Qualla: Eski Kermen

Eski Kermen: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yakudza, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name says it plainly: Eski Kermen, the old fortress. And old it is - a long, narrow plateau rising sheer above the wooded hills of southwestern Crimea, its flat crown pocked with some four hundred chambers hewn directly into the living stone. The buildings that once stood on the surface are almost entirely gone, weathered away over the centuries. What survives is subterranean: a honeycomb of rooms, stairways, and hollows cut into the cliff, a whole town turned inside out and pressed into the rock itself. To walk it now is to move through the bones of a place that was born to guard a frontier and outlasted nearly everyone who ever held it.

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Image: Yakudza | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eski Kermen: A Fortress on the Cliff

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Håkan Henriksson (Narking), CC BY 3.0. Eski Kermen was raised in the sixth century by the Byzantine Empire, built to defend against the westward pressure of the Goturks who ranged across the steppe. The site was chosen for its natural strength: a plateau roughly a kilometer long and only about two hundred meters wide,...

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Image: Håkan Henriksson (Narking) | CC BY 3.0

Eski Kermen: Conquered, But Not Abandoned

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ilya Schurov, CC BY-SA 2.0. Its life as a fortress was cut short. In the seventh or eighth century the Khazars, a powerful steppe people, conquered Eski Kermen, and with that its military importance faded. But the town did not die. Stripped of its strategic role, it carried on as a thriving cave settlement,...

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Image: Ilya Schurov | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eski Kermen: The Slow Emptying

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ilya Schurov, CC BY-SA 2.0. Eventually even that endurance ran out. By the fourteenth century, under the rule of the Tatars, Eski Kermen appears to have been deserted - emptied not by a single catastrophe recorded in the chronicles but by the long, quiet processes that hollow out any settlement when its pur...

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Image: Ilya Schurov | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eski Kermen: Walking the Empty Rooms

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ilya Schurov, CC BY-SA 2.0. Today Eski Kermen is one of Crimea's celebrated cave towns, a protected monument reached by a climb up to the plateau. The reward at the top is a landscape of stillness and stone - openings in the cliff face framing views over the surrounding hills, stairways worn smooth by feet ...

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Image: Ilya Schurov | CC BY-SA 2.0