In the spring of 1787, four years after annexing Crimea, Catherine the Great set out on a six-month progress south to inspect her new lands. A fleet of gilded galleys carried the empress down the Dnieper; in Sevastopol she reviewed a brand-new Black Sea fleet built almost from nothing.
The journey gave history a phrase that has outlived everyone involved: the 'Potemkin village'. Grigory Potemkin, the viceroy of the south and the empress's favourite, supposedly ordered painted pasteboard villages and staged 'happy peasants' along the route. The truth was subtler — new settlements were being built at extraordinary speed, and the decorations were genuine, if theatrical, landscaping.
The Journey of Catherine II to the Crimea reconstructs the tour day by day from contemporary sources — the ceremonial entries, the fleet review at Sevastopol, and the foreign envoys' gossip that seeded the legend.
The 1787 tour explains why Crimea dominated Russian imagination for the next sixty years — up to the war surveyed in our Crimean War overview. Explore the region further via the Crimea place page and the history shelf.