Of course I will thank you...and I might add, with the hope that this painful, horrible and tragic war may come to an end as soon as possible.
I read a lot about Ukraine's glorious history and Crimea. The closest I came to Crimea was a few hundreds',km across the Black Sea, in Samsun and Trabzon, today's Turkey . I wanted to have a sense of what Anatolia and the Black Sea, once part of the Greek world and later the Byzantine Empire looked like.
What spurred my interest in this part of the world is that I am Italian and the Graeco-Roman heritage is one of the main facets of our culture. Particularly, the Black Sea and Crimea were for centuries the seat of prosperous Genoese colonies, like Yalta and Caffa in Ukraine ) ( todays Feodosia /Kefe ), along with many other Genoese trading colonies dotting the Black Sea coast, to the point that The Black Sea appeared in some of the Medieval maps " Lacus Genoensis ( the Sea or Lake of Genoa ). Through the centuries there have been several Italian settlement waves, the earliest at the time of the Republic of Genoa and the latest as late as the XIX century, mainly in Kerch , were there is a local Association of about 300 people, who still maintain ties with Italy and the language
I went off the topic, but I thought it may be of interest to you
Gundo
