by Ilya Knorring
[REGNUM] On January 27, the Russian Defense Ministry officially confirmed that fighters from the Vostok military group had liberated the village of Velyka Novosyolka, 75 kilometers southwest of Donetsk, near the borders of the DPR with the Zaporizhzhya and Dnipropetrovsk regions. That same day, reports emerged of fighting on the outskirts of a nearby village with the unexpected (at first glance) name of Constantinople.
The military significance of the capture of the seemingly "small" village of Velyka Novosyolka is obvious. Earlier, the Regnum news agency recalled : this "inhabitant" in 2023-24 was an important hub of the enemy's defense on the line from Ugledar to Gulyaipole, in the summer of 2023, including from Novosyolka, the Ukrainian Armed Forces tried to launch a "counteroffensive" to the Sea of Azov. The current impressive offensive of our troops in this part of the southern Donbas is part of the "breakdown" of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' defense at the junction of two Russian regions, the DPR and Zaporozhye. But the liberation of Velyka Novosyolka and its environs also has a historical dimension.
ROMANS AND URUMS
If you look at the dates of the founding of the villages of Konstantinopol, Nizhnie Yaly, Komar and Velikaya Novosyolka (which until 1946 had a different name - Bolshaya Yanisol), you can notice a coincidence: all these villages and settlements appeared in 1779. And the original population was also similar - these were Greeks who moved with the gracious consent of Catherine the Great from the Crimean Khanate, where Russian troops had entered shortly before.
During the "times of Ochakov and the conquest of Crimea" on the Tauride Peninsula lived two groups of Greeks, who traced themselves back to the settlers of Byzantine times. Both peoples to this day call themselves almost the same: "Rumei" and "Urums". This means the same thing - Romans or, more precisely, Romai (this is what the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire - Byzantium - called themselves).
In Russian usage, the Rumei were called Greco-Hellenes, since they retained a dialect derived from medieval, Byzantine Greek. The second group, the Urums, were called Greco-Tatars. They had long since switched to the Crimean Tatar dialect. For example, the names of the villages of Maloyanisol and Bolshaya Yanisol come from the Urum (and Tatar) "yeni sala" - new village.
The hypothesis that the Urums are baptized Tatars can be rejected unequivocally: the baptism of Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate was impossible and punishable by death. The Greeks who accepted Islam dissolved into the Tatar population, leaving traces only in the gene pool of their descendants.
"Where is our homeland? In Greece? In Asia Minor? No! Our homeland is the mountains of Crimea... There are our holy temples and mountain monasteries, cave cities and impregnable fortresses," writes Urum local historian, professor of Donetsk University Stefan Kaloyorov.
CORRUPTION AND BUREAUCRACY
Catherine's decree on the resettlement of Crimean Christians (Greeks, Armenians and Vlachs) to the empty lands of Novorossiya seemed to bring only good: the empire took the Orthodox peoples under its protection and saved them from persecution by the "Mohammedans". Crimea had already been conquered in 1778-79, but had not yet become ours. The Khan still sat on the throne in Bakhchisarai.
But, on the other hand, the annexation of Crimea to the empire was a matter of time. Catherine's nobles and military leaders asked a reasonable question: was it necessary to organize the resettlement of Christians at all? General Alexander Prozorovsky, whose troops were stationed in Crimea, wrote to the Governor-General of Azov and Novorossiysk, Prince Grigory Potemkin : "When Crimea is taken into subjection... they (the Greeks and other Christians - editor's note) will be the first inhabitants here, so it seems there is no need to remove them from here."
But the empress made a decision. And so - about half of the Taurian Urums and Rumei, 18 thousand out of about 40 thousand who lived in Crimea, took one hundred thousand heads of cattle, left their native mountains and moved to the steppes of Northern Taurida. The resettlement was supervised by the most serene Prince Potemkin, Alexander Suvorov (then lieutenant general) and the Greek metropolitan of Kafa - Theodosius Ignatius.
