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Crimea

The Crimean War, of 1853-1856, has been described as both a “largely forgotten conflict” and a “watershed in military history.” Yet few people today are likely to know the location of Crimea (the northern shores of the Black Sea), or be able to name the country it’s a part of today (Ukraine) or explain the causes of the war (ostensibly to determine whether France or Russia would have authority over the Holy Land, but the larger issue was more important: whether France or Russia would dominate the Ottoman Empire). The war was between Russia and an alliance of France, the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire. When Napoléon III’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire urged the Ottomans to recognize France as the sovereign authority in the Holy Land, Russia disputed this newest change in authority. British statesmen used the Balance of Power argument, saying that Turkey couldn’t possibly go it alone against Russia: the result would certainly be that the Russians would take the Dardanelles or possibly destroy Turkey altogether, and then “Russian ships would sail into the Mediterranean and cut British communications with India,” as Norman Stone explains in “Crimea: A Brief History of an Unnecessary War,” in Cornucopia. Thus, based on such real or imagined fears, Turkey declared war on Russia in 1853 and an Anglo-French fleet anchored in the Bosphorus.

The Crimean War is sometimes considered to be the first modern conflict. Military tactics that had been considered standard for two hundred years were abandoned in Crimea, and new techniques were introduced that then became the norm by 1914. Florence Nightingale’s innovations in medical care created a new foundation for modern nursing. The subject of Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a disastrous cavalry charge during the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War. And, due to the appearance of the electric telegraph, it was the first war to be covered regularly and rapidly, and public opinion in France and the UK was informed by newspaper reports as never before. Norman Stone notes that the 1860s were to be an extraordinary decade, “marked by wars of national unification—Italy and Germany in Europe, the great Civil War in America. At the time, there was tremendous energy and optimism, a belief in unstoppable progress, and there was even a sort of formula for achieving it. The Turks had already applied some of it with the Tanzimat (an Ottoman Turkish word meaning “reorganization” or “reformation”). But Stone concludes that the Crimean War “was blundered into, by men who did not really understand what they were doing. They have much to answer for.”

Martin Randall Travel (martinrandall.com), an outstanding British tour operator, offered a Crimean War trip in 2007 that included Sebastopol, Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman. “Perhaps no other group of battlefields survive so unaltered and so clearly elucidate the action. In most cases even the crops and vegetation remain the same. The sense of the past is hugely enhanced by the rarity of visitors and the absence of touristic paraphernalia. Until a few years ago the region was closed to foreigners and even most Soviet citizens because the battlefields are ranged around Sebastopol, for over two hundred years the base of the Russian Black Sea fleet.” MRT offers a number of excellent trips to Turkey, some of which include Istanbul.

The Crimean Church in Istanbul, which John Freely has described as “one of the city’s 100 most important buildings” and “by far the largest and most handsome of the western churches in the city,” was conceived as a memorial to the Crimean War. According to an article by Geoffrey Tyack, “The Crimean Church, Istanbul,” in Cornucopia 25, the foundation stone was laid on October 19, 1858, and stone from Malta was used for carved detailing, the tiles came from Marseilles, and the internal timberwork was from Trieste. The church itself, a fine example of Victorian Gothic, looks out of place in Istanbul,