In Search of Crimean Gothic November 4, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern , trackback
Crimea is the Ukrainian or Russian peninsula that stretches down into the Black Sea and whose large bays make it resemble a famished fish about to eat a smaller prey. Crimea’s geography has made it a natural place for enclaves. In ancient times, the Greeks and Romans held colonies here, as did the Byzantines and Genoese in the middle ages. Another group that took Crimea as their home were the Goths, the Germanic tribe who radiated out of central Europe in the third, fourth and fifth centuries. That the Goths arrived in Crimea should come as no surprise: after all some got as far as Spain at a later date. We should also remember that ‘Goths’ here might not be the proper ethnic term, just a general label for some ‘Germans’ of uncertain origin. The really extraordinary thing is that, whatever their precise origins, their language, Crimean Gothic managed to survive well into the modern age. Just to put this in context, elsewhere Gothic was dying out in the 800s.
Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq was a Flemish-speaker who, in the 1550s and 1560s, lived in Constantinople. Sometime in 1556-1562, while resident in Constantinople, he met two men who had travelled from Crimea and described them in his fourth letter, written in a workaday Latin. One of these two was a Greek, but ‘the other was taller, showing in his appearance a certain simplicity, so that he seemed like someone from Flanders or Holland.’ If this had been all then we could raise our eyebrows and move on: after all, the Nazis in their brief stay out east were for ever finding blond ‘German’ Slavs in the fields. But Ogier backs up his claim with a series of words from Crimean Gothic: a list of about a hundred. In fact, the corpus is big enough that a modern linguist could venture a few sentences in that tongue: ‘there is blood on my seat and rain in the wind’; ‘shoot an arrow at the apple on the waggon’, and other such useful formulations. One slight difficulty is that these words came not from the tall German, who had got so used to speaking Greek that he had forgotten his own tongue: but from the Greek who had learnt Crimean Gothic in the previous years. It goes without saying that the potential for confusion here is immense! This is a now lost language filtered not just through Ogier, a Flemish-speaker, but through a man who spoke the language, perhaps only poorly, as a second (or being a Greek perhaps a third or fourth or fifth) language.
Crimean Gothic survived, certainly, some time longer. In the late seventeenth century, the German traveller Engelbert Kaempfer, who knew Ogier’s work, claimed that he had come across many German words in the Crimea: though he does not talk of a language. In 1817 a Belarusian Stanisław Bohusz Siestrzeńcewicz described how on a visit to Crimea in 1783 he had met Goths there. He claimed that they spoke a Germanic language. When, in the 1880s, the Russian scholar V.E.Vozgrin researched the Crimean Goths he was unable to find any evidence of the language though he noted that there were some villages where the men were suspiciously tall and looked Scandinavian: we are back to crude nineteenth-century ethnology. It is not inconceivable that Gothic survived unnoticed, but if it did it will have become a private language of a few families and by the time the Soviets took over any trace of anything Germanic will have been sensibly passed over.
There is one other reference that might allow us to push the language forward into the nineteenth century. Beach quotes it, for what it is worth. In Blood of Victory by Alan Furst, an espionage novel, the following passage appears.
‘By the way, Monsieur Serebin, did you know that the last time anyone actually heard spoken Gothic it was not far from Odessa?’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, in 1854, during the Crimean War. A young officer in the British army – a graduate of Cambridge, I believe – led a patrol deep into the countryside. It was late at night, and very deserted. They heard the sound of chanting, and approached a group of men seated around a campfire. The office who’d taken his degree in philology, happned to recognize what he’d heard – the war chant of the Goths.’
Furst is widely read and usually his history is based on real events or texts: unfortunately here no source is given and Beach has found no trace of it. Of course, even if there turns out to be a late nineteenth-century memoir with this tall Gothic tale it does not mean that it is remotely true. There is something here of the Welsh colonist in America coming across a Welsh-speaking tribe of Indians in the Rockies. Still it would be interesting to have to hand.
Can anyone track down Furst’s source: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
17 Nov 2016: Bruce T writes ‘When I was an adolescent the couple who owned the local bookstore would take the books that they were going to send back, remove the covers, bundle them and put them in a box. As I was a friend of their reading adverse son, they would take all the history and tales of the odd books and hide them in another box behind a curtain for me. I got to read hoary old tales from Victorian adventurers such as Burton and the like along with Ivan Sanderson, Robert Ripley and every oddity that came down the pike. I even got a copy of the Kama Sutra at twelve in the middle of a bundle. It didn’t do me much good then, but a few years later it came in very handy. The price was fifty cents for a bundle of three and I would usually walk out about two dollars lighter. One of the constants in the books by the empire building types was tales of Gaelic speakers in the Hindu Kush and Kashmir. They would all go something like this, “Col. Smith-Smythe reports the most remarkable incident on his recent patrol through the Northwest Frontier. When waking for breakfast camped at the foot of a high pass, he heard what he thought were his Highlander’s talking among themselves in their native tongue outside his tent. When he looked out he found his men conversing with some passing traders in what Smith-Smythe reported as ‘Perfect Gaelic’. As the Col. had heard the language spoken regularly at times throughout his service, we don’t see how he could be mistaken.” The reports were so common in the books it seemed like all of Scotland and Ireland had set up home on the subcontinent in ancient times? Between such tales and the weirdo doctors obsessed with measuring and comparing penis sizes of the various peoples of the world in the rush for empire, I would laugh myself to sleep when I came across some colonial officials tome on life out there “amongst ’em.” The Gothic war chant is right up there with some of the better tall tales in those volumes.
