A single square medieval tower still stands above the beaches of Alushta, wrapped now by the balconies and rooftops of a modern resort town. It is easy to walk past. The tourists on the seafront promenade, the Naberezhnaya, are mostly looking the other way, toward the water and the row of converted boat docks that now serve as sand. But that tower, and the shattered walls around it, are the reason a town exists here at all. This stretch of Crimea's southern coast has been worth defending since the sixth century, and Alushta grew up in the shadow of the fortress that did the defending.
The fortress was called Aluston, and it was built around the sixth century AD on the orders of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, positioned to watch the Angar Pass, the mountain gap that funnels traffic down from the Crimean interior to the sea. For an empire trying to hold a distant coastline, this was strategic ground: whoever controlled the pass controlled who reached the shore. Aluston grew from a garrison outpost into a small fortified town, changing hands as the great powers of the Black Sea rose and fell. Byzantines held it, then lost it, then held it again across the early medieval centuries, each ruler adding to walls first laid down in Justinian's name. To stand beneath the surviving tower is to stand at a hinge point of that long contest for the coast.
In 1239 the Mongols swept through and destroyed the fortress, but the site was too valuable to abandon, and it rose again. By the late fourteenth century the merchant republic of Genoa had taken the town, calling it Lusta, and they rebuilt the stronghold with three towers and installed a consul to govern their Black Sea trade. The Genoese were traders first and soldiers second, weaving Crimea into a commercial web that reached back to Italy. Their tenure ended in 1475, when the Ottoman Turks seized the southern coast and, having no use for a rival's fort, let it decline into a quiet village. Each of those regimes left a layer in the stone, and the ruin standing today is a Genoese tower on Byzantine bones, a small monument to how many empires wanted this shore.
Modern Alushta wears its history lightly. It is a summer resort, unpretentious and a little chaotic, where the old harbor docks have been given over to swimmers and the seafront turns into something close to a carnival when the season peaks. People come to swim, to eat, and to be sociable, and the town obliges. Portions in the local eateries run famously small, so the standing advice is to order two of everything, and the plov, that rich Turkic dish of rice and meat, is the thing to order first. In the evenings the promenade fills with strolling crowds and the easy, unhurried mood of a place whose whole purpose, for now, is pleasure rather than defense.
Alushta's greatest asset may be what lies just beyond it. The town sits at the foot of the mountains, and the same Angar Pass that once made it worth fortifying now makes it a doorway to some of Crimea's most striking landscapes. A short way inland rises the tent-shaped mass of Chatyr-Dag, honeycombed with famous caves; nearby, on the slopes of Demirci, stands the eerie Valley of Ghosts, where fog and weathered stone conjure figures out of rock. The strict Crimean Nature Reserve, guarding the peninsula's highest peaks and oldest forests, begins not far to the west. For many travelers Alushta is less a destination than a base, a comfortable seaside perch from which to strike out into the wild high country each day and return, sunburned and content, to the promenade by night.
Alushta lies at 44.67 degrees north, 34.40 degrees east, on Crimea's southern coast where the mountains meet the Black Sea. From the air, look for the town cupped between the shoreline and the steep wall of the Crimean Mountains, with the Angar Pass notching the ridgeline directly inland to the northwest. The nearest airport is Simferopol International (ICAO UKFF), about 25 kilometers north over the mountains.