Our Notes & References

First edition of the first work on Black Sea antiquities, an important, richly illustrated scientific book and a fine production of the presses in Odessa, with the text elegantly printed with various fonts (including much Greek) and within a double frame, and all plates produced by Braun, the leading lithographer in Odessa at the time. These plates show a variety of motives and artefacts, from a view and maps of the region, to tombs and monuments, their structures, vases, art and decorations, jewellery and other archaeological findings.

Scarce complete and in such a luxurious binding: we could trace only one example at auction outside Russia in recent decades, the Imperial, Tsarskoe Selo-Blackmer copy, 15 years ago.

Ashik’s main work, ‘The Bosphorus Kingdom’ is a comprehensive description of the important Greek antiquities (including many excellent vases and tomb frescoes discovered by the author in 1843) found in the area of Kerch in the Crimea. From 1832, Anton Ashik (1801-54) was the curator of a small museum established at Kerch in 1828 to house discoveries made in tombs in the environs of the town.

Kerch was the centre of the successful Greek colony of Panticapaeum in the sixth century BC. Thereafter the area became known as the Kingdom of the Bosphorus. After the damage inflicted on the town during the period of British occupation at the time of the Crimean War, the surviving objects in the museum were moved elsewhere in Russia, principally to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

Ashik’s informed and innovative book would soon be followed by two other, but quite different works on the same theme: the larger, more impressive ‘Antiquités du Bosphore cimmérien’ published in St. Petersburg in 1854 and focusing only on the Hermitage collection; and perhaps the more known (and more common) Western work by Macpherson, ‘Antiquities of Kertch’, London, 1857, with only a dozen plates.

Provenance

The Demidoff-Obolensky family; Boris Berezovsky (1946-2013, Russian businessman and politician; label to upper fly-leaf).

Bibliography

Blackmer 51; Berezin 17 (“Vesma liubopytnoe opisanie […]. Redka”); Obolianinov 113; Solovev kat. 105, 51 (in half-binding only, 25 rub.).