Tmutarakan

Listen first. Small waves move against a low clay bank, and gulls call over the shallow water of Taman Bay. Underfoot, the ground is soft and pale, and here and there it is scattered with broken pottery. These are not ordinary pebbles. Many of them are fragments of jars, roof tiles and bowls, worn smooth by the sea and the wind. You are standing on the edge of a town that lived here for well over two thousand years.

This place is known to historians by many names. The Greeks called it Hermonassa. Later it became Tamatarkha. In the medieval chronicles of Rus, the early state of the Eastern Slavs, it appears as Tmutarakan. Today the ancient settlement lies beside the modern village of Taman, on the peninsula of the same name. It sits at the far western corner of Krasnodar Krai, facing the Kerch Strait and the Crimean shore beyond.

The story begins with the Greeks. Around the sixth century before Christ, Greek settlers sailed into these waters and founded Hermonassa. It was one of many Greek colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea. These towns traded grain, fish and wine across the ancient world. In later centuries Hermonassa became part of the Bosporan Kingdom, a Greek-speaking state that controlled both shores of the strait. So the pottery at your feet may include pieces that are very old indeed.

Empires came and went, and the town survived them. In the early Middle Ages the Khazars, a Turkic people who built a powerful state between the Volga and the Caucasus, held this coast. Under them, the town was known as Tamatarkha. It was a port where many peoples met. Merchants, sailors and craftsmen from the steppe, from Byzantium and from the Caucasus all passed through here.

Then comes the most surprising chapter. In the tenth century, after the fall of Khazar power, Tmutarakan became a principality of Rus. Think about the map for a moment. Kyiv, the centre of Rus, lies far away to the northwest, across hundreds of kilometres of open steppe. Yet this small coastal town was ruled by Rus princes. It was a distant outpost, cut off from the rest of the state, and that isolation shaped its whole history.

The most famous of these rulers was Prince Mstislav, remembered as Mstislav the Brave. The old Rus chronicle tells a dramatic story about him. According to the chronicle, he fought a duel with Rededya, a prince of the Kasogs, a people of the northwest Caucasus. The two men agreed to settle a war by single combat rather than by battle. Mstislav won. It is a vivid tale, and historians treat it as a chronicle story rather than an exact report.

Now for a detail that most visitors miss. In 1792, a marble slab was found near Taman. It carried an old inscription in early Slavic letters. The text says that Prince Gleb measured the sea across the ice, from Tmutarakan to Korchev, the medieval name for Kerch. The inscription gives the year 1068. This object is known as the Tmutarakan Stone. It is one of the oldest dated Slavic inscriptions known, and today it is kept in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Pause on that image. A prince, in the middle of a hard winter, sent men out onto the frozen strait to measure the distance with a rope or a chain. It was an early act of surveying. When the stone was first found, some scholars doubted that it was real. Later study persuaded most experts that it is genuine. Look out across the water toward Crimea and imagine that whole strait white and frozen.

Tmutarakan also appears in the great medieval poem known as The Tale of Igor's Campaign. In the poem, the name carries a sense of something distant and half-legendary, a place at the edge of the known world. But by the end of the eleventh century, the town vanishes from the Rus chronicles. Nomadic peoples gained control of the steppe, and the long road to Kyiv was closed. The Rus outpost simply fades from the written record.

The town did not disappear, however. In later centuries, Genoese merchants from Italy traded here, and they called the place Matrega. Later still, the coast came under Ottoman control. At the end of the eighteenth century the Russian Empire took the region. In 1792, Black Sea Cossacks landed at Taman to settle these lands. The village around you grew from that moment.

There is a literary echo here too. The Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov set a short story called Taman in this village. It forms part of his novel A Hero of Our Time. In the story, a young officer spends a few uneasy nights in a poor hut by the sea and becomes caught up with smugglers. The mood of that story fits this shore well: wind, dark water, and the feeling of being at the edge of things.

The ancient settlement itself is an archaeological site. For many years, scholars have dug here and found layers of the town stacked one above the other — Greek, Khazar, Rus and later. There is an unusual problem, though. The sea is slowly eating the shore. Part of the ancient town has already been lost to Taman Bay. When you see the clay cliff crumbling at the water's edge, you are watching history slowly dissolve.

Before you leave, look down once more at the shards along the beach. Each one passed through human hands. Some may be Greek, some medieval, some much more recent. Please leave them where they lie, because they belong to the site. Then look up at the long horizon and the faint line of Crimea across the strait. Thousands of years of traders, princes and settlers looked at this same view.