* * *
On the day of the reopening, I am on duty in the visitor center; a student group is waiting, larger than anticipated. There is a typewritten script for the new tour lying on my desk, but as I rise to greet the visitors I do not take it. That morning, I had looked for any mention of the resignations in the city newspapers and failed to find one.
In the time of the Greeks, all male citizens of Chersonesus were made to swear an oath of allegiance, promising to defend their town and its democracy from conspiracies by outsiders and by those within. It is a depth and seriousness of civic piety perhaps difficult to imagine in our day and age. Etched into stone pillars, the oath would have constituted not only the conceptual but also the physical fabric of the settlement, its words legible to the townspeople as they walked to market or returned from tilling the flinty soil. The sight would have been a comfort at the hour of Chersonesus’s greatest need, firming resolve as its citizens awaited the armies of the Romans, the Huns, the Turks. At the foot of one of these pillars, I start my tour; behind the crowd of students are the walls of what even I have come to call the necropolis, and beyond that is the sea.
“In Sevastopol we keep the Greek myths alive,” I begin, “but we tell them differently. Here we say that Iphigenia did not die by her father’s sword; we say that Artemis rescued her from Agamemnon, that the goddess carried her all the way to the Crimean Peninsula and installed her here as a priestess. We say that when foreigners arrived on the shores of her new home Iphigenia would never fail to slit their throats with great solemnity and not a little relish.”
Erica X Eisen‘s works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Little Star, Pleiades, The Atticus Review, Lumen, The Harvard Advocate, and the Nivalis 2015 anthology.
