The third installment in the Slate Ukraine series is out:
BAKHCHISARAY, Ukraine—The stone minarets of the 15th-century
Khan's Palace that dominate the skyline here, a city of about 50,000 a
30-minute bus ride south from Simferopol, are a reminder that while
today Ukraine and Russia are jousting over Crimea, for most of the past
millennium, another group ruled the peninsula: the Crimean Tatars.
Muslims and speakers of a language closely related to Turkish, the
Crimean Tatars are the descendants of the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan
who settled here in the 13th century. Their historical legacy is nearly invisible today, systematically destroyed first by the czars and then the Soviets.
But the Tatars, improbably, have revived themselves and are once again political players in Crimea. They are no longer the rulers, but as a politically active minority, they could act as the wild card in an eventual conflict over Crimea.
The whole thing is here.
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