" Tavriia" = "Crimea"?

[Paul B. Gallagher]

William Ryan wrote:

> Even earlier - see Herodotus, History, bk 4, 20. Mid 5th c. BC - so 
> Latin as a source language (see Frans Suasso's posting) is surely not 
> possible, quite apart from geographical considerations. 

Yes, of course, by citing the Latin cognate I didn't mean to assert that 
the name had a Latin origin. The Greeks were obviously there long before 
the Romans arrived.

> The region is still called 'the Taurid' occasionally in English
> writing. But all this is a long way from the original philatelic
> question, which is still puzzling if the stamps were of the Soviet
> period when the pre-Revolutionary name 'Tavricheskaia guberniia' had
> disappeared.
> Will Ryan
> 
> Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
> 
>> The name "Taurica" (Greek: Ταυρίς, Ταυρίδα, Latin: Taurica) goes at 
>> least as far back as Euripides, who wrote of "Iphigenia in Tauris."
>> [snip]

But follow my second link, which you snipped, for a brief history of the 
political units and their names:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurida_Governorate>
    "In 1783, the Khanate of Crimea was annexed by Catherine the Great’s 
Russia. Soon after this the Taurida Oblast (province) was established. 
During the reign of Paul I the oblast was abolished, but soon (in 1802) 
re-established as a Governorate (guberniya). It was a part of the 
Russian Empire until the Russian Revolution of 1918.
    "Following the 1917 October Revolution, the governorate was reformed 
as the Taurida Soviet Socialist Republic (Russian: Советская 
Социалистическая Республика Тавриды - Sovetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya 
Respublika Tavridy) briefly in early 1918 before being overrun by the 
World War I Central Powers. After the reassertion of Soviet control in 
1921, the lands of the governorate were divided between the peninsular 
Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic under the Russian SFSR and 
the mainland portions which accrued to the Ukrainian SSR and were 
divided between what would become (in 1932) the Kherson and 
Dnepropetrovsk Oblasts. Today the mainland portion forms parts of 
Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts while Crimea is the Autonomous Republic 
of Crimea, all subdivisions of Ukraine."

So the question is, what part of the Soviet period? I don't recall the 
dates (if any) cited in the original posting.

I would also note that 17 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, we 
still have Ленинградская область side by side with Санкт-Петербург, so 
there is some precedent for place names persisting after their 
motivations have passed.


-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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