Reconstruction of Town-Planning Look Development of Crimean Residential Places Based on Mass Pictorial Sources of Late 19th - Early 20th Centuries
In contrast to the well-developed problem of written sources, complex of graphic materials, reflecting the state of the cultural heritage of the Crimea in the late 19th - early 20th cc., is still poorly studied. The cause of this is the ‘text-centrism’ of the historical source studies, the overcoming of which is only began in the second half of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, there is vast body of picture postcards and photo albums on Crimean cities and villages published by the Russian and foreign printing houses. This type of postcards and photos is the object of my research in the context of urban-development boom in Crimea in the turn of 19th and 20th cc. For my research goals I used historiographic and comparative analysis: in my article, I systematized complex of postcards on the basis of the current state of objects (some of them was lost), their species (monuments of archaeology, architecture and town planning, monumental and landscape art, science and technology, movable objects of cultural heritage), the advent of a cultural heritage of respect ‘Golden Age of Postcards.’ I identify 2main types of such pictorial sources. They are as follows: (i) panoramic views of cities and towns of the Crimea, which can be grouped under the general name ‘overall views’ or ‘view from...’ (here summaries about the city, geographical location, or about cardinal direction, from which photofixation have been made, been published); (ii) views of streets, squares, alleys, places of interest in residential areas. The most attractive for the publication were representative images of the city centers. These two groups of cards represent the most holistic image of the urban development of the Crimean cities and towns in the early twentieth century. For the cities of the Southern coast of the Crimea, it is possible to distinguish images taken from the hills and cliffs. They show the most complete town planning scheme, but not ‘holistic image of the city’, which includes a combination of building and landscape. However, cards with such views show tridimensional and spatial relationships between individual parts of urban area, especially planning and ‘city silhouette.’ Analysis of pictorial postcards allowed me to show that the results of the Soviet and post-Soviet urban planning in the Crimea are partial or total destruction of the urban complexes of the Middle Ages, as well as loss of linkage between several elements of nineteen-century buildings. Thus, site coverage in Simferopol historic center in the last 20 years has destroyed unique historical urban complex of the early 20th century. So, in my article, I prove possibility of ‘reading’ individual monuments of the visual image as an independent research tool of cultural heritage.