The origins of Saky are lost. Under the Crimean Khanate it was only a small village, and as late as 1805 it counted fewer than four hundred residents, more than ninety-five percent of them Crimean Tatars, the peninsula's Turkic-speaking Muslim people who had lived here for centuries. It was a quiet place with a strange asset in its lake. The bathhouse and the hospital office followed, and slowly a resort economy began to take shape around the mud that the Tatar villagers had known about long before any doctor arrived to write about it. That fragile beginning, though, sat directly in the path of an oncoming war.

In 1854 the Crimean War arrived on Saky's doorstep. Allied forces came ashore near the town, landing between Saky Lake and Kyzyl-Yar Lake before marching on to besiege the great naval fortress of Sevastopol. Early in February 1855, the troops of General Stepan Khroulev massed at Saky before assaulting the enemy positions at Yevpatoria. The village did not survive the campaign; it was completely destroyed by bombardment. When the war ended, the Tatar population, caught in a second wave of emigration that emptied so many Crimean villages, abandoned the ruins. Migrants from the Poltava region resettled the site, joined a little later by Greeks from Constantinople (now Istanbul), so that the rebuilt Saky rose from its ashes with an entirely different face than the one it had worn before.

History kept passing through. In February 1945 the British and American delegations bound for the Yalta Conference landed at Saky's airfield just up the coast, bringing the town within earshot of one of the twentieth century's pivotal meetings. Through all of it, the lake remained the constant. The mud that drew the sick in the 1820s still draws them, and the seaside resorts that line the beaches carry on the vocation Saky discovered almost by accident. Alongside the sanatoriums grew a harder industry, chemical plants extracting bromine, iodine, and other compounds from the mineral-rich waters. A town born from healing mud learned, over two centuries, to survive on both cures and chemistry.