First-ever epigraphic Crimean Gothic attestation discovered

[Porphyrogenitos]

The article is in Russian, but what I know from Wikipedia and Reddit comment sections is:

In 1938, some stone tablets were excavated in the city of Mangup, Crimea. They bore inscriptions illegible to the discoverers, and were assumed to be Greek. After sitting in a Russian museum for eighty years, in 2015, the historian Andrey Vinogradov analyzed the inscriptions and determined that they were in Crimean Gothic. The scholars Vinogradov and Maksim Korobov translated the inscriptions. They include prayers and a fragment of a psalm, and are written in Wulfilas' Gothic alphabet. The inscriptions date from c. 850-950 CE.

This discovery is significant because it is the first-ever direct attestation of the Crimean Gothic language. The only other evidence of the language comes from a letter by the Flemish ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq published in 1589. I thought users here would find this discovery to be interesting.

Source (in Russian): https://meduza.io/feature/2015/12/25/molitvy-na-kamnyah

Images of one of the tablets:

[jal]

Very cool. Somehow the idea of Germanic peoples so far down South (and East) feels odd.


JAL

[WeepingElf]

Very cool. Somehow the idea of Germanic peoples so far down South (and East) feels odd.

But the Ostrogoths were there. And the Vandals in North Africa.

[jal]

But the Ostrogoths were there. And the Vandals in North Africa.

Yeah, I know. But still, when thinking of Germanic tribes, I somehow picture Vikings and the like (they probably were like Vikings, but then in North Africa. Weird.) Reading about Crimean Gothing reminds me that the Germanic tribes went everywhere. It's a pity their language completely disappeared.


JAL

[zompist]

There were Goths in the Crimea, still speaking aGermanic language, until at least the 16th century.

There was also a migration of Germans to the Crimea that began in the early 1800s; they were still there in the 1940s, when Stalin exiled them to Siberia.

[Nortaneous]

Russia encouraged German immigration for a long time, with the result that there were German communities in Crimea, the Caucasus, Bessarabia, the Volga area, and so on. Then Stalin exiled them all to Siberia or Kazakhstan. (There are still a few hundred thousand Germans in Kazakhstan.)

There were also German communities in most of the other countries of Eastern Europe, but the Allies expelled them to Germany after WW2 -- which was one of the largest ethnic cleansings in history even before you add the internal expulsions in the USSR.

[zompist]

"Allies" is a weird word there; the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe and they're the ones who did it.

[Salmoneus]

"Allies" is a weird word there; the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe and they're the ones who did it.

That's also somewhat disingenuous.
There were three phases of expulsion. The first phase was partly self-removal and partly removal by the Nazis: Germans fled and were evacuated before the Soviets got there.
The second phase was a chaotic process of flight and genocide, mostly conducted on a local level, without official policies on any side - local civilian authorities and the Soviet army participated, but it was mostly led by local militias and gangs, rather than "the Soviets" in any organised fashion. The exception is in Hungary, where the expulsion was ordered by the Soviets.
The third phase was a policy of legalised expulsion. It was mostly carried out by the Soviets, but it's fair to say that this was done by "the Allies": the policy was created not by the Soviets acting in isolation, but by all the Allied nations, and made law in the Treaty of Postdam.

It's also worth pointing out that while most Germans lived in, and hence were expelled from, Soviet-controlled countries, it's not like other countries didn't expel too. Britain expelled Germans from Palestine, and the US 'impelled', if you'll excuse the coinage, from Latin America (the US and its south american allies took Germans from their homes in latin america and transported them to internment camps in the US). The Dutch carried out a larger expulsion after the war. And the most intense genocide occured not under the Soviets but in Yugoslavia, where Germans were sent to concentration camps.

So while it's true that the largest bulk of people were indeed expelled from countries that fell under Soviet control, framing it purely as something "The Soviets" did is disingenuous, I think.

[zompist]

Some numbers from Wikipedia:

Expulsions from Eastern Europe: 12 million
From Netherlands: 3,691
From Latin America: 4,058
From Palestine: 661

Information is always good, but the action was overwhelmingly Soviet. (Yugoslavia was in the Soviet orbit at the time.)

The Soviets did this to their "allies" too-- 1.6 million Poles were expelled from the USSR to Poland, as Stalin simply kept the third of Poland he'd taken via the Nazi-Soviet pact.

As a point of comparison, the number of Japanese-Americans interned was about 120,000. 11,000 German nationals were interned as well. (There were some German-Americans, but Wikipedia doesn't say how many and some quick Googling didn't help.)

[zompist]

BTW, if you think TV Tropes is addictive, try looking at WWII history. An endless book-lined pit of information.

[Travis B.]

Umm the Yugoslav Partisans' being allied with the Soviets was pretty nominal, especially considering that they quite quickly broke with the Soviets after the war. They acted largely independently during the war, and things like the Bleiburg massacre were their doing, not that of the Soviets.

Anyways, it cannot simply be blamed on the Soviets alone, for the reasons Salmoneus has outlined.

[zompist]

The Yugoslav-Soviet split was 1948, after the bulk of the expulsions. The Yugoslavs were close enough to the Soviets during the war to transport 30,000 Germans to the USSR for forced labor.

95% of the expulsions were Soviet rather than Yugoslav; 99.9% were communist. Nothing wrong with talking about the remaining 0.1%, but trying to give the impression that the expulsion of Germans was not an overwhelmingly communist action is a little strange.

[Travis B.]

Claiming that the Soviets were primarily responsible for the expulsions ignores the first two phases of the expulsions, as explained before. And when the Soviets did do their expelling, they had received the consent of the western Allies in such, it should be noted.

[Nortaneous]

"Allies" is a weird word there; the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe and they're the ones who did it.

Except for the Potsdam Agreement.

It could've been worse for the Germans, of course: the Netherlands tried to expel its entire German population and take a chunk of German territory and expel the native population (as Poland and the USSR successfully did), but the plan was eventually shot down by the British and the Americans. Then there's the Morgenthau plan. Then there's the bizarre proposal from a (IIRC) Canadian Jewish newspaper right after the Anschluss to sterilize all Germans (because, you see, Germans are inherently warlike), but of course that never got anywhere except into the Nazis' propaganda.