Ayudag - Bear Mountain
Russian-language article (translation in progress).
The height of Mount Medved is not great - 577 metres above the sea level, though its area is rather impressive - 5.4 square kilometres.
Very often we apprehend Ayudag as a part of scenery: we look at it with wonder, admire and take some photos of it. This mountain had got a rare luck both in painting and in literature. It is very easy to enumerate a great majority of names but let us mention only one name of Adam Mitzkevich, great Polish poet. He wrote :
Ayudag, from your stones I like to watch How a black billow moves, curling and growing up, How it drops off, starts boiling and, glittering silver, Strews a large rain of iridescent lights.
Ayudag is a national reserve. The mountain juts out into the sea and forms the headland which is fairly visible from almost all sides of the Southern seacoast. It is a fine reference-point for sailors. At the begining of this era ancient geographer Strabon describing commercial centers on the Crimean shore mentioned Ayudag under the name Kriumetopon, what means "Sheep's Forehead". This name was preserved on the geographical maps for a very long time. To medieval residents already this summit seemed looking like a huge bear which bending over the waters of the Black Sea and as if drinking water from the sea. There are a lot of legends and superstitions which are connected with this summit of the Southern sea-coast.
The distance hides a lot of things. From a distance it seems that the mountain is covered with shrubs, but actually the hair of the gigantic stone bear is a real thick and shady forest. There are antique roads, paths and vast green glades in it, and here side by side there are stone precipices, rocks by which the waves are breaking below.
Ayudag is called one of the natural mineralogical museums of the Southern sea-coast. The rostrums on the Red Square in Moscow are made of the Crimean diabase. In the recent times new, earlier unknown in Crimea mineral - vesuvian was found in this place. The total number of minerals found on Ayudag reaches 18. The relic verdure which covers the slopes and the summit of the mountain is very interesting: ever-green strawberry-tree, bushes of Pontic butcher's boom, Crimean rock-rose are growing here. It is the only Crimean site of special spices of sylvan cabbage and the only Ukrainian site of rare fern - lip-fern brake-shaped.