Crimean Goths - Disappearance

Disappearance

There are numerous other sources referring to the existence of Goths in the Crimea following Busbeques report, though none providing details of their language or customs. The last known record of the Goths in Crimea comes from the Archbishop of Mohilev; Stanislas Sestrencewicz de Bohusz circa 1780, who visited Crimea at the end of the 18th century, and noted the existence of people whose language and customs differed greatly from their neighbors and who he concluded must be "Goths".

Despite no further records of the languages' existence since the late 18th century, communities of Germanic peoples with distinctly separate customs and physical features have been recorded living in the Crimea, leading some to believe that the Gothic language may have survived as a "haussprache" (home language) until as late as 1945.

According to the Soviet Ethnologist V.E. Vozgrin the Goths interbred with the Crimean Tartars and converted to Islam. In "The Crimean Tatars: the diaspora experience and the forging of a nation" By Brian Glyn Williams they quote Vozgrin as saying; 'In all probability their descendents are the Tartars of a series of villages in the Crimea, who are sharply delineated from the inhabitants of neighboring villages by their tall height and other features characteristic of Scandinavians.

It is clear that the Goths had begun to speak Crimean Tartar and Crimean Greek from long before the arrival of Busbeque thus they may well have integrated into the wider population, as later visitors to Mangup were unable to discover "any trace" of Gothic peoples.