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Friday 19th of April 2024, 04:30 CET |
| Balaklava and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" |
February 1, 2003
LonelyPlanet TT Eastern Europe/Caucasus
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Written by Mark Smith
Posted by HW on April 18, 2024
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Before heading for Ukraine, I bought my Lonely Planet "Russia, Belarus and Ukraine" and eagerly turned to the index to look up "Balaclava". Not a sausage... Lots of info on the Bakchisaray palace of the Khans (which I"d never even heard of) but absolutely no mention of what to every schoolboy must be the most famous place in the Crimea if not Ukraine.
So as there seems to be a complete dearth of information for visitors wanting to see the battlefield at Balaclava, here"s the gen...
Balaclava itself was the British supply port during the Crimean war. It"s 7 miles from Sebastopol (the town the British were busy beseiging), a trip which can be done by trolleybus (No.12, I think) to the town boundary interchange point, then a normal bus (No.9 or 9a, I believe) to Balaclava (spelt "Balaklava" by the Ukrainians). Alternatively (and a dam" sight more easily) it"s about £3 by taxi from central Sebastopol.
Both Sebastopol and Balaclava were closed to foreigners until about 1996. It"s easy to see why - Sebastopol is the home of the Ukrainian/Russian Black Sea Fleet, and Balaclava a submarine repair centre.
At Balaclava itself, you can climb the grassy hill to the ruined and deserted fortress overlooking the expanse of the Black Sea to one side and the enclosed harbour to the other. The fortress and its hill look exactly as they do in the photographs and drawings made in 1854.
To reach the battlefield, I walked 2 or 3 miles uphill back up the road towards the junction with the main road from Sebastopol. I was navigating using an 1854 map of the battlefield, because this was all I had... I thought that this road junction was the one marked on the 1854 map. But having turned right (away from Sebastopol) I should have been on the battlefield almost immediately, but the topography was all wrong...
I walked Eastwards down the main road for another mile or two, through the drizzle, until the landscape began to look more like that shown on my map - could I be nearing the battlefield? I was then flummoxed to find a large roundabout, a main road to Simferopol, two petrol stations and the Ukrainian equivalent of a Little Chef (none of which was marked on the 1854 map...)
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Undeterred, I strode into the bar/cafeteria attached to one of the petrol stations and asked where Balaclava battlefield was. I didn"t know the Russian or Ukrainian word for "battlefield", so had to improvise. Unfortunately, my one-man mimed renactment of the charge of the Light Brigade was simply too much for the girl on the cash register, who sent for reinforcements. The buxom woman who emerged from the kitchen produced a stream of Russian, from which I managed to catch the word "Yalta" several times. So I took the road leading off the roundabout towards Yalta, and there it was - the old Sebastopol-Yalta road running along the shallow ridge, with the six small hummocks where the British redoubts were (the Russians managed to capture four of them in the course of the battle). To the left was the muddy valley where the Light Brigade famously charged the Russian guns, which were lined up across the valley from the small hills on the far side to the road.
They"d have trouble charging now - most of the valley is now vineyard (and I can"t think of a better use for it...)
The battlefield is completely unsigned and unmarked - you need a good historical book to tell you what you are looking at. There is a "panorama" museum/viewpoint on the escarpment to the West overlooking the whole valley, but this is to do with the heroic defence of that escarpment in WW2, and nothing to do with the Crimean war. The battlefield is about 2-3 miles inland from Balaclava, about 5 miles from Sebastopol, and if I"d had any sense I"d have hired that taxi for half a day - still the 10 miles I walked that day probably did me good. You might find a more direct road up from Balaclava port than the one I took..! |
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