Balaklava looking north, 1855

Photograph by James Robertson (1813-1888), Crimean War, 1855.

In the early months of the Crimean campaign Balaklava was in a dreadful state. 'The Times' reporter William Howard Russell described the insanitary conditions of Balaklava in lurid terms: 'As to the Town itself, words could not describe its filth, its horrors, its hospitals, its burials, its dead and dying Turks, its crowded lanes, its noisesome sheds, its beastly purlieus, or its decay. All the pictures ever drawn of plague and pestilence, from the work of the inspired writer who chronicled the woes of infidel Egypt, down to the narratives of Boccacio, Defoe, or Moltke, fall short of individual "bits" of disease and death, which any one might see in half-a-dozen places during half an hour's walk in Balaklava'.