Crimea in War and Transformation is the first book to examine the terrible toll of violence on Crimean civilians and landscapes from mobilization through reconstruction. When war landed on Crimea's coast in September 1854, multiple armies instantly doubled the peninsula's population. Engineering brigades mowed down forests to build barracks. Ravenous men fell upon orchards like locusts and slaughtered Crimean livestock. Within a month, war had plunged the peninsula into a subsistence crisis. Soldiers and civilians starved as they waited for food to travel from the mainland by oxcart at a rate of 1/2 mile per hour. Every army conscripted Tatars as laborers, and fired upon civilian homes. Several cities and villages-Sevastopol, Kerch, Balaklava, Genichesk among them-burned to the ground. At the height of violence, hysterical officers accused Tatars of betrayal and deported large segments of the local population. Peace did not bring relief to Crimea's homeless and hungry. Removal of dead bodies and human waste took months. Epidemics swept away young children and the elderly. Russian officials estimated the devastation wrought by Crimean War exceeded that of Napoleon's invasion. Recovery packages failed human need, and by 1859, the trickle of Tatar out-migration that had begun during the war turned into a flood. Nearly 200,000 Tatars left Crimea by 1864, adding a demographic crisis to the tally of war's destruction. Drawing from a wide body of published and unpublished material, including untapped archives, testimonies, and secret police files from Russia, Ukraine and Crimea, Mara Kozelsky details in readable and vivid prose the toll of war on the Crimean people, and the Russian Empire as a whole, from mobilization through failed efforts at reconstruction.

During the nineteenth century-as violence, population dislocations, and rebellions unfolded in the borderlands between the Russian and Ottoman Empires-European and Russian diplomats debated the "Eastern Question," or, "What should be done about the Ottoman Empire?" Russian-Ottoman Borderlands brings together an international group of scholars to show that the Eastern Question was not just one but many questions that varied tremendously from one historical actor and moment to the next. The Eastern Question (or, from the Ottoman perspective, the Western Question) became the predominant subject of international affairs until the end of the First World War. Its legacy continues to resonate in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, and the Caucasus today. The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.

In nineteenth-century Russia, religious culture permeated politics at the highest levels, and Orthodox Christian groups-including refugees from the Russo-Ottoman wars as well as the church itself-influenced Russian domestic and foreign policy. Likewise, Russian policy with the Ottoman Empire inspired the creation of a holy place in ethnically and religiously diverse Crimea. Looking to the monastic state of Mount Athos in Greece, Orthodox Church authorities in the mid-1800s attempted to create a monastic community in Crimea, which they called "Russian Athos." The Crimean War catalyzed the Russian Christianization that had begun decades earlier and decimated Crimea's Muslim population. Wartime propaganda portrayed Crimea as the cradle of Russian Christianity, and by the end of the war, the Black Sea Region acquired a Christian identity. The same interplay of religion, politics, and culture has found new ground in Crimea today as its sacred monuments and ruins lie vulnerable to abuse by nationalist groups sparring over the land. Christianizing Crimea is the first English language work to analyze the Christian renewal in Crimea. Drawing on archives in Odessa, Simferopol, and St. Petersburg that to date have remained untapped by Western scholars, Kozelsky provides both a fascinating case study of past and present religious nationalism in Eastern Europe and an examination of the political conflicts and compromises endemic to holy places. She explores the diverse strategies of church expansion, the importance of Byzantine history and the Greek population, the assimilation of local pagan and Tatar traditions into sacred narratives, the crafting of Russian identity through print culture, and Crimea's re-Christianizing in the post-Soviet era. Kozelsky's unique approach joins the fields of contemporary history, religion, and archaeology to show how Crimea has been reshaped as a holy place. Christianizing Crimea will appeal to both scholars and general readers who are interested in past and current religious and political conflicts.