Here in the warm semi-tropical climate they planned an English flower garden and an extensive botanical garden where the rarest of plants flourished and added, as in the Voronzov gardens, the dark mysterious cypress trees.

These trees all over the Province had an interesting history – for the first two had been planted by the Empress Catherine and Prince Potemkin on their journey to her Southern domain.

From these two trees were grafted off the many cypress groves and alleys that were becoming a characteristic mark of the Crimean landscape.

Yamina’s father spent a great deal of money on what he decided would be his permanent summer home, but he could not rival the fantastic and extravagant luxury displayed by Prince Voronzov.

At Aloupkha, on a site rising one hundred and fifty feet sheer above the Black Sea, the Prince had built a Palace with the help of an Englishman, Edward Blore, which critics said resembled the stronghold of the Black Douglas or the Palace of the Great Mogul.

He used a special greenish stone that was quarried in the Urals and cost vast sums to transport.

Lesser mortals had to be content with marble, but nevertheless Yamina had loved her home and would not have had it any different.

As a child she could remember crying when the summer was over and they had to return to the chilly splendour of St. Petersburg.

There she used to count the days until, as the snows melted, she knew that they would soon be travelling South, back to their own special paradise on the shores of the Black Sea.

Because her father was so ill and in any case communications were difficult, she had not realised the danger of the situation even when General Paskievich was laying siege to the Turkish fortress of Silistra with extraordinary vigour in the middle of May.

When she arrived in Constantinople, Yamina had learnt that with only Ottoman Commanders the garrison might have surrendered, but it happened that two young English Officers, Butler and Naismyth, had thrown themselves into the beleaguered City and inspired the defenders with such zeal that the Czar’s Army was driven off.

This did not make her feel any more kindly towards the British when with France and Turkey, in what they called ‘an attempt to draw the eye-tooth of the Bear’ they made a sudden descent on the Crimea.

‘Long before then,’ Yamina later told herself, ‘we should have left!’

It would have been easy to do so. Carriages could have carried them to the nearest railway station and, although the journey would have been difficult owing to her father’s weakness, he would have undoubtedly survived, as he survived so much else.

At the time, however, he had seemed too ill to move and she had not anticipated, nor had anyone else, that the War would escalate so quickly.