In a corner of Ukraine's southern Crimea peninsula, a few hundred Karaites -- a mysterious people of Turkish origin and a Judaic sectarian faith -- struggle to keep their millennium-old culture alive.
The ruins of a 10th century Karaite fortress, known as Chufut-Kale, or "Jewish fortress" in Turkish, still stand near Bakhchisarai in Crimea's southwest.
At the foot of stone walls, in a wooded valley, lies an ancestral cemetery numbering over 10,000 tombs engraved with Hebrew characters.
"Judging by the number of branches or wooden sticks laid near the sepulchres, a ritual meant to mark our passage, fewer and fewer of us come here," said Yuri Polkanov, a 67-year-old Karaite.
"Now there are only vandals," he sighed, looking at several overturned tombstones.
According to this academician, a native of Crimean capital Simferopol, "if the Ukrainian state does not aid the Karaites, they are bound to disappear."
There are no more than 1,200 Karaites in Ukraine, and only 70 among them still speak their native language derived from the Turkish, according to Ukraine's latest census conducted three years ago.
The history of Crimea's Karaites, their origins and conversion to a Jewish sect that rejects the oral laws of the Talmud, continues to intrigue researchers and prompt various interpretations.
The latest theory has it that the Karaites descended from the Khazars, a Turkish-based people who had occupied the Crimea in the seventh century. In the 10th century, some of them converted to the version of Judaism taught by the dissident theologist Anan ben David, who lived in Iraq in the eighth century.
The Karaites' customs and language are, however, very close to those of the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people also of Turkish origin.
"Our Book is the Old Testament, but we also recognize Mohammed and Jesus as prophets," explained Polkanov as he inspected restoration of two Kenassas, or Karaite temples, in Chufut-Kale.
Yet "we are Karaites, not Jews. We should not be mixed up with ethnic Jews who live in Israel and also embrace the Karaite faith," he pointed out.
As proof, Polkanov said the Karaites were not targeted by Nazi terror during Germany's occupation of the Crimea during World War II.
Some hundred Karaites were deported to Russia and Kazakhstan in 1944 by Joseph Stalin's order, he added.
"The Soviet regime dealt a mortal blow to our people, our religion and our language," said Olexandre Arabadji, chief of a small Karaite community in Kiev which numbers 150 people at best.
"We have forgotten our rites and our tongue is no longer spoken except by the very old. We sometimes gather at the place of a 90-year-old woman, who still remembers, to relearn our culture," Arabadji said.
The Karaites' sole religious site is at Evpatoria, "but we no longer have a religious head," Polkanov mourned.
Kiev's old Kenassa of neo-Byzantine splendor, constructed in 1900 on donations from wealthy Karaite tobacco producers, is now the House of Actors's spectacle hall.
Several hundred Crimean Karaites also live in Lithuania, where their ancestors moved in the Middle Ages.