Qualla: Eski Yurt

Eski Yurt: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Asta, Public domain. For decades, shoppers haggled over vegetables and household goods on a square in Bakhchysarai without knowing - or perhaps without being allowed to remember - that they stood on one of the holiest sites in all Crimea. Beneath the market stalls lay the sanctuary of a warrior-saint the Crimean Tatars called a slayer of dragons. Around it stretched a cemetery where khans had been laid to rest. This is Eski Yurt, whose name means "old settlement" or "old headquarters," a whole medieval town that time and empire pressed down into the ground until only fragments broke the surface.

Read more: Eski Yurt on Qualla

Image: Asta | Public domain

Eski Yurt: A Town on the Trade Road

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Simon Pallas / Gottfried Heinrich Geißler, Public domain. In the days of the Golden Horde, Eski Yurt was large - possibly a proper city - strung along an ancient trade route that linked the Black Sea ports of Chersonesus and Kalamita with the Crimean interior. You can measure its old importance by its dead. Its principal cemetery, Qirq ...

Read more: Eski Yurt on Qualla

Image: Peter Simon Pallas / Gottfried Heinrich Geißler | Public domain

Eski Yurt: The Saint Who Fought Giants

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Travelpleb, CC0. At the heart of the town stood the Aziz, the sanctuary of Malik Ashtar - a symbolic tomb, or maqam, honoring a seventh-century companion of the Caliph Ali who was actually buried far away in Cairo. Crimean Tatar tales, however, gave him a local death. In their telling, Malik Asht...

Read more: Eski Yurt on Qualla

Image: Travelpleb | CC0

Eski Yurt: Tombs of the Girays

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yuriy Zhilovets, CC BY-SA 3.0. Though the great cemetery is gone, a handful of stone mausolea still stand, small domed türbe scattered among the modern houses. There is the tomb of Bey Yude Sultan, mother of a fifteenth-century bey, and the tomb of Ahmed Bey, named for a gravestone found leaning against its wa...

Read more: Eski Yurt on Qualla

Image: Yuriy Zhilovets | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eski Yurt: Erased and Remembered

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Vasbur at ru.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The twentieth century tried to erase Eski Yurt twice over. The Soviet regime closed the sanctuary in the 1920s. Then, in 1948, following the mass deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their homeland, the village - like nearly every Crimean place bearing a non-Russian name - was ...

Read more: Eski Yurt on Qualla

Image: Original uploader was Vasbur at ru.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0