The Kingdom of the Dead: For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine
nplusonemag.com
nplusonemag.com
This year I went back to Kiev for the first time in well over a decade since I moved to the US. To see my family, friends, as well as show my wife all of the places and the way that I grew up.
Due to the current political climate and overall conditions in Crimea going there was not even an option for us. A real disappointment as some of my most cherished memories were formed there.
On the flip side, Crimean border is protected by armed forces on behalf of Russia and overall sentiment in the peninsula is not that favorable to Ukrainians.
Though I do agree that many still visit. My only point was that I did not feel comfortable.
That resonated with me. My childhood is peppered with memories of Russians, who were bused in at some point by the Soviet Union to take over administrative positions, telling me to speak a "human" language - Russian instead of my native language (implying I was sub-human). I always remember that and am sad for them for living with that kind of prejudice (especially when you tell that to a child).
They would raid the nearby Ukrainian and Russian villages and sell the villagers into slavery. In one year, 1769, they captured 20,000 and sold them in slave markets in the Ottoman Empire.
From 1500 to 1700 or so, between 1 and 2 million Slavs were captured and sold off into slavery.
The end of the Crimean Khanate is about as distant in history as the Revolutionary War that started the USA. Of course Tatars don't do this anymore, but some people unfortunately prefer to remember old grievances and raise them again and again.
Source BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafr...
n. A small gateau or sponge cake, often shaped like an elongated scallop shell.
n. Something which brings back a memory; a source of nostalgia or evocative memories (used with reference to its function in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time).
That seems to be how it's used in the article and some of the comments here:
"Crimea was the ideal site for this post-Soviet reunion, since it was the place where so many children, now adults, had spent their happy summer vacations, flocking there from all over the Soviet Union. For post-Soviet people, Crimea was a gigantic madeleine."
I see others have beat me to a response. m-w also has a paragraph about it:
"The madeleine is said to have been named after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word madeleine itself became a designation for anything that evokes a memory."
I had never heard of it either.
yes, Russian climate makes you yearn for hot climate vacation near sea and giving the Iron Curtain there weren't much options. These days Russians go en mass to Mediterranean : Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Chernogorya, Italy, Spain. Despite all the propaganda they aren't going to Crimea. As joke has it these days "it is so quiet on Crimea beaches that one can hear Russian tourists having drink party ("buhayuschih") on Egypt beaches"