Cave Cities

Cave Cities

cave monastery sister organizations
Wednesday October 28, 2009

I was picked up promptly by my guide and driver this morning. I slept on the train very well but I'm still tired. My guide is a chatty fellow and while he is Ukrainian and Crimean, he is more Russian than anything and says everyone here speaks Russian even though they are supposed to speak Ukrainian. He also visited the U.S. this year to see 5 of his former clients who all invited him over. So he saw Utah, Nevada, Southern California, and Arizona. He loved Bryce Canyon and Yosemite and took 5000 pictures while there. And he is flexible so whatever I want to do, he will accommodate me and he has suggestions to see different things. Today he missed his volleyball game because he had to come pick me up at the train station but he has been playing for 40 years and plays on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. He is retired after 25 years in the Soviet Navy on all kinds of boats but he couldn’t retire until after the Soviet Union broke up because you just don’t retire from the Soviets but he got his pension. WHEW. I learned all this on the walk from the train carriage to the car and before we were ever out of the parking lot. I think I might be too quiet and dull for him. Oh dear.

caves monastery
Driving from Simferopol (train station) to Sevastopol (apartment), we are to stop at the town of Bakhchisaray where there is a palace and also a Caves Monastery. We are too early for the palace so we drive through the town to the monastery and although you are supposed to park at the bottom of the hill, he drives halfway up, lucky me.
The Caves Monastery is not very large. These are limestone bluffs with seashells in the layers so it is easy to dig out caves. The monastery has 17 monks now and a wall of affiliations with other monasteries and churches throughout the world. Each one has a small inset on the plaque with dirt in it from that church or monastery. The chapel is quite small but lovely. As we are leaving a group of about 40 older people filed up the stairs and into the chapel for a service.

cave city
My guide tells me that there is a cave city that is about a 20 minute walk from here and it is a good one and the easiest one to reach as the path is paved. My feet aren’t hurting yet so I say let’s go. What he neglects to tell me is that the path is only paved part way and the entire way is uphill. The last half to the city gate is all rocky and steeper at the end. As we go he tells me a story of one of his clients who weighed 225 kgs but wanted to get up there so climbed slowly and made it. How could I possibly turn back after that story?

silk road between limestone cliffs
We made it to the gate which was cleverly hidden around turns so a battering ram could not be used to breach the gate. Into the city and to see any of the caves, there is more "up" over more steep rocks and wagon ruts in the path. I gamely follow him. There are school holidays now so there are several groups of mixed age children roaming the cave city. My guide takes me to the viewpoint so we can look down upon the old Silk Road snaking through the limestone bluffs. I didn’t need translation to know the teachers were forbidding their students to get close to the edge.
We wander through the city and look at some of the buildings that are standing, a couple of Knessets, a mausoleum, and the first wall. The Tartars had built this city or rather they were good fighters but not good builders so they hired the Crimea people to build the city but refused to let them live inside the city walls. The Crimea people weren’t dumb so they built them a wall but then built themselves a second wall to protect their homes. The Tartars were fine with this because they now had two walls to stay behind.

weeping fountain and Pushkin
We go into the largest cave which the students are standing in and hollering to get the echoes. Finally it is time to head back down to the car and we pass several vendors who daily make this climb to be close to the cave city and sell their goods.
We are now able to visit the palace which he warned me would not be as nice as Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. This was a small palace that was mostly a museum now but it did have some lovely fountains including a weeping fountain that Pushkin wrote a poem about and all the students must learn this poem in school. Also a very nice Muslim cemetery. It didn’t take long to visit the palace and as my legs were still jelly from the climb up and down the mountain, I declined going up more stairs to view the art museum which he said didn’t have much.
Now he asks if I want to go directly to my apartment in Sevastopol or take a country road drive and have some lunch at a Crimean Tatars restaurant. I opt for this and we go driving through the country past the location of the Charge of the Light Brigade. I am going to have to bone up on my Crimean War history. The restaurant had good food but we had to sit at a short table and “lounge” at the table which I can’t do with my arthritis so I wasn’t able to eat all my food because it was too painful and uncomfortable for me. My guide had them put the rest of my lunch in a doggy bag but I wasn’t able to bring home the rest of my soup which is sad because it was very good.
A stop at the grocery store so I will have some breakfast and then to the apartment. I am staying in a beautiful 2 bedroom apartment that has a lovely view out the back of the dry docks. However, where I had too much heat in Kiev and Kharkov, here I have no heat yet as they haven’t turned on the city heat. Luckily there is a small unit for air conditioning but also does heat. So I have deserted the living room and am holed up in the bedroom where it is warm, probably too warm now to sleep. It’s either too hot or too cold for me most of the time. And I had counted on the warm radiators to dry my laundry.