Queen Alexandra of England and King George of Greece about the house. The affection and devotion for which the royal family of Denmark is famous is illustrated by the number of photographs that are scattered around.

The czar’s sleeping chamber is a large, square room with an outlook upon the Black Sea. It is left exactly as it was when he died. His bed, a large four-poster with two mattresses, is shielded from the light by a high screen, and beside it is a small iron camp bedstead that was used by his nurse. In the corner is a cabinet bathtub, which closes up like a settee; in the centre is a table, with several Russian books, reviews and newspapers--the last he read. There is a sofa behind it with a pillow embroidered with the imperial arms, where he rested in his last days. Beside one window is a large easy chair, in tufted blue leather, much worn, and rather shabby, in which Alexander III sat when he breathed his last. He died of a combination of Bright’s disease and dropsy, and his lungs and heart were drowned. For several days before his death he was unable to lie down, and slept in this chair. It stands exactly where it was when he died, and where his feet rested a cross of olive-wood has been embedded in the floor.

The rooms of Alexander II in the winter palace at St. Petersburg and those of Nicholas I, the iron czar, are preserved in the same way, and will never be occupied again. But no emperor ever died in such simple, homelike surroundings as Alexander III.

The widow has never been there since she left for St. Petersburg with the funeral cortege, but Nicholas II, the son, always spends a portion of the year in Livadia, usually three months in the fall. The old vine-covered villa, which has been photographed and used as an illustration for books and magazines so often, has been torn down, and a splendid palace of white sandstone, to cost $750,000, has been constructed on plans prepared by Architect Krasnoff of Yalta.

There are 700 acres in the estate, 250 acres under cultivation and the rest in park. Nearly 200 acres are in vineyards, and the best wine of the Crimea is said to come from the emperor’s grapes. It is not made on the place, but the grapes are hauled to a wine press in the neighbourhood.

The estate is surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, draped with honeysuckle and creepers. It lies between the main highway and the Black Sea, and people who drive that way can get a very good idea of the establishment--the groups of stables, the cottages for aide-de-camp and members of the household, the conservatories, the chapel, and other buildings which are scattered over the place, and half hidden in the foliage. There is an especial residence for the cabinet minister, who attends the czar, and apartments for the entertainment of other members of the government who are brought here on official business. Nothing, however, is pretentious. Many summer homes in the United States surpass it in every respect, but Livadia will always be sacred to Russians because of its associations with Alexander III.