Crimean Goths

In his Fourth Turkish letter, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522–1592) describes them as "a warlike people, who to this day inhabit many villages".

Though most scholars agree that the peoples must have been of Gothic origin,[5][6] some others have maintained that the so-called "Crimean Goths" were in fact West or even North Germanic tribes that had settled in Crimea, culturally and linguistically influenced by the Ostrogoths.

During the late 5th and early 6th century, the Crimean Goths had to fight off hordes of Huns who were migrating back eastward after losing control of their European empire.

[citation needed] Many Crimean Goths were Greek speakers and many non-Gothic Byzantine citizens were settled in the region called "Gothia" by the government in Constantinople.

One romantic report appears in Joachimus Cureus' Gentis Silesiae Annales, in which he claims that, during a voyage in the Black Sea, his ship was forced ashore by storms.

Torquatus visited Crimea in the mid-to-late 16th century and reported the existence of Goths, who spoke their own language, but used Greek, Tatar and Hungarian in dealing with outsiders.

[15] In 1690, Kampfer states: The language spoke[n] in the Peninsula Crimea, or Taurica Chersonesus, in Asia, still retains many German words, brought thither, as is suppos'd by a colony of Goths, who went to settle there about 850 years after the Deluge.

The late Mr. Busbeq, who had been Imperial Ambassador at the Ottoman Port, collected and publish'd a great number of these words in his fourth letter; and in my own travels through that Country I took notice of many more.

[citation needed] The language of the Crimean Goths is poorly attested, with only 101 certain independent forms surviving, few of which are phrases, and a three-line song, which has never been conclusively translated.

In 2015, five Gothic graffiti inscriptions were found by Andrey Vinogradov, a Russian historian, on stone plates excavated in Mangup in 1938, and deciphered by him and Maksim Korobov.

Hitler had intended to resettle German people in Crimea and rename numerous towns with their previous Crimean Gothic names.

[26] Hitler's ultimate goal for his planned "Gau Gothenland" ("Gothland" or "Gothia") was to replace the local population with "pure Germans" and turn Crimea into what he described as "the German Gibraltar" — a national foothold not contiguous to the rest of Germany, similar to how Gibraltar was not contiguous to the rest of the United Kingdom — to be connected to Germany proper by an autobahn.

The plan was postponed for the duration of the war, and never went into effect due to the Soviet recapture of Crimea and Nazi Germany's eventual demise.