Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/64

 16 FROM THE BLACK SEA TO THE CASPIAN

lying at anchor in the roadstead were bright with bunting, and the streets of the town were lined with holiday-makers in festive garb to match it.

Sevastopol is a place of some fifty thousand inhabitants and is a naval port of the highest significance to Russia. The part which it played in the Crimean War, two generations ago, when Turkey, Great Britain, and France were combined in arms against Russia, and when Sevastopol was the center of action and the object of a long siege, is still fresh in memory. The allied forces reduced it and victoriously entered it on Sept. 11, 1855, only to yield it up again to the government of the Czar by the Treaty of Paris in the following year. Today the visitor is promptly reminded of the official head at St. Peters- burg, for he is immediately obliged to hand in his passport, without which a traveler in Russia has practically no existence, and he learns by experience to cherish this guarantee of free passage with the same care that he guards his letter of credit.

A glimpse of the city is worth the while, as its history goes back to the ancient Greek colony of Chersonesus, which name is still perpetuated in the ruins of Kherson or Korsun, a short distance to the west of the present town. Even in the sixteenth century Sevastopol had not come into existence, for its site was then occupied by the Tatar village of Akhtiar, a settlement that owed its origin to the Mongol invasion of the Crimea. Sevastopol itself, ' the August City,' was founded by Catharine the Second of Russia, in 1784, and the city today is almost wholly Russian, with only a slight tincture of the Orient. The military history of the town, for such a history it is, is summed up in its Museum, filled with mementos of the Crimean War. Its religious history is epitomized in the presence of the Cathe- dral of St. Vladimir, for we must bear in mind that Russia originally entered into the war with Turkey, which ultimately embroiled France and Great Britain, on the claim of defending her right to be the protector of the Greek Christians in the Turkish dominions.

�� �