[gothic-l] the eventual fate of the Crimean Goths

[Anthony Appleyard]

This may or may not be relevant for those who wonder what happpened to the
Crimean Goths. Russia suffered an endless amount of enslaving raids from
Crimea by Crimean Tartars; the slaves and loot were sent to Turkey and sold in
the Middle East. In the reign of Catherine the Great of Russia, a Russian army
broke through the Tartars' defences on the isthmus of Perekop in force and got
into the Crimea and deported / evacuated all the Crimean Christians. This
deprived the Crimean Tartars of very many of their slaves and destroyed the
economic base of the Crimean Tartar state. Soon after, Russia occupied the
Crimea easily. Clearly, in this evacuation, any who still spoke Crimean
Gothic, or who remembered anything about Crimean Goths, would likeliest have
been taken out of the area and their knowledge likely lost to history.
Stalin's deportation of the Crimean Tartars would likely have broken many
remaining threads of traditional knowledge about Crimean Gothic-speakers.

Are there any Crimean placenames that could be of Gothic origin? Best use a
map made before Communist times, as Communists renamed many places in Crimea,
e.g. such re-namings as `Krasnogvardeysk'. In a Crimean War period map I saw
that Sevastopol was also called Akhtiyar at the time.

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