A forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast (2015)

caitlingreen.org

77 pointspepys7 comments

The Crimea is a funny old place. Last vestige of the Goths, possible Anglo-Saxon colony.. interesting stuff. Makes me wonder if those peoples ever met. They might have at least had a common ground for communication. I don't know enough about the area to know how closely they were geographically. It might make a wonderful novel is any aspiring writers feel like using it as a basis.

Not quite the Crimea, but you might like the novelist Amin Maalouf. He primarily writes historical novels set in the medieval Islamic world -- with protagonists who travel a lot, so you see some of the (more-or-less accurate) interactions of different places and people.

'Samarkand' is my favourite of his novels, or 'Leo the African' is probably his most well-known.

How tragic! Their homes taken from them by a foreign conqueror, their people overthrown and enslaved, they flee to a foreign land, establish a colony … and eventually they're wiped out by the Turks. Sad to think of the cousins of the Beowulf poet, of Ælfric and of Cynewulf expiring on the Anatolian coast.

I believe the 13th century conquest would have been the Mongolian Empire. While Constantinople fell in 1204, Crimea devolved to the Empire of Nicaea [1] or Trebizond [2]. In 1223, the Mongols conquered most of Crimea [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire#Crusader_sack... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexios_I_of_Trebizond [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea#Medieval_history

I imagine that the people they displaced during the process of establishing that colony would have just as dramatic a story, about having their homes taken from them by a foreign conqueror... I wonder what happened to them afterward?

It's like repeating the Flight of Aeneas from Troy in backward direction but then missing destination a bit.

Off-topic: Why is Crimea classified as being on the north-eastern coast of Black Sea? It is on the Northern coast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com