Городские стены Боспора в юстиниановское время

Abstract

Procopius of Caesarea’s account that Emperor Justinian I, having found the fortress walls of the capital of the Bosporan Kingdom destroyed, strengthened them, is of fundamental importance for the understanding of the limits of this city in the Early Byzantine Period. For ages, the researchers have been discussing the spatial organization of the city in question in the sixth century. Some of them have inferred that Early Byzantine Bosporos was reduced to a small town in the area of the ancient port, where Justinian had erected the fortress walls, along the contour of which the Genoese-Turkish castle was built later. Other researchers have supposed that the walls of Bosporos were simply repaired under this Byzantine emperor. To a large extent, the solution to this question is hampered by the limited volume of written sources. When the evidence of the kind is absent, archaeological sources should play the main role. However, in the case of Kerch, the large-scale systematic archaeological excavations are restricted due to the continuity of the area covered by urban buildings. The analysis of the areas of the Bosporan city in question which lay far from each other and were uncovered by small-size archaeological researches allows a rather fragmentary notion of the specifics and dynamics of the urban development. However, one has enough reasons to state that the six-century city of Bosporos occupied a significant part of the territory of ancient Pantikapaion, with the lower town extended at least 500 m northwards of the foot of Mithridates Hill. Under Emperor Justinian I, the old fortress walls in the lower (flat) part of the city were repaired in certain areas, as it comes from archaeological data, particularly uncovered in recent years. There is no objective evidence of the condition of the walls of the upper town, where a few nests of residential buildings continued in the sixth century. In the seventh century, the entire city area reduced to the flat territory (ca 25–30 hectares), protected by fortress walls, and the upper town became a cemetery.