“Cave towns” in the Crimea and the legends of the Deluge

This article analyses the legends of the “traces of the Deluge” in the Crimea, as described in the works of the “Western” and “Eastern” travellers and writers in the Modern period. These legends stated that the ancient inhabitants of the peninsula witnessed that the sea flooded most of the Crimea, so only the mountain tops rose above the waves. There the people built their dwellings, which remains survived as the “cave towns,” the sites, according to our present knowledge, dating back from the Byzantine period. The legends under study reflected the influence of the factors of multicultural origin: the accounts of classical writers, the Crimean Tatar tradition, the attempts of the scholars of the Enlightenment to explain the presence of fossils in highland layers, as well as the fantasies of travellers who tried to impress their readers by the exoticism of distant lands. In the absence of modern ideas concerning the history of the Earth, mountain formation, and geology, travellers’ fantasy, logic and so-called common sense became almost the only methods of studying the past. It is not surprising therefore that pseudo-historical reconstructions appeared in the years when there was no reliable information about the Byzantine-period sites, and the methods of archaeological research were taking their first steps. However, the value of the accounts under present study lies elsewhere: they allow the one to understand the peculiarities of the mentality of the period, as well as to reconstruct the complex, comprehensive process of intercultural communications.