The Khan's Palace at Bakhchysarai

The Crimean Khanate was the longest-lived of the Muslim Tatar states that emerged from the breakup of the Golden Horde, a khanate of the northern Black Sea ruled by the house of Giray, descendants of Chinggis Khan, from the later fifteenth century until its annexation by Russia at the end of the eighteenth. From 1475 the khanate stood under the protection and suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan, to whom the Crimean Tatars were close allies and from whom they took much of their high culture, while remaining a power in their own right on the steppe, where their cavalry ranged far to the north. Their capital was Bakhchysarai, whose name means the garden-palace, in a sheltered valley of the Crimean uplands, and the heart of the capital was the Khan's Palace, the Hansaray, a low complex of painted wood and stone set among gardens and courts, with its mosque and slender minarets, its divan hall, its harem quarters and its celebrated marble fountain, the so-called fountain of tears, which lets fall slow single drops from basin to basin. The architecture follows Ottoman models but on an intimate, residential, garden scale rather than the monumental scale of the imperial mosques, the cultivated centre of a steppe power rather than a fortress. This scene depicts the Khan's Palace and its gardens in the days of the khanate: the painted halls and shaded courts, the minarets of the palace mosque, and the quiet fountain, the court of a Muslim Turkic people in the northern Black Sea lands, far from the older heartlands of Islam. In keeping with the project's visual ethics no individual is shown by likeness.