"LITTLE JERUSALEM" - EVPATORIYA AND CRIMEA - a talk by the Ukrainian historian Stanislaw Tsalyk about Evpatoriya, a small coastal city where Crimean Tatars, Karaites, Othodox Jews, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Krymchaks lived in peace for many centuries. The city’s religious buildings include three Karaite kenesas, two Jewish synagogues, a Krymchak house of worship, a dozen  mosques (including the Khan Mosque built for the coronation of Crimean khans), a Mevlevi Dervish monastery, an Armenian Apostolic Church, an Armenian Catholic church and a Greek Orthodox Church - all in close proximity. Because of its unique ethnic and religious diversity this area is known as "Little Jerusalem”.

Stanislaw Tsalyk calls himself a local historian.  What makes his work important, however, is his ability to shed light, through a consideration of the local, on more universal themes.  His book Yevpatoria: Walks in Little Jerusalem was first published in 2007 and has been republished several times.  Over the years its central theme - the complexity of Crimea’s multicultural history - has become ever more topical.  Far from being “an ancestral Russian land”, Crimea has only been Russian for 166 years of its 2500 year history.

This talk will be chaired by Donald Rayfield. 

Stanislav Tsalyk is a Ukrainian writer, essayist, historian, researcher of region features. The Member of the National Filmmakers Union of Ukraine (screenwriter) since 1997. The Member of the Association of European Journalists since 2013. A winner of Kyiv City Award in film arts (2016). The author of books and also more than 1000 articles, dedicated to unknown pages of Ukrainian and Kyiv history and life of eminent historical persons. Stanislav Tsalyk was born and now lives in Kyiv, he is the native Kyivan in the fourth generation. 

Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. Born in Oxford in 1942, he has spent most of his working life in London (with a brief spell in Queensland, Australia). He is the author of monographs on Anton Chekhov, the explorer Przhevalsky, and Stalin’s ‘Hangmen’; his Literature of Georgia is now in its third edition. In 2012 he published Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (Reaktion Books); he is also the chief editor of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary.
He has translated a number of Georgian and Russian poets and prose writers. Garnett Press has published his translations of Otar Chiladze’s novels A Man Was Going Down the Road and Avelum. His translations of Varlam Shalamov's collected stories and of Devils' Dance, a novel by the Uzbek Hamid Ismailov, are forthcoming. He has written a number of articles and given talks on the Crimean Tatars and their Khanate.