A View over Taman Bay and Medieval Foundations from the Height of the Cultural Layer at the Hermonassa-Tmutarakan Site

A view over Taman Bay and medieval foundations from the height of the cultural layer at the Hermonassa-Tmutarakan site. At present work is under way on only a small part of the monument; in places it has been lost to landslips, elsewhere it has gone under water, and here and there it has fallen victim to illegal cottage development. Yet another part, which was explored intermittently, has been buried under several metres of earth and turned into a field. In the middle of the last century, when investigations were carried out here by turns, this section was opened up and the foundations of buildings were found, one of which was most probably a large and famous church. But even in the brief pauses between campaigns the monument was subjected to a serious stress test by the local inhabitants, who not only dismantled it for stone (and stone is in very short supply in these parts) but also, where the especially sturdy carcasses could not be taken apart, blew them up with dynamite. The chairman of the local collective farm therefore took a decisive step: he had an excavator driven in and the trench covered with a thick layer of soil. A ruthless and hard-to-reverse conservation of the site in situ, one might say.