Stand on the bluff where the settlement once rose and you are thirty-five meters above the floodplain, with the water winding below. The people who lived here chose the position for defense and held it with earth and stone. The main stronghold formed an irregular trapezoid, its ramparts reinforced with masonry, and beyond it the town spread north along the river in lines of houses and workshops. This was no village. The complex at Verkhnii Saltiv gathered together fortifications, a sprawling settlement, and four separate catacomb burial grounds, with still more sites facing it across the reservoir. A written trace survives from the seventeenth century, when a Russian geographic register, the Book of the Great Map, noted the ruined earthworks and called the place Saltanovskoye, a fortress already ancient and abandoned.

Archaeologists call it the Saltovo-Mayaki culture, and Verkhnii Saltiv is one of its two defining sites, the yardstick against which finds across the steppe are compared. It was the material world of the Khazar Khaganate, a confederation of Turkic peoples whose ruling elite, famously, adopted Judaism, making the Khazars one of history's most intriguing polities. The catacomb graves gave up the evidence of ordinary lives: weapons and horse gear, ornaments, the craftsmanship of a society that traded and fought along the river roads. So rich was the site that its finds were dispersed to museums across Europe, from Kyiv and Kharkiv to Odesa, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Sofia, a scattering of a single people's memory across many capitals.

From Babenko's first spadework, the excavations never really stopped. In 1901 formal research began, and between 1905 and 1927 commissions from a half-dozen museums combed the region. After the Second World War, scholars turned to the defensive works themselves, cutting cross-sections through all three lines of the old ramparts and opening dozens of catacomb burials. A 1959 expedition found an entirely new settlement and cemetery on the opposite bank. From 1984 the Kharkiv Historical Museum made the site a standing commitment, sending expedition after expedition. The state recognized what was here, granting protection in 1965, declaring the whole complex a reserve in 1987, and founding the Verkhnii Saltiv historic-archaeological museum-reserve in 1989, so that the buried Khazar world above the Donets could be studied and remembered rather than plowed away.