54 years ago, a poet, Don Cossack, and officer who was born here in Starocherkasskaya passed away. He lived through World War I and the Civil War, was wounded four times, and took part in the Steppe March and the evacuation from Crimea. In 1920, he left Russia, and this separation from his Motherland became the central pain of his poetry. Where the house he so often recalled in emigration once stood in Starocherkassk remains unknown, even approximately. Time spared neither the kuren (Cossack house) