tartars and karaites

Go figure, the day dawned bright and sunny...no snow the day i left yalta...i checked the opening time for the cable car, but it was 10am, and i had no desire to wait that long...(i woke up again at 0600)...so i walked to the main bus station, and caught the next bus to sevastopol...at the bus station in sevastopol i caught the next bus to bakchisarai, a small town about halfway to simferopol...i was lucky in the timing of both buses, they both left within about 15 minutes of me purchasing my ticket...on the first bus to sevastopol i think i was sitting in the wrong seat (until that point i didn't know seats were assigned) but the guy who was trying to tell me i was in his seat gave up almost immediately when he realized i speak no russian...it only occured to me after he sat in another seat that he was probably trying to say i was in his seat...ooops...

when i got to bakchisarai (бакчисараи) i walked a bit and asked about 4 people for directions to a main street called lenina...once i found the street it was easy enough to find a guesthouse...i chose the cheapest guesthouse listed in the guidebook, also the only guesthouse with directions printed in the book...all the rest said to call ahead...which is all fine and dandy, if you have a phone, and if that phone has credit on it, and if you speak some russian...as i realized as i arrived, i have no credit on my phone, i couldn't call anyone...again, ooops...i'll have to fix that sooner rather than later...probably when I get back to simferopol...

lonely planet calls the guy who owns/runs my guesthouse "an amiable former military man"...he's a friendly old guy...and the place is soooo cheap!! i think i was the only person staying there...it definitely isn't high season...he brought me tea just after I got into the room...nice:)

after resting for a little bit, i started walking...bakchisarai is located in a valley, and the sky was clear, so i knew that as soon as darkness fell, it would be COLD...i walked i have no idea how far to my first sight...a monastary...called the uspensky monastary, it's built into the side of the cliff wall...byzantine monks built the monastary in the 8^th or 9^th century...i wonder how long it took to build...there is another church currently being built in the valley, almost 'under' the current church, i don't know if there will be a move, or if it is simply a new church...of course, with the snow, there wasn't any construction happening...

you're almost there before you realize it's there...after following a snow covered path for a little while, i realized i could see stairs, and the golden top that seems so familiar after a few months in this country...the golden top simply covered an arched gateway, not the church itself...the church was carved into the cliff wall, with a couple "windows" letting in light...a low ceiling, not a lot of natural light in the sanctuary...to get to the sanctuary you walk down a couple 'hallways' which have a number of doors leading off them...as i was leaving, i realized these doors are probably to rooms where the priests and others live...each door had the orthodox cross on it...there are also paintings all along the walls...as seems to happen to me quite often, i walked into the sanctuary in the middle of a service...it seemed very quiet, but maybe that was just the natural accoustics of the small room...

from the monastary i kept walking up the snow covered path...there was no sign directing me, but there weren't any other options, so i kept going...at one point a lady went flying by me going the other way on a sled...how awesome is that?!?! it's dead season for traveling, but people are still having fun:) ...i never did figure out where she got the sled...i wonder how much that might have cost?

my next destination was a place called chufut kale (чуфут кале)...a plateau on the top of one of the sides of the valley...settled sometime between the 6^th and 12^th centuries by christian descendents of the sarmation tribes...(i don't know who they were, but that's what the guidebook says)...one of the last rulers of the mongols sheltered here as well, after being defeated in 1390...the first crimean khanate was established here (for a time crimea was part of the ottoman empire)...after the tartars left, turkic jewish karaites lived in the city until the mid 1800s...(i think I have that date right?)...the people who lived there had some great views on a daily basis...

getting to the plateau meant walking on paths with mostly melted snow, and a lot of mud...my shoes were covered...yuck...chufut kale (which translates to 'jewish fortress') is a city mostly carved out of the plateau...everywhere you go you can see caves and 'windows...later inhabitants built good looking houses, and there are a couple large prayer houses...from one side you can look into the valley on the other side, which houses an old karaite cemetary...there are no barriers to keep you from falling off the edge, straight down into that valley...i wouldn't mention this, except that I kept slipping on stone, snow covered steps...i came close to sliding into that valley...

at some point I realized I needed to get walking back into town...it was a cold walk, thankfully not entirely in the dark...it was earlier than I wanted to eat, but I didn't want to go back to the guesthouse, then leave again...bakchisarai is a very small town, and I was feeling particularly alone...i don't think i'd have felt that way in the summer...dinner was at a place with typical crimean food...yum...not surprisingly, I overate...

an even earlier night than the previous two nights...there is only so much you can do to stretch out an evening when you don't have internet or a book to read...one of my options was taking a bucket shower...not what I was expecting, but thank goodness I have plenty of experience...a little bucket of warm water can go a long way if you know how to do it properly...anywho, my hair was clean for the first time in a few days...granted, the bathroom was concrete, so I was still freezing...at this point I decided I wasn't going to be warm/comfortable again until I was on the train back to kyiv...

The place I stayed in bakchisarai had bucket showers because there isn't a lot of running water in this area...they don't really have the water availability to let people take daily showers the way we're used to doing...in addition to the bucket shower, there is also a squat toilet...again, not really a problem for me, as I have plenty of experience with them...the morning of my last day in crimea was a surprise though...i went to use the squatty and found that the bucket of rinse water was partly frozen!! hee hee...i guess it was a wee bit chilly out during the night:) ...the day dawned with another blue sky though, I loved it...

after another cup of tea, I packed up and set out from my guesthouse...my first stop of the day was the khan's palace in the middle of bakchisarai...remember that the town used to be the seat of the crimean khanate, of course the khans needed a place to live...it was pretty fancy...

I was one of the first people to show up for the day...so each time I entered a building a lady unlocked it for me, then waited around while I looked in each room...those rooms are fancy!! I don't know how the whole thing was kept warm during the winter and during summer some of those rooms must've been toasty!! lots of rooms with natural light, including my favourite room, which was called the summer house...there were small coloured pieces of glass in the windows of the room, which made the whole room feel really colourful, yet really light and airy at the same time...very cool...i wouldn't mind having a room like that in my own house...(if I ever have my own house)

the palace was made of wood and marble, and built under the direction of persian, ottoman, and italian architects...in one of the buildings was a small mosque, for the personal use of the khan, I think...there were several rooms for hanging out, and a room with instruments...i don't know if musicians played regularly, or the instruments were just displayed because that's what existed back then...

the first room I saw was the divan room...the guidebook says it is dimly lit, but it didn't seem that way to me...the chandelier was lit, and the sun was streaming through the windows...apparently this is the room where governmental decisions were discussed and made...

one of the courtyards inside the palace has two fountains...(in fact, there were a number of fountains all over the palace)...one of them is called the fountain of tears...

there were a couple garden areas, i'm sure they are quite beautiful later in spring and during summer...as I saw them, there wasn't much to see...on the second floor of one of the buildings were museum exhibits of the life of the khans...the clothes they were, the items to be found in the household, etc...the shoes the ladies were looked really uncomfortable...they didn't do a lot of walking; at least I hope not...cooking utensils, tools for shaping/cutting leather, etc...nifty to see, but I never spend very long in those sorts of exhibits...

after the living part of the palace, I ended up back in front...i would've loved to have seen the inside of the big mosque, but that didn't seem to be open...i don't know if it is still in use, or if it was closed for another reason...i was able to walk through part of the cemetary, but not through the entire area...and I wasn't able to enter the two tombs I could see...who knows how much there might have been to see inside each tomb...there looked to be an entrance to more gardens near one end of the compound, but that entrance was closed off...i could see a tank in there, I wish I could've walked around a bit...

by this point, there were more people wandering around, and i'd seen every area I could...i bought one set of postcards and left the palace...(on a side note, crimea in general isn't nearly as good at postcards as the other areas of the country i've seen...yet crimea has heaps to see and do...why aren't there many postcards?)

after the palace I tried to find a center of crimean handicrafts...but it seemed to be closed...i saw signs pointing to the location, but there were no open doors, nor any signage on the door itself...i don't know if it was closed for the winter or just the day...i was gutted, i'd gotten myself to be looking forward to buying a ring with silver filigree...oh well...

from there I walked back to the bus station...it wasn't a short walk, but not long either...and I had plenty of time to kill, so the time didn't matter, either...at the bus station I was able to catch a bus to simferopol almost straightaway...howeva, this bus took me to the main bus station of simferopol, not the bus station next to the train station...so I had to find a marshrutka going in the right direction to get to the train station...(i knew the number of the correct marshrutka, but it isn't easy to figure out the right direction)...

I had a lot of time at the train station, so I found a place to check internet for an hour...the first time i'd been online since leaving kyiv...i don't know if it was a good or bad thing that there were only 4 messages in my inbox?!?!

more time in the train station...for a while I sat next to a lady who smelled like dill pickles...i love pickles and all, but it was overpowering...how does someone smell that stronly of pickles? Not long after she stood up, a man who smokes sat down...at that point I decided I preferred pickles...there was no smoking in the train station, but this man had definitely just finished smoking a cigarette outside, as he REEKED of smoke...yuck...as far as smoking goes, people can do whateva they want...i just don't like the way it affects me...

eventually my train was listed on the departures board, I boarded, and 13 hours later I arrived again in kyiv...