21 December 2025

Occupation authorities abandon plans to 'restore' the ancient city of Pantikapaion

(Panticapaeum. PHOTO: wikipedia/Igor Derevyagin)

Another loud promise of the occupiers in Crimea turned out to be empty: Panticapaeum will not be "restored". A group of so-called experts assembled by the invaders, during a speech in Simferopol, directly stated that the restoration of the ancient site on top of Mount Mithridates is "impossible".

This was reported by the Voice of Crimea.

Referring to "objective circumstances", the collaborators actually admitted their inability to maintain the monument of world importance.

Despite the calls of the 'deputy' Oleh Kryshtal to make the ancient city a business card of Mithridates, representatives of the occupation science came up with a cold shower of propaganda. In particular, Vadim Maiko, who calls himself the director of the 'Institute of Archeology of Crimea of the Russian Academy of Sciences', said that full excavations of Pantikapaeum will take at least another 250-300 years. Although he dreams of creating an open-air museum "like Pompeii," Maiko admitted that any attempt at reconstruction is pointless, as even the leader of the long-running expedition, Vladimir Tolstikov, is not sure what the city really looked like.

This position was reinforced by an "archaeologist Sergei Lantsov. He explicitly stated that the restoration of Pantikapaeum is impossible, as it violates international restoration standards. According to him, any modern attempt at 'restoration' will be just a fantasy on the theme of sketches, not a restoration of the thousand-year history of the Bosporus.

In early summer, it became known about Putin's personal order to museumize Pantikapaion. According to the dictator's plan, the ancient settlement was to become part of a large-scale 'restoration' of historical sites in Kerch, another ideological project modeled on the 'New Chersonese' in occupied Sevastopol.

Already in November, the invaders began actively discussing the creation of a "tourist archaeological complex" directly on Mount Mithridates, where the ruins of the ancient city are located.

Катерина Глушко

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