«we Are Settled Between the Mountains…»: To the History of the Village of Balta-Chokrak in the Southwestern Crimea at the End of the Xviii–xx Centuries

This article presents the history of the population of the village of Balta-Chokrak with the Southwestern Crimea, a settlement with different ethnic composition. Until the beginning of the XIX century, the village was inhabited by the Crimean Tatars, but subsequently Balta-Chokrak and its agricultural territories (cultural landscape) are bought to the treasury from the noblewoman Kalitsa Ivanovna Mazganina. After the Crimean Tatars leave the village and travel to the Ottoman Empire, a colony from Greek families who came from Anatolia is founded here. Instead of the mosque that existed in Balta-Chokrak Greek colonists build a church, and begin to actively develop agriculture. What is important, the article on the basis of archival documents and field research for the first time gave a reconstruction of the Crimean Tatar stage of the history of the village, presents the peculiarities of the structure of new immigrants, the difficulties that they had to face in a new place. The point of view established in historiography about Balta-Chokrak as a Greek-Bulgarian colony was also questioned and the features of the composition of the cultural landscape of Balta-Chokrak were revealed, the history of the construction in 1818 and subsequent rebuilding of the Panteleimon Church and the spiritual life of the colonists were detailed.