Every traveller, ancient or modern, who has visited the Crimea, has devoted a large portion of his pages to a description of Kertch — a city whose origin is lost in the remotest antiquity, whose vicissitudes of fortune from the period when history replaces fable, are perhaps without a parallel in the annals of the world, and whose antiquarian treasures have beggared the invention of the most audacious archaeologists in tracing them to their source, as they mock the efforts of the most vivid imagination which would realise the wealth, the numbers, the prosperity, and the power of the departed race to whose existence they so mysteriously and yet so strongly testify. The cumulative impression of the glorious memories of countless ages has roused the tamest pens into unbidden eloquence, and struck a spark of Promethean fire from the coldest bosoms: in " thoughts that breathe and words that burn" the enthusiastic pilgrims to this time-hallowed shrine have recalled the traditional glories of the Bosphorian Empire, have dwelt lovingly on the character and career of the hero-king, whose valour and whose accomplishments could not avert his sudden and overwhelming reverse of fortune, nor shield him from the insidious wound of domestic treason which stung him to his self-inflicted fate. The graceful tradition which records that the world-weary and heart-broken Mithridates sought and found the only earthly resting-place where baffled ambition may not reach, nor deceived affections blight, beneath the hill which bears his name, and whence he had so often witnessed his victorious legions gather for fresh conquest, commands, and will still command, despite the stern denial of unsympathising history, a host of unquestioning believers.
The enthusiasm aroused in those whose foot-fall on this classic soil awoke at every step the slumbering echoes of departed grandeur, was only equalled by the intense glow of indignation with which each succeeding chronicler banned the ruthless barbarity of the Muscovite conqueror, who had stripped the tumuli of the sacred relics deposited in them by the piety of a race of which they were almost the only memorials, defaced the temples, and shattered the sculptured marbles which had survived the havoc of successive revolutions, and wantonly destroyed monuments justly held the dearest by the enlightened nations of the world. Little did they deem that the reproach with which they flouted the excesses of a semi-savage horde would in process of time recoil with ten-fold force on two powers who claim the proud prerogative of standing at the head of the civilization of Europe. Though England and France did not share in their national representation in the disgraceful atrocities which followed the capture of Kertch, yet the apathy which tolerated them renders them scarcely less deserving of censure than if their complicity had been of a more active nature. The sack of the Museum, in which by a tardy atonement the Russian Government had assembled all such antiquities as had escaped from the first unrestrained fury of the soldiers on their entrance into Kertch, or had not been forwarded to adorn the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, will ever form a dark contrast to the so-much vaunted enlightenment of the nineteenth century. These remains, which were neither few in number nor despicable in kind, are for ever dispersed and lost, and history has to deplore the destruction of an accumulation of her most reliable materials, which can never be replaced.
The following succinct account of the early history of Kertch is borrowed from Mr. Oliphant's " Russian Shores of the Black Sea."
" Kertch is one of the most interesting towns in the South of Russia to the antiquarian — the Panticapasum of Strabo. It was founded about the middle of the seventh century, B.C., by the first Milesian colonists in the Taurida, and two hundred years afterwards it became the capital of the kingdom of Bosphorus, and the residence of its kings.
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" For three hundred years the trade of Theodosia and Panticapea flourished, for the Cimmerian peninsula had become the granary of Greece. The conquest of that nation by the Romans, however, produced an important effect upon this kingdom, since it was dependent for its prosperity upon a market which will soon cease to exist; and it fell an easy prey to Mithridates, at the same time that he subdued the rest of the Taurida.
" To Panticapea the celebrated King of Pontus fled after his last defeat by Pompey, and here, unable to contend at once against the victorious arms of Rome and the treachery of his own son, he terminated his glorious career; and here it was that Pharnaces afterwards raised the standard of revolt, and Ctesar came, saw, and conquered him.