The Crimean Italians

Organised by

• Department of History

On the shores of Eastern Crimea, in the city of Kerch, lives today a group of people of Italian descent, who call themselves Crimean Italians. In 2015, they were officially recognised by the Russian state as a minority oppressed by the Soviet regime, with almost no historical debate over who they are, where they come from and what really happened to them. The present work aims to answer those questions, shading light over a little-researched Italian migratory flow – the one towards the Black Sea and the Russian Empire. Stretching from 1820s to 1940s, from Genoa and Apulia to the steppes of Kazakhstan, the present thesis focuses on human experience across political, geographical and identity boundaries, reconstructing the life trajectories of individuals, eventually caught in the whirlpool of 20th-century historical events. The Crimean Italians’ migration and settlement process, their impact on the rural and urban ‘ecosystem’ of Eastern Crimea, their resonance within post-WWI colonial plans in the region, their ordeal in Bolshevik Russia and, ultimately, their deportation to Central Asia in 1942 form the main chronological thread of the narrative. Throughout this thread, and alternating both micro and macro analyses, the narrative wants however to preserve the personal dimension of the researched topic, which constitutes an important part of the long-neglected memory of the Crimean Italians and their descendants today