After last week’s article, I had a prompt call from my cruise friend, Mr Know-All, reminding me that LP Hartley said the past was a foreign country. Quite true, but Hartley needs emendation: the past is many foreign countries, some happy, some bloody. Minerva II’s second week in the Black Sea began with four different ports of call in the Ukraine. Joseph Brodsky, speaking of the USSR, remarked that “six decades of turning the other cheek transformed the face of the nation into one big bruise”. Today’s welcoming smiles have the memory of pain in them.

In Yalta, we docked not far from where Chekhov saw that Lady with the Dog. In the late 1800s, it was the smart resort for north Russian aristocrats and tubercular bourgeois. Among the latter, Chekhov found Yalta extremely dull, but stayed alive there for several years and wrote some of his best work — Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard — in the “White Dacha”, a stuccoed asymmetrical suburban villa which he had built in 1899 on today’s Kirov Street.

After the revolution, Lenin decreed the workerisation of Yalta. Villas and palaces were turned into sanatoria. But Chekhov’s renown preserved the modest house where Maria, his long-lived sister, kept the flame. We had a protracted morning’s homage at the Soviet-style museum of sepia relics, as we waited for an official delegation to have its fill of the crepuscular rooms where Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky had played the ebony upright piano and Anton had his blue-leathered desk.

His friend Tolstoy said that Chekhov’s plays were “worse even than Shakespeare’s”. Trust another writer.

We were so flaked by our morning in attendance on Chekhov that we fell asleep and missed the bus to Levadia, where the triumvirate of FDR, Joseph Stalin and (last and least by then) Winston Churchill carved the world in two in 1944. After a look at the Alexander Nevsky cathedral — bright and cheerfully onion-domed outside, ardently incensed within — we slumped on an arboured bench on the Lenin promenade, where we were discovered by Mr Know-All. The wide, curved waterfront reminded him of Smyrna, “now Izmir. Scene of another mass evacuation. 1922. Been chucked out of a lot of places in their time, your Greeks”.

Indeed. They were in the Crimea for millennia, if myths are anything to go by: Prometheus spent 30,000 years chained in the Caucasus, having his liver pecked by an eagle for giving mankind the divine gift of fire. And in one version, Iphigenia was not sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to procure a fair wind for Troy, but was spirited off to Tauris, near Sebastopol, our next ancient destination.

All but 10 houses in Sebastopol date from after 1945. What it endured when stormed by the British and French in 1855 was repeated, more bloodily and ruinously, during the Nazi invasion and occupation.

We spent another ancient Greek morning at Chersonesos, one of the last colonies to be founded, as recently as 421BC, in a region where any successful city was always a target for takeover. The citizens must have had a fat defence budget to put up the double walls, with a “killing ditch” between them.

So: we did Chersonesos, as had the Khazars, the Pechenegs and the Tatars, each in their ungentle way, before setting off for the battle of Balaklava. Bob Godfrey, the military man, took command. First we paraded at the (Russian) war memorial down on the battlefield. The Swan contingent massed on the low but significant ridge where the British guns (and some Turks) were disposed.

The little harbour of Balaklava and the sea were in front of us, beyond the long, broadish “South Valley”. Parallel to it, behind us, was the shallow “North Valley”: Tennyson’s “Valley of Death”, when the Light Brigade made its magnificent, misguided charge.

In 1855, Balaklava was a vital British arsenal, screened by some 600 men of the 93rd infantry. On the morning of the battle, they watched 4,000 Russian cavalry debouch into the North Valley from the east (I hope I’ve got this bit right, sir). The 93rd were watched by William Russell, the Times correspondent, as they were charged by, and repelled, the Russians. His report coined the famous phrase “the thin red line tipped with steel”. As the Russians re-grouped, they were charged and shattered by General Scarlet’s Heavy Brigade: 400 men and horses pitching into almost 10 times as many.

So far, not so bad at all. Meanwhile, Lord Lucan and his Light Brigade had been held in reserve. Lord Raglan, the one-armed C-in-C, had been anxious not to risk the cavalry in the preliminary battle at the Alma. Lucan and his men had endured a good deal of chaff from the cholera-ridden, hardfighting infantry: Lord “Look- On” was now impatient to do something heroic.

We embussed for Raglan’s vantage point: a superb panoramic position. The Russians had mounted their artillery on the high hills closing the far end of the North Valley. But Raglan was more concerned about losing his own guns than capturing the Russians’. From where he stood, high above the battlefield at the west end of the two valleys, he spotted his Turkish contingent, guarding the guns on the ridge, start to disintegrate. He sent polite word to Lucan to take care of the guns. He assumed it would be obvious which guns he meant. Raglan was puzzled, then horrified as Lucan took the Light Brigade over the ridge into the South Valley and aligned them in perfect drill order to advance towards the Russian guns.