Crimea has emerged as the central obstacle to ending the war in Ukraine. But for the strategic peninsula, being at the nexus of great power competition is nothing new.
At the northern end of the Black Sea, Crimea sits at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. At various times in its long history, the region has either been coveted, conquered or controlled by the Greeks, the Roman Byzantines, the Genoese, the Mongols, Ottomans, Russians, Ukrainians, and even by the Germans for a brief period during World War II.
"It is this sort of semi-mythical realm where the world of the nomads meets the world of the sedentary ancient Greek civilizations," explains Brian Glyn Williams, a professor of Islamic history at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. "It is a zone where Christianity meets Islam, the East meets the West, and it has been contested by these empires and faiths [and] societies for thousands and thousands of years."
Until about a decade ago, the first (and perhaps only) thing that came to mind for most people about Crimea was the Alfred Tennyson poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade," about a hapless British cavalry assault on a heavily fortified Russian artillery during the Crimean War (1853-1856).
That was until 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and the Kremlin subsequently annexed the Ukrainian territory. Today, both Kyiv and Moscow see Crimea as a red-line in negotiations to end the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insists it must be returned as part of any truce and Russian President Vladimir Putin is just as firm that it be retained by the Russian Federation.
Where did the word come from?
The etymology of "Crimea" is not easy to pin down, according to Douglas Harper, the creator and editor of Online Etymology Dictionary. That is typical for many toponyms (place names), he says, especially those labeling regions as "high trafficked" as Crimea.
"The name's not going to have a straight line through history. It's going to be crooked," Harper says. "My guess is that it's medieval. It's coming up through the Mediterranean."
Anatoly Liberman, a professor who teaches medieval linguistics, folk and oral tradition at the University of Minnesota, agrees that determining the origin of place names is especially challenging. "The verdict very often is: origin unknown," he says.
We do know, however, that Crimea is not the original name for the peninsula. It was known as Taurida or the Tauric Peninsula by the Greeks, who named it after the ancient inhabitants of the region.
"But those names vanished when the Mongols came," Liberman says.
"If there is a convincing etymology for the modern name, it must be found among the Mongols or their linguistic relatives," he says, declaring "One thing is clear: it's certainly not Islamic. It's certainly not Greek. It's certainly not Slavic."
Instead, one hypothesis is that "Crimea" derives from a Mongol or Turkic root, such as Kherem or Kerem meaning "fortified place" or "wall," — a name adopted by Slavic speakers and anglicized over time, Liberman says.
"Crimea is, of course, the English pronunciation of the modern Russian pronunciation of the name, [which] is 'Krym' and that is how it is pronounced in Ukrainian," he says. "Crimea is already an anglicized form of this."
Still, he remains cautious. "We know it's a medieval name, probably coined in the 14th or 15th century. We know the rough language family. But we probably will never know the precise original word and meaning," Liberman says.
How has the word been used over time?
Although the name of the region doesn't appear to be very old by linguistic standards, the origin of the people known as Tatars who inhabited Crimea is much older.
"The Crimean Tatars are Europe's last descendants of the Mongol Tatar Turkic Golden Horde… direct Muslim and Turkic descendants of all these ancient races going back thousands of years," says Williams, who is the author of The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation.
He says that centuries later, people like Marco Polo sailed from Venice in the Mediterranean up through the Bosphorus Strait where modern day Istanbul is located. At the time, the city was Constantinople.
"Before the British had their empire ... the Italians settled all around the coast of the Black Sea, and they traded in the hinterlands with all the tribes living in what's today in the Caucasus or Crimea or Romania," Williams says.
Over time, Crimea became a key entrepot for commercial shipping and a vital port for Russia's Black Sea fleet.
Although the proximate cause of the Crimean War in the mid-19th century was a dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over control of Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, historians also attribute the conflict to geopolitical rivalries and imperial ambitions.
"You could also call it the first world war, really, because it engaged … very large international empires," says Mara Kozelsky, a history professor at the University of South Alabama.
Years before the U.S. Civil War photographer Mathew Brady took his famous photos of the Antietam battlefield, the camera of Britain's Roger Fenton captured scenes at Battle of Alma in Crimea in 1854. The Crimean War also marked the first military application of the telegraph and the first salvo of naval gunfire using exploding shells. For the first time in history, war correspondents were able to provide daily updates of the conflict to the British public. Florence Nightingale, who led a corps of nurses to care for British soldiers in Turkey, identified crises in hospital care, including lack of sanitation and supplies.
Kozelsky says that many places now in the news because of the current war in Ukraine, such as Mariupol, also came under attack during the Crimean War.
"The Crimean War so severely devastated the entire peninsula that it really did not recover until the eve of World War I," she notes.
As for the famous Light Brigade, "brave British cavalrymen formed up… and charged straight into Russian cannons," Williams says. "It became just a bloody massacre… the end of the cavalry era and the beginning of modern warfare."
Why does the word matter today?
A century after the Battle of Balaklava that inspired Tennyson's famous poem, Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev transferred Crimea to the Republic of Ukraine in a move that would have far-reaching consequences for an independent Ukraine in the decades to come.
Williams says Kruschev at the time wouldn't have been concerned about his decision becoming the seed for future conflict. The Soviet leader simply "never [imagined] the Soviet Union would one day collapse."
Fast forward to 2014. Days after the ouster of Ukraine's pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych — who had spurned the European Union in favor of closer ties with Moscow — masked Russian troops launched a covert military operation to seize Crimea from Ukraine. The soldiers, known as "little green men" because they wear no insignia on their uniforms, are accompanied by denials from the Kremlin that any of its forces are involved.
Two months later, Putin annexed Crimea.
Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has brought Crimea to the forefront once again. The Trump administration has presented a proposal to end the fighting that would officially recognize the Kremlin's control over the peninsula. But that's something that Ukrainian officials say they can never concede.
Months after the invasion, Zelenskyy put it succinctly: "This Russian war... began with Crimea and must end with Crimea — with its liberation."
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