Qualla: Taman

Taman: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlixSaz, CC BY-SA 4.0. "Taman is the nastiest little hole of all the seaports of Russia. I was almost starved there, and into the bargain they tried to drown me." So begins one of the strangest chapters in nineteenth-century Russian literature, and the town Mikhail Lermontov describes is a real place: a low, wind-scoured Cossack village on the coast of Taman Bay, an inlet off the Kerch Strait. Lermontov set part of his novel A Hero of Our Time here, and the memorial house that honors him is now one of the village's proudest sights. But the writer's brief, uneasy visit is only the thinnest top layer of a settlement that has been inhabited, abandoned, and rebuilt for nearly three thousand years.

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Image: AlixSaz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Taman: Cities Beneath the Village

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Пётр Иванов, Public domain. Dig anywhere in Taman and you strike history. The modern stanitsa sits directly atop the ancient Greek colony of Hermonassa, founded in the sixth century BCE, and above the medieval trading town of Tmutarakan, once a far-flung outpost of Kievan Rus. Layer upon layer of civilizati...

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Image: Пётр Иванов | Public domain

Taman: The Cossacks Come Ashore

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Djouce from London, CC BY 2.0. The Taman that exists today was born on August 25, 1792, when Zaporozhian Cossacks under Anton Golovaty landed here to establish the first garrison of the Black Sea Cossack Host. Golovaty made the settlement his residence, and the following year the settlers raised an Orthodox ch...

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Image: Dmitry Djouce from London | CC BY 2.0

Taman: War and the Working Coast

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NP2014, CC BY-SA 3.0. The twentieth century brought Taman its hardest years. From September 1942 the village lay under German occupation, and it was not fully freed until the invading forces were driven off the entire Taman Peninsula in October 1943, in some of the bitterest fighting of the war on the...

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Image: NP2014 | CC BY-SA 3.0