Iranians and Greeks in South Russia - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

INTRODUCTORY 3
the commission excavated the numerous barrows and cemeteries
scattered over the vast steppes on the shores of the Black Sea, and on
the banks of the great Russian rivers. The resuks obtained v^ere of
the highest importance. Those v\^ho were able to visit the Museum
of the Hermitage before the Russian Revolution will remember the
deep impression produced upon all visitors, whether specialists or not,
by the two great rooms on the first floor—the Kerch Room and the
Nikopol Room. The ordinary sightseer was struck by the accumulation
of gold objects in these rooms, by the enormous quantity of jewels,
of gold and silver plate, of engraved gems. The less unsophisticated
were astonished to find so many masterpieces of Hellenic art, sometimes
of types unknown in other museums. But the scholar, above all,
carried away quite novel impressions : realizing that in these rooms
he was in the presence of a new world, in which Greek art appeared
in an altered, sometimes almost unrecognizable form, and in which
side by side with this art, another art was revealed, new and strange.
The thousands of objects which filled the Hermitage came almost
entirely from excavations conducted by the Archaeological Commission.
Year after year the treasures poured in. Each excavation,
prosecuted with knowledge and perseverance, afforded new series of
objects, no less artistically interesting and no less scientifically valuable
than the old. The cemeteries of the great Greek colonies, Panticapaeum,
Phanagoria, Chersonesus, Olbia, and the ruins of these
towns—two of which were excavated systematically, Olbia by Farmakovski,
Chersonesus by Kosciuszko-Waluzinicz and Loeper—furnished
immense numbers of pure Greek products, imported from Asia
Minor, from Athens, and from other Hellenic centres. The finest
groups of Ionian vases came from Olbia and Berezan, which were
methodically excavated by Ernst von Stern, from Panticapaeum, and
black-figured and red-figured ware, the
from the Taman peninsula :
Panathenaic vases, Hellenistic and Roman pottery, are represented in
the Hermitage by superb series. The Greek jewellery, as we shall see,
is unequalled : most of it came from those great stone chambers,
surmounted by stately tumuli, at Kerch, at Theodosia, at Anapa, and
in the peninsula of Taman, which were the tombs of the kings who
ruled the Bosphorus and the tribes dwelling in the Taman peninsula.
The fineness of this jewellery enables us to appreciate the creative
genius of the Greek goldsmith in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.
The wooden coffins, sometimes painted, are frequently masterpieces.
The gold and silver vases are various and beautiful. It would be a
long task to enumerate all the classes of Greek objects yielded by the
ruins and cemeteries of the Greek cities.