Holy Ground and a Bulwark against “the Other”: The (Re)Construction of an Orthodox Crimea in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Empire

Since March 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimea for the second time after 1783,¹ the impression has arisen that most people in Western Europe discovered a new and until then unknown territory. Maybe older people still remembered the peninsula as a place where politics were made—at the Yalta Conference for instance, convened in the Livadia Palace near Yalta in February 1945, where the heads of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union discussed Europe’s postwar reorganization. For enthusiasts of Russian literature, for example, the peninsula on the northern shores of the Black Sea is connected to