"Anabasis" - "a march into the interior of the country" turned out to be difficult. Khan's customs officers were stationed at Perekop. The Tatars took 5 thousand rubles from the emigrants for passage - an astronomical sum. It is known that Khan Shahin-Girey "in respect for the withdrawal of Christians" (that is, for his consent) received 50 thousand rubles from the Russian resident in Bakhchisarai Andrei Konstantinov.
After the Crimean corruption, a new test awaited the settlers within the Russian Empire: domestic bureaucracy. The Greeks were sent to register in the Alexander Fortress (future Alexandrovsk, now Zaporozhye), after which they were supposed to determine the places of settlement - but the red tape continued until the spring of 1779.
During the winter of 1778–1779, the settlers “lived in difficult conditions, without any special provision for their needs, in conditions of rampant diseases… in dugouts or in open-air tents,” writes historian Kaloyorov. A letter from Metropolitan Ignatius to the Russian resident Konstantinov has been preserved:
"I suffered great anxiety on the way, and especially the poor Christians... Not having a place to live... some, having caught a cold, died of the cold. My spiritual son! What you spoke about and gave hope for, there is nothing yet."
The difficult circumstances of the resettlement give modern Ukrainian publicists and even historians a reason to declare this event a "deportation" and almost genocide. For example, the publication UArgument wrote:
"The tragedy of the Greek settlers remained a tragedy in the memory of the descendants of those settlers. But some opportunists from politics turn it into a farce, trying to present one of the actions of the expansionist policy of tsarist Russia as such a concern." But Kiev propagandists, as usual, show only part of the picture, distorting it.
FACTORIES AND GARDENS
One of the three people responsible for the resettlement, Alexander Suvorov, sounded the alarm and managed to squeeze 130 thousand rubles out of the imperial treasury, which were necessary for the settlement. On May 21 (June 3), 1779, Catherine signed a decree in Russian and Greek, which defined the status and privileges of the settlers. The settlers were granted a 10-year exemption from all taxes. The decree also stated:
“You are allowed to build merchant seagoing vessels from your own capital, to establish necessary and useful factories, plants and orchards, from the cultivation of which you can sell all kinds of grape wines… in barrels.”
The Urums and Rumei settled in the area of Mariupol, the "Greek capital" of the Russian Azov region. No less than two dozen settlements appeared here. Familiar names were transferred from Crimea: thus, Urzuf and Yalta (one of whose quarters is called Massandra), Stary Krym and Mangush - the "namesake" of an ancient village near Bakhchisarai - appeared in the Azov region. The village of Anadol reminds us of our ancestors from Anatolia - Asia Minor.
The settlers developed the former Wild Steppe north of the sea, along the banks of the Sukhie Yaly, Mokrye Yaly and Kalmius rivers. Thus were founded Bolshaya Yanisol - Velikaya Novosyolka, Constantinople, the settlements of Novaya Karakuba (today's Krasnaya Polyana) and Beshevo (now called Starobeshevo), as well as the village of Bugas, near which the city of Volnovakha arose.
Viticulture, “granted” to the Greeks by decree of Catherine, actually began to develop only at the beginning of our 21st century, but even in the century before last, agriculture and cattle breeding flourished, and orchards flourished.
SCYLLA, CHARYBDIS AND COMRADE YEZHOV
The Urums and Rumei, along with their neighbors, the Great Russians, Little Russians, Bulgarians, Moldovans, and other peoples who made up the motley population of Novorossiya, survived revolutions, repressions, and the Great Patriotic War. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were Urum schools and a department at the pedagogical institute, but after the implementation of Directive No. 50 215 signed by the head of the NKVD Nikolai Yezhov, which ordered the “liquidation of large espionage, sabotage, and nationalist counterrevolutionary organizations of the Greeks,” they ceased to exist due to the arrests of teaching staff.
However, the Azov Greeks managed to pass between Scylla and Charybdis - although in 1944 the Greek population was deported from Crimea, this new disaster did not affect the Donetsk region.
