The Crimean Goths Gothic Ruins, Mangup, the Heather, Peter, The
Goths, Vasiliev, A. A., The Goths in the Crimea, History of the
Goths, The Goths: guilty of destroying the Roman Empire, but
innocent of Gothic architecture. Their language is the only
known example of the now-extinct Eastern Germanic family, and
originally they lived on the southeastern shores of the Baltic
in what is now Poland (rather than in Scandinavia as legend has
it). Early in the Christian era they saturated the basins of the
Vistula, the Bug, and the other rivers flowing north to the
Baltic, until about 200 A.D. when they were finally able to make
the jump to the rivers flowing south to the Black Sea: the
Dnieper and the Bug. (The south-flowing Bug is sometimes called
the Southern Bug by people with no sense of humor.) Heather
argues, against the recent consensus, that this was a genuine
migration of peoples rather than just an invading army achieving
dominance over local populations, and also that, in the end,
Goths had a considerable