Toward the Secrets of Olden Ochakiv

In 1656, Turkish traveler Elvia Celebi arrived in Oziu, known as Ochakiv in the history, an important center of the Ottoman Empire on the Black Sea northern littoral. What caught his eyes were its impregnable walls, a wooden bridge over a deep moat, which was drawn up every night, and the gun muzzles sticking out of all the battlements.

Coming to the town center, he noted with satisfaction the careful planning of buildings and the cleanliness of the paved streets along which two-story adobe houses huddled next to each other. Then he saw the palace of the Pasha and his retinue, the slender minarets of mosques, fountains, and, of course, a multitude of tender southern roses. Numerous ships from various countries lay in the harbor. It is they that flooded the town with the crowds of multilingual sailors and traders. A Turkish garrison was stationed in the fortress; there also were craftsmen and merchants; even overseas engineers, Germans and Frenchmen, who had come to take part in building the fortifications.

Ukrainian Cossacks were also frequent guests — not only to raid but to trade as well, bringing hide, tobacco, tallow, flax fabric, yarn, timber, coal, dried fish, and fish glue from Ukraine. Our merchants would buy and take to Ukraine wines, salt, spices, dried fruit, olive oil, incense, oranges, cotton print, Moroccan leather, horse harnesses, and sheepskins.

In peacetime, Armenians and Greeks, Wallachians and Ukrainians could find shelter here. Each was free to pray to his god according to his own custom: a Christian (Orthodox) Moldavian church conducted service not far from the local pasha’s palace and the mosque. The Ochakiv pasha hired many Cossacks to maintain law and order in the town, guard the sea routes, and sometimes even calm some excessively uninhibited janissaries.

Beyond the town walls, there were hundreds of reed-thatched Wallachian structures, Nogai yurts, small retail stores, inns, mills, and warehouses. Vegetable gardens spread out well into the boundless steppe.

Unfortunately, the town’s further destiny was far from happy. A Russian army assault in 1788 transformed the fortress and the town quarters into terrible ruins. The Russian Empire replaced the Ottoman, leaving reconstruction plans never fulfilled, and the garrison commander lived in the lower, intact, part of the pasha’s house. Gradually, residents scavenged the remains of fortress walls and other structures and made use of them in their households.

In the early twentieth century, this was a small steppe town which, however, did not lose its military and strategic importance due to its location, and large military units were stationed there under both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

All of historical value in Ochakiv was left under the cobblestones and houses, but it constantly revealed itself as researchers continued to find old coins, smoking pipes, clay vessels, and numerous mysterious hollows in the downtown. The past comes back in the local legends of the untold wealth of the Turkish treasury hidden in the town’s underground labyrinth. Sometimes, to the utter astonishment of residents, brick structures sink underground overnight, as with half the two-story building of a travel bureau in the early 1990s. Mountains of crushed rock and sand, brought over by powerful dump trucks, could vanish, like sand, into the subterranean galleries.

The town erected, according to some sources, by Mengli Girey in 1492 at the place of older, perhaps pages of its history to assume distinctive outlines as museum exhibits or library books. On the initiative of the Ochakiv residents themselves, area researchers, and local authorities, who turned for help to the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences, a systematic study of the town began in 1989. Tremendous work was done in 1989-1996 by the Ochakiv expedition of the Institute of Archeology and, in later years, by the joint Ukrainian-Turkish expedition of the institute and the Turkish Historical Society.

Gradually, the 4-6 meter deep cultural layers revealed more and more new outlines of Ochakiv from the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, including those described by Evlia Celebi, in Istanbul archival documents, and in contemporary accounts. It became possible to localize on the modern city’s map the place of the ancient and medieval centers and its separate parts, and to compare them with the eighteenth century maps and plans.

Exposed were the remains of the walls of the former palace complex, the basements of monumental buildings in the Old Fortress, fragments of residential houses, ruins of a Turkish tower, an aqueduct, fortifications, and a cemetery of soldiers who defended the fortress. A small yurt- like structure was dug out beyond the fortress, with the remainders of reed- lined structures described by the same Celebi.

All fortress items bear the marks of terrible ruin: numerous bomb craters, dozens of cannonballs sometimes stuck in the house walls, bomb fragments, broken horse bones, and iron pellets baked together in a blaze.

The town’s former prosperity emerges in the shape of architectural details and the chipped-off pieces of marble tombstones, thousands of various objects once belonging to soldiers, craftsmen, and, of course, society’s upper crust. There are exquisite faience articles made by well-known masters from the Ottoman Empire’s art centers: quaint little coffee and tea cups, saucers, plates, and ceramic tiles. A huge collection of finely-ornamented smoking pipes with imbedded marble, gold, and the masters’ personal hallmarks. In addition to clay masterpieces, pipes were also found, made of jade and meerschaum, snow-white, carved, imbedded with tiny royal-blue glass beads, traditional Turkish “eyes” to protect against evil spells. Various adornments of semiprecious stones, including a unique carnelian ring insert adorned with a highly artistic miniature depicting lush chrysanthemums and bearing the caption Ismail and the date 1749 in the center. Glass vessels also strike one by their perfect shapes. Burgeoning transit trade is testified to by finds of copper, bronze, and silver coins, including those struck in Istanbul. Special pointed sticks remind us of Koran readers.

Ochakiv’s mysterious cave-ins and mazes have become the object of test pits and archeological excavations under the guidance of Candidate of Sciences (history) T. A. Bobrovsky. The researchers have drawn up the first map of the underground city and identified the most dangerous areas where cave-ins could occur. However, this is only the first step. The trouble-free development of the town requires further research and special serious efforts of speleologists, archeologists, builders, geologists, and other specialists. And all this requires money...

The monuments discovered by archeologists and a richest collection of material culture artifacts laid the groundwork for establishing the Historical and Cultural Preserve, initiated by the Institute of Archeology and Ochakiv city council members in 1996, but very much is still to be done to strengthen and develop it.

The results of Ochakiv research became the object of scholarly papers at a 1997 international congress in Ankara, Turkey, and a number of international and Ukrainian conferences. Great assistance in the coordination of Ukrainian-Turkish studies was rendered by the Embassy of Turkey in Ukraine and the Ambassador of the Turkish Republic, Ali Karaosmanoglu. Thanks to his personal initiative, the presidents of our countries were also informed about the results of cooperation between the Turkish and Ukrainian researchers, when President Suleyman Demirel of Turkey visited Kyiv in May 1998.

As recently as ten years ago it was impossible even to think about joint Turkish-Ukrainian excavations, but, despite all the current hardships of Ukrainian science, such cooperation has itself become a historical fact.

№14 April 25 2000 «The Day»
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