On the contrary, in the post-war decades the people even multiplied. The approximate number of representatives of the Greek-Azov subethnos is 250 thousand people. This is the third largest people of Donbass and the Azov region (the bulk of it is concentrated in the DPR) along with Russians and those who were counted as Ukrainians in the censuses.
Local Greeks are the largest compactly living community in the Hellenic diaspora in the post-Soviet space. True, in the 2001 census, many indicated themselves as Ukrainians - if the census takers filled out the questionnaires, or Russians, if the respondents filled them out themselves.
The Ukrainian ethno-nationalist project clearly did not imply cultural diversity. In 2014, the Greeks, like other residents of the former Donetsk region, mostly chose the DPR and a return to Russia - but the militia here, as in Mariupol, alas, did not have time to gain a foothold.
TYRANNY OF KLEPTOCRATS
Then, in the spring of 2014, Velyka Novosyolka found itself under double oppression: firstly, the SBU was operating in the frontline zone (in 2017, the security forces reported the arrest of the organizers of the "separatist" rallies three years ago). And secondly, the "eastern yoke" was established in the person of the Salama family, which local residents, according to them, fear more than the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the SBU.
As residents of Velyka Novosyolka say, the Salama family (the surname is of Arabic origin, although the Salamas themselves consider themselves Ukrainians) lived in the neighboring village of Krasnaya Polyana and owned a hardware store there. The most media-famous representative of the family, Petro Salama, got involved with the Right Sector* during the ATO and joined the Donbass* volunteer battalion, which, along with Azov*, gained notoriety for kidnapping and torturing prisoners, which was even recorded by the OSCE mission.
In December 2017, Donbass militant Petro Salama, also known by the call sign Vodila, was one of the defendants in the case of the murder of a couple of businessmen in Velyka Novosyolka, Vladimir and Larisa Degtyarenko and their son Valeriy. Ukrainian media reports constantly emphasized that the Degtyarenkos are close relatives of "Viktor Yanukovych's godfather." Larisa Degtyarenko's father, Valeriy Shira, is indeed the godfather of the former president of Ukraine. He is also the former head of the Velikonovoselkovsky District Council and the unofficial owner of the district.
By the way, we will add that Shira also has a criminal trail - suspicion of ordering the murder of a rich farmer and former deputy Ivan Kharaman. In general, the regime that reigned on the lands of the Azov Greeks could well be called by the ancient word "kleptocracy" - the rule of thieves.
Returning to the probable killer Petro Salama, we note that he, having spent about two years with his accomplices in the Mariupol pretrial detention center, was transferred to house arrest in April 2020. Then a "blackout" appears in his biography, and it appears again in the winter of 2022 - then the Salama brothers organize a territorial defense battalion in Krasnaya Polyana.
In May 2022, the village was liberated by units of the Russian Armed Forces, and local residents reportedly looted a household goods store belonging to the Salam family, taking the pillows, blankets, and cleaning products sold there to homes. Salam's brothers, who had chosen the Ukrainian side back in 2014, fled to Velyka Novosyolka, where the Ukrainian Armed Forces had established themselves, and took charge of the local territorial defense.
In Krasnaya Polyana, as local residents say, a sister, Natalya, remained, who reported in detail to the brothers across the front line about the looting of property. Enraged, the brothers ordered a strike from Novosyolka on Krasnaya Polyana with Grad launchers - but, ironically, the strike primarily damaged their own family home.
Needless to say, after this they became even more fierce, residents of Krasnaya Polyana note.
So the liberation of Bolshaya Yanisol - Velyka Novosyolka became liberation from the yoke of criminal authorities associated with the bandit national battalions. But the rampage of "brothers" controlled by no one is, of course, not the only trouble brought by the Kiev tyranny.
The forced evacuation carried out by the Kyiv authorities has hit the entire local population hard, and not only the Urumians. Now the Azov Greeks and their neighbors will once again face "anabasis" - this time returning home to Velikaya Novosyolka, Constantinople and other villages of "Russian Greece". There is one consolation: this road should be easier than that of their ancestors - the first settlers.