VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Yalta is a city and seaside resort on the Southern coast of the Crimean peninsula. The city's name is widely believed to come from the Greek word "yalos", or coast, although some scholars believe the name to be of Turkic origin.
Yalta was founded by the Greeks in approximately the first century. Legend has it that after being blown of course by a storm, Greek sailors were forced to search for land for a long time. When they finally saw the coast, they decided to call the new settlement "yalos".
Yalta was part of the Roman Empire in ancient times, and in the Middle Ages it belonged to the Byzantine Empire and the Principality of Theodoro, and later became a Genoese colony. From 1475 to 1774, when the Southern coast of the Crimea belonged to the Ottoman Empire, Yalta was part of the kadylyk (the smallest administrative unit in the Ottoman Empire) of Mangup.
After the Crimean Christians were relocated to the area around the Azov Sea in 1778 by order of the Russian government and the massive emigration of Crimean Tartars following the peninsula's incorporation into the Russian Empire, Yalta was almost abandoned, and had become a small fishing village by the end of the 18th century.
Yalta was connected with Alushta and Simferopol by a dirt road in 1837, and with Sevastopol in 1848.
The Red Army occupied the city during the Civil War in 1920, and in 1930 Yalta became the regional centre of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
Yalta was the location of a conference of the same name from February 4 to 11, 1945.
The city developed as a seaside resort after the war. Yalta's population was 80,000 as of the latest Ukrainian census in 2001. In unofficial estimates, among the Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin). now the number is about 100,000 people. Yalta's population increases to 400,000 from March to September.
Russians form the majority of Yalta's residents (65.6%), while Ukrainians account for 27.6%, Crimean Tartars for 1.3%, Belarusians for 1.6%, Poles for 0.2% and Moldovans for 0.2%.
