Crimean Antiquities through the Eyes of Edward Daniel Clarke: From Archaeology to Ideology

• Main Author: Nikita Igorevich Khrapunov
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Ural Federal University Press 2016-10-01
• Series: Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки
• Subjects: записки путешественников XVIII–XIX вв.; история науки; археология Крыма; Крым; воображаемая география; Эдвард-Даньел Кларк.
• Online Access: https://journals.urfu.ru/index.php/Izvestia2/article/view/2107

The article analyses a travelogue by British traveller Edward Daniel Clarke, which was one of the first encyclopaedic descriptions of the Crimean Peninsula, visited by the author in 1800. Clarke’s book appeared to be extraordinarily popular with his contemporaries and modern researchers, though the issue of the author’s descriptive strategy and its influence on the text’s objectivity has never been addressed previously. Clarke’s narrative combines elements of a travel journal, academic research, and a political pamphlet. The article reveals how Clarke transforms archaeological sites description into an “ideological weapon.” The traveller used archaeology as a key argument to prove Russia was uncivilized and had to be banished from the Crimea. In his opinion, the Russians were inclined to destroy archaeological monuments from ancient and mediaeval periods without any pity or reason. In the eighteenth century, antiquity gradually came into fashion in Western Europe, and Greece became apprehended as the cradle of European civilization, therefore blaming the Russians for the destruction of ancient buildings and artefacts would be a clear statement of their barbarism. Clarke’s approach was discriminatory, as the traveller interpreted the cases of antiquities destruction by the Ottomans, Tatars, or Brits in a different way. Although there really exists reliable evidence that old structures in the Crimea were damaged during the Russian period, Clarke was the first one who considered them in terms of ideology. His travelogue had a great influence on the scholarship that followed, since the new generations of authors were inclined to take it uncritically.