Qırq Or

The best caves in Crimea are found around Bakhchisaray, of course. From the Bakhchisaray train station, you catch marshrutka bus no. 2 and, if you can squeeze in, it takes you to the entrance of the valley that will lead you to Qırq Or. If there isn’t space, you walk past the Khan’s Palace or Khan Saray, cross the river, and keep walking to the Mariam Dere valley entrance and then all the way up. You go past the cave monastery and the well outside the Dervish cemetery until you end up at the entrance to the cave city of Qirq Or, aka Chufut Kale, or “Jewish Rock,” the old Karaim capital of Crimea. Nothing much is left of the city, apart from the caves and the cemetery.

Buy a ticket, climb the steep path to the Kucuk Kapu, or the Small Gate, turn right, walk past the acoustic cave, the tiny Karaim museum and the two kenasas, or Karaim synagogues, to Biyuk Kapu, or the Big Gate, with the Karaim tamga, or coat of arms, carved above the door, and head East, to the Karaim cemetery.

The Karaims are the smallest nation on the planet and an autochthonous Crimean tribe of supposedly Turkic origin. They adopted the Karaite version of Judaism in some century or another. Only two thousand of them remain, mostly in the diaspora. The cemetery, Balta Tiymez, or “The Axe Won’t Touch,” is a shady grove of sacred oak trees with hundreds of gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions. Women on them have Turkic names, and men have Jewish ones. One of the graves is said to belong to Isaac Sangari, the rabbi who converted Khazars to Judaism.

After the cemetery, turn right and walk until you reach Tepe Kermen, the first cave city, where you can stay, for free. It’s an amazing place with cave churches and great views from the precipices, but too touristy and, again, not great for enlightenment.

The Cave

I turned left onto the neighboring plateau, which has no name and no water sources marked on the map, and is therefore considered unlivable. I had the place all to myself, square kilometers of it. I found three springs in the caves on the precipice, set up a tent in a grotto above an old Soviet military base, boiled some herbal tea, and started to wait for enlightenment.

For 9 days, I fasted. Nothing happened. The guy on Incir, the master of Prakshalana, said, “You will hear voices on day 3 or 4. Don’t fast for more than 10 days. End the fast slowly, drink juices, eat porridge.” He lost count of days and started chewing cookies on day 11.

I didn’t hear any voices. But something else happened, later. I had too much energy, so I was running around in the woods and up and down my mountain, down to the blue lake with blue mud, across the road from Kachi Kalyon, the cave city of the Goths, the first Christians of Crimea.

On day 9, I went to the water spring by the lake. I found a one-liter beer bottle by the spring. I thought it was water, but it was not. This was the end of my fast. I was drunk and hungry.

There were some blue guys by the lake, drunk, noisy, and covered with blue mud. I hadn’t seen any humans for a while, and I can’t say that I was happy to meet them. They tried to feed sausages to me. They said, “Have you been to the monastery to the left of Kachi Kalyon? They have borshch and give it to everyone, for free. And they have a very funny church.” I finished my beer, washed off the blue mud, crossed the road, and climbed the stairs made of tires to the monastery.

The Monastery

The monastery was built on top of some old caves, most probably, illegally. The cave church looked like a Buddhist shrine and a yurt, a nomad’s tent. It was colorful and shiny. The icons were printed on plastic. The walls were painted with phosphorescent pigments. I loved it, but there was no borshch.

I walked to the exit. I found a monk at the souvenir shop. He looked like a guy from an icon. “Excuse me, what about borshch?” I said. “What borshch? Are you hungry? You don’t have money? Hold this, I’ve saved some,” he said, giving me a handful of hryvnias. I’d never have taken them, but the gurus at Incir preached that you have to accept the divine gifts sent to you by Ganesha himself, or he’ll be offended. When I counted the money, it was exactly the price of a 3rd class train ticket to Kyiv. I said, “Thanks, I’ll pay you back next summer.” He laughed and took me to the canteen. “Give her some borschch,” he said and disappeared.

On the way back, I followed a narrow path along the edge of the abyss on top of Kachi Kalyon, the Gothic cave city. People were bungee jumping from the plateau. I went to have a look, and found some treasures at the side of the path: a kilo of rice, some canned food left by tourists going home for whoever finds it, a pot and a pan, and a bottle of oil. There was no one around, except for the guys taking a leap of faith into the abyss, tied to rubber strings. I grabbed my divine gifts and went back to my grotto.

But the time was running out, for me and for Crimea. It was October 2013.

The End

Now I had tons of food. There were also mushrooms everywhere. Not that kind of mushroom, just normal ones, big and small. There was an invasion of mushrooms that year in the woods all over Ukraine – south, north, west, and center, not sure about the east. Ask any babushka in Ukraine about mushrooms. She will say that they grew like crazy before the war. That’s what they did in 1941. That’s what they did in 2013, my last time in Crimea.

I thought, I’d finish all the mushrooms around my tent and then go home to Kyiv before the snow fell on the tops of the Crimean mountains. I fried them and dried them, and they kept popping up, thousands of them. I gave up on mushrooms, packed my tent, my pots, my pans, and hid it all in my secret grotto above the military base, to pick it up the next March. That was the plan. That was the last time I had a plan.

The plan was to come to Crimea with the first rays of the spring sun, stay all summer in caves and woods, see no one, eat mushrooms and berries, drink from water springs, spend nothing, do nothing, think of nothing, and then maybe rent a house for winter, somewhere on the coast, somewhere like Koktebel.

That was a great plan. I had been thinking for years about relocating to Crimea, but the locals were mostly unfriendly, those locals that were brought in after the deportation of Crimean Tatars, or Qirimli, in 1944. I couldn’t figure out how I could possibly coexist with those unfriendly blonds on the shore of our inhospitable Black Sea, our Pont Axinus, our Mare Scythicum, our Cimmerian Lake. I thought, next year, I’ll give it a try.

So, I hid my stuff for next spring. I filled my now empty backpack with Crimean herbs I had collected on my private plateau, and marched from my secret grotto down the hill, following the small paths towards the big one that would take me through the woods and to the big road. There I could catch a marshrutka to Bakhchisaray.

The Warning

Down the hill I trotted happily, until I stopped in the middle of the woods, near a small spring, to catch my breath and have a last look around. I had passed the place a hundred times that summer. I stared at the spring and froze, not recognizing anything. It was like déjà vu you get as a child. It was like you were staring at a wall when you were 3 years old, but your mind was on some other planet. But it wasn’t déjà vu and it wasn’t a voice. It was a millisecond of omniscience. When I unfroze and blinked, I knew there would be no Crimea for me next year. There would be no Crimea, there would be a war, a WWIII, and there was something about a nuclear bomb in that message that arrived straight to the middle of my head.

The year was 2013, the month was October, snow fell on the summits of the mountains, life was great, there were no clouds whatsoever on the horizon, and no reasons to receive weird messages. Strange things in Kyiv started happening in late November, and it was still a good six months until the war.

Kyiv

My tent is still waiting for me in Crimea, for over ten years now. The Crimean herbs in my backpack became Crimean tea that we’d drink endlessly in my kitchen in Kyiv during the night vigils of the Maidan winter with fellow revolutionaries from all over the country, who were sleeping in shifts on the floor of my one-room apartment. Day shift, night shift, peaceful protest in the frozen Square. That winter, two more warnings arrived in my head, with the same text. “WWIII, millions will die.” Then there was blood on Maidan, lots of blood, the rivers of blood, the smell of death. Then there were funerals. Then, in March, Crimea was gone.

The War

Then the war started, and never ended. But that’s another story.

(… to be continued…)

Transadaptation Volume 5 – Of Flowing Vicissitudes

January: The Night the Stars Stopped Shining – Sarah-Leah Pimentel (South Africa)

February: Three Sides to Every Story – Krisztina Janosi (Hungary)

March: Rain Trap – Adriana Uribe (Columbia)

April: Priorities – Narantsogt Baatarkhuu (Mongolia)

May: The Night in Heaven – Armine Asryan (Armenia)

June: Witches Don’t Burn – Alejandra Baccino (Uruguay)

July: A Regular Flat – Mateusz Tymoszewski (Poland)

August: Many Happy Returns – Svetlana Molchanova (Russia)

September: And Now, It Will All Go Downhill – Jonay Quintero Hernandez (Spain)

October: Planet Qirim – Anastasiia Leonova (Ukraine)

November: You Are Her, Aren’t You? – Seyit Ali Dastan (Turkey)

December: Culture Shock – Veronika Groke (Austria)

Background – Context

Transadaptation Volume 4: Material Dissent – Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2023)

Transadaptation Volume 3: Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2022)

Transadaptation Volume 2: Conceived – Childhood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2021)

Transadaptation Volume 1: In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2020)

Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)

La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)

The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)

L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)

From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)

Emblems and stories on the international community

Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world

Credits

Left column (top to bottom): 1. Balaklava, Crimea – In the evening – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Feodosia, Crimea – On the bike – Francisco Rioseco (Unsplash); Evpatoria, Crimea – Swimming – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock)

Middle column (top to bottom): 1. Yalta, Crimea – View from above – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Simferopol, Crimea – Feeding pigeons – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Evpatoria, Crimea – Chaplin visiting Crimea – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock)

Right column (top to bottom): 1. Sevastopol, Crimea – A scenic view – Konstantin Dyadyun (Unsplash); Bakhchisarai, Crimea – Road to Cave City – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Crimea – At the port – Angelika Agibalova (Unsplash)

Source: The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed