If you were to sit for an hour, rocking and swaying to the ambling gait of a rural rail carriage heading south from Simferopol' on the very southern fringes of the Eurasian plain, you might be serenaded, as I was, by the shrill strum of a gypsy guitarist and the nasal-twanged song of his eight-year-old son. Django Reinhardt where are you? If you too had been with me, your train would have been shambling into a narrow, sheltered valley shielded by limestone cliffs. Two vendors would have already passed through the carriage, though none offered çay. This was not Turkey. Through the dust and smears of the train window, and from the timber slats of the proletarian seats, vines and olives may be seen all about . and cement factories too. Villagers' mud-brick houses and yards were strung along the roadways just as they might in the dusty villages near Edirne and Manisa. Each had a barking dog, strutting chickens and familiar footpaths alongside that never seemed to join without a choked gutter, two uneven steps and three loose pavers. But this was not Turkey. This was Turkic Bakchisaray,the place of the palace of gardens as the name goes in Nogai Turkic tongue that the Tatars of the Crimea speak.

I was in a place that resembles a teardrop. I was on the northern shore of the Black Sea, in the centre of what is at once an abode of peace and a vale of tears, a little peninsula that seems - like a last honey drop - to hang by a thread (called Perekop) onto the Ukrainian steppe. Wild Christian fighters, called Cossacks, once roamed and raided from the rampaging rivers and fertile plains to the north, at Zaporozhe, and to the east, in the Don and the Kuban. The Islamic foes of Cossacks, the Chechens and the Tatars, are and were respectively to be found in the mountains to the East, and the more removed steppes of Crimea, Siberia and the Terek. As you move upstream from the great rivers flowing from the north, you'd have found and you'll still find first Ukrainians and then Russians. And on the steppe you'd have encountered and you'll still encounter some Kalmyks too, Buddhists all, having wandered off from Tibet.

Abode of tears; vale of peace. We are in the Europe of the old USSR, in a place that's now Russian in tongue and population, but ironically now too an autonomous province of Ukraine. These changes in tongues and the populations began in the 1770s, when a great Russian general, Mikhail Kutuzov, humbled the forces of the last Tatar khan and during that battle lost the eye that only pretended to treat with Napoleon in 1812. These changes quickened after the 1860s as Russian gentry hastened to imitate their great libertine and liberating tsar, Alexander II, who built a palace, the Livadia, near Yalta, on a sun-drenched Crimean coast. The same changes soured and stampeded in 1941-44 when generalissimo Joseph Stalin, fearing subversion, cruelly deported every single Tatar of the Crimea, despatching these Moslem garden-folk to the wild waste of the Kazakh steppe. Then Nikita Khrushchev just papered things over, even airily attaching Crimea to his native Ukraine. Now the Tatars of the Crimea are slowly returning, once Brezhnev had impliedly relented their exile and Gorbachev had allowed their fate to be discussed. But the same Tatars of the Crimea, people with shattered families and a lost language, must now find new homes on the fringes of farms and towns their forebears once founded, their new lives blighted by the unemployment which masquerades under the name of re-structuring in every post-Soviet land.

My rattling, rambling train journey was really a journey of discovery of the world of a group of Turks almost as forgotten as the Uighurs of Kashgar in western China, the Uzbeks of Tashkent, and the Mameluks of Egypt. The people of the Crimea I sought were people of the Khans of the Nogai clan of Girey, descendants of the thirteenth-century Tatar Khans of the Golden Horde, heirs in turn of the Mongol Chinggis Khan. They had embraced Islam in the thirteenth century. By the fifteenth century, their Crimea had emerged as the most prosperous state on the western edge of the Eurasian plain. My journey was to the pleasure place their Khans Girey had commenced to build amid the springs, garden, vines and bathhouses in the valley of Bakchisaray in 1422. They had ruled from there till 1783. The same people had built from the 1490s - in partnership with Jews, called Karaimes, who disdained rabbis, only accepting Torah, not Talmud - a mighty fort in the limestone hills above and beyond, calling it Chufut Kale.

Bakchisaray was for almost four hundred years the capital of a great Islamic state in Europe. Tatar horsemen were formidable offensive troops in Europe; fighting off the Poles, Lithuanians and the Moscovites till the 1730s. They always demanded tribute and raided Christian towns and villages - including Moscow in 1382, 1546 and 1607 - for livestock, money and slaves. The exalted in their harems, horticulture, horse and herdsmanship, things in which Ukrainians and Russians were generally not as adept. Accepting Ottoman suzerainty from 1475, the Tatars of the Crimea took up a valued place in the Ottoman army as semi-independent raiders (ak¹nc¹lar) answering to their own Khan. I had just been studying in Moscow just that kind of work on the Ottoman behalf in helping to engineer a great Russian defeat in Moldavia in 1711.

So wander with me now through the Khans Girey of Bakchisaray's walled world and moated malls. We think that we know what to expect. Inside awaits a palace of pavilions, gardens, fountains and courtyards. The town beyond also resembles the Ottoman world of merchants hans and kervansarays and artisans' guild streets. Just inside the gate, we can go past the mosque and adjacent hexagonal mausoleum that might be in Bursa or Amasya. The Khan's bathhouse lies beyond. (Don't tell our AFoT secretary, Susan Aykut.) We'll go past storehouses, stables, communal kitchens and guardhouses. Everything seems so Ottoman, so Turkish, so familiar. But - as always when we travel - we're primed to see sights we're supposed to see. There are also silences we're meant to miss. Memorials and museums manipulate us. The only hint we'll see now of the many thousands of slaves traded from and through here is a melancholyFountain of Tears (1764), a sour Sultan's unusual memorial to a favourite concubine. There is nothing to remind us, however, of this or any other captive Christian or Cherkassian concubine's tears. And whereas now, sauntering through, we can freely see the secluded harem, we could in times past only imagine those pain and pleasure grounds, glimpsing over the walls the whimsical second storeys and roofs of its winter and summer pavilions, catching but a whiff of the rose garden, and hearing just a faint echo of the chatter in its gardens and the gurgle of its fountains. We could be in or about Topkap¹ Saray¹. We are reminded that forThe Friends of Turkey there is more to Turks and Turkish civilization than Turkey itself.

Adrian Jones January 2004

Dr Adrian Neil Jones is Senior Lecturer in History, History Program, School of Historical and European Studies, at LaTrobe University. He is also Convener, VCE Humanities, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Chair of History Council of Victoria and co-Director, National Centre for History Education. At LaTrobe, Adrian teaches Russian and Soviet history, Modern European history, Ottoman history and historiography. His particular research interests are the history of Imperial Russia and the Ottoman empire, historiography, history pedagogies. He is at present writing a book on historiography, a book or articles on Russian-Ottoman relations in the era of Peter the Great and Ahmed III. An article on the Enlightenment in provincial Russia in the eighteenth century is in preparation. Adrian has dedicated much time to promoting history in the wider community (through the History Council of Victoria) and in schools (throughthe Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority and the National Centre for History Education: http://hyperhistory.org).

Adrian has already published a scholarly monograph, Late-Imperial Russia: An Interpretation (Peter Lang, Bern, 1997) and an award-winning local history, Follow the Gleam: A History of Essendon Primary School, 1850-2000 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2000; Information Victoria prize for the best print publication on history in 2000). He has published scholarly articles on the strengths and limitations of national and Foucauldian-Geertzian historiographies (Meanjin, 2003; The Historical Journal, 2000), on comparative theories of the origins and processes of European revolutions (English Historical Review, 1992; Law in Context, (1994); on twentieth-century French history (on the birth of French Communism in French Historical Studies, 1982); on Vichy in Social History, (1986); on Russian intellectual and social history (The Russo-Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, Macmillan 1999; Journal of Post-Soviet Studies, 2000; The Historical Journal, forthcoming), and on contemporary Russia (Australian Journal of Politics and History, 1995) and on Nationalism and Postcommunism, (Dartmouth, 1995).