After visiting Alimova Balka (I actually lied about us being there, we were near it, but not on the classic route) we took a minibus to the old town of Bakhchisaray to visit the famous Khan's palace — Khan-saray.
Bakhchisaray, by the way, means "garden-palace". This city is the capital of the Crimean Khanate, where various kinds of khans and khanychoks (that is, crappy khans who were bad at their jobs) used to sit.
Basically, a bunch of sheds. But I'm not spoiled, this shed was to my liking. The others turned their noses up, saying it's better in Italy. And I'll tell you — there's no damn point going to Crimea after Italy, you gotta hit up places in the right order, then there won't be any disappointments. Plus, an excess of cultural artifacts causes poisoning, so one palace per trip is just right, while in Italy, they say, the whole country is cluttered with them.
In Khan-saray, by the way, there is a fountain of tears, which Pushkin wrote a poem about. My colleagues decided that local oligarchs bribed him to glorify the shed for centuries to come. I'll drop some quotes from the poem where appropriate, just to make things more fun.
General view of the heating pipes minaret towers of the palace
Entrance
Tourists snagged a guide with the help of persistent Nina
Interior fuckery finery
Girey sat with a downcast gaze;
The amber pipe smoked in his mouth;
In silence, the servile court
Crowded around the dreadful khan.
The ceiling. The khan slightly underdelivered, otherwise he would've invented Tetris
All was quiet in the palace;
In awe, everyone read
The signs of anger and sorrow
On his gloomy face.
They chilled in the shed pretty well. They probably smoked opium and ganja here like steam engines
The Fountain of Tears
There is an inscription: by corrosive years
It has not yet been erased.
Behind its foreign strokes
Water babbles in the marble
And drips with cold tears,
Never falling silent.
Thus weeps a mother in days of sorrow
For a son fallen in war.
The young maidens in that land
Learned the legend of old,
And that gloomy monument
They named the Fountain of Tears.
This is the women's bathhouse, pardon, wing
No, the timid wives of Girey,
Daring neither to think nor wish,
Bloom in dreary silence;
Under a watchful and cold guard
In the bosom of joyless boredom
They know no betrayals.
In the shadow of the protective dungeon
Their beauties are hidden:
Just as Arabian flowers
Live behind the glass of a greenhouse.
For them, in a dreary succession,
Days, months, years pass by
And unnoticeably lead away
Both youth and love with them.
I found some verses about the door too
Why is Girey's mind full of sorrow?
The chibouk in his hands has gone out;
Motionless, not daring to breathe,
The eunuch waits for a sign by the door.
The thoughtful ruler rises;
The door opens wide before him. Silently he
Goes into the cherished abode
Of his recently beloved wives.
And there are verses about the lamp (almost)
There day and night a lamp burns
Before the face of the Most Holy Virgin;
The solace of an aching soul,
There hope dwells in silence
With humble faith,
And reminds the heart of everything
About a close, better land;
This is the women's wing too
He knows the female temper;
He has experienced how cunning it is
Both in freedom and in captivity:
A tender gaze, the mute reproach of tears
Hold no power over his soul;
He no longer believes them.
Alas! The Bakhchisaray Palace
Hides a young princess.
Fading in quiet captivity,
Maria weeps and grieves.
Girey spares the wretched girl:
Her despondency, tears, and groans
Disturb the khan's brief sleep,
And for her he softens
The strict laws of the harem.
The courtyard
The only part of the palace that has been preserved unchanged since it was built
All the wives sleep. One does not.
Barely breathing, she rises;
She walks; with a hurried hand
She opened the door; in the darkness of the night
She steps with a light foot...
This isn't a palm tree, but nonetheless
Like a palm tree crushed by a storm,
She drooped her young head;
Nothing, nothing is dear to her:
Girey has fallen out of love with Zarema.
There's also a museum in the palace
In empty chambers and gardens;
Waters play, roses glow red,
And grapevines twine,
And gold gleams on the walls.
All in all, I liked the palace, highly recommend it to everyone. But Vova is right, you gotta get a guide, otherwise you won't learn or understand anything. Luckily, the guide was free, but only for groups of 20 people. Idiotic bureaucracy, as usual in the ex-USSR. Bureaucracy can be overcome by force, which Nina brilliantly demonstrated to us by gathering a small crowd of onlookers buying tickets and demanding a guide. In general, I was convinced once again that you should always and everywhere demand things, spin tall tales, and generally negotiate with jokes and persistence, then you'll always learn and see something interesting.
Visiting the palace, by the way, is paid, and not even cheap, around a few lats, and a full ticket is even more expensive. In general, in Ukraine everything costs money, even if it isn't exactly cheap.
After visiting the palace we had no time left, so we went to look for a place to sleep, which we found on the shore of a local reservoir. It's swampy, to get some water we had to wade in above our knees, squelching through the algae.
The water was for technical needs, that is, washing hands, pots, and making soup, and for this we had an excellent 20-liter canister with a tap.
Here's the kind of sunset we had over the reservoir
And another one
Vova came up with the smart idea to bring a grill to make cooking easier
An indispensable thing for getting an endless stream of firewood — the Fiskars saw
Nina is ready for takeoff
Someone's working, and someone's glued to their iPhone
The Conquerors-Boozers
Men in Black
For now they're drinking what they brought from the motherland, but it won't be long, since we're in wine country
The evening passed peacefully, in a warm and friendly atmosphere, enhanced by a significant influx of warming substances. Where people fit so much booze, I don't know. But at least they start telling entertaining stories, especially Pasha, which were interesting for me to listen to even sober (I didn't drink then, and I don't now either).
All in all, the first day went quite decently, even though there were no bicycles. Already on the way to Crimea we found out that psychological compatibility among the participants was present, which, without a doubt, is one of the most important aspects of such tours.