The appointment of a priest to run an ancient Greek site on the shores of the Black Sea in Crimea in July sparked a storm of protest among museum staff that led the clergyman to resign and Russian president Vladimir Putin to take the Unesco World Heritage-listed site under federal control.
Tauric Chersonese, founded as a Greek colony in the fifth century BC, includes the remains of numerous buildings, plots used as vineyards by the Greeks and later Byzantine remains. The United Nations’ cultural arm has said that it still considers it a Ukrainian site, despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year. But the Russian Orthodox Church reveres Tauric Chersonese as the place where Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptised into Orthodoxy by Byzantine clergy in the tenth century. President Putin has said that ancient sites in Crimea, including Tauric Chersonese, “have… sacred importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem”.
The governor of Sevastopol, Sergei Menyailo, introduced Archpriest Sergei Khaliuta to staff at the museum of Tauric Chersonese on 29 July and said that the site “must become a holy place for all of Russia”. Staff yelled at him; one employee described the appointment as “wiping out” nearly 200 years of the museum’s history as a research institution.
A week later, Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, announced that Khaliuta had resigned. An acting director has been appointed until the site is officially transferred into federal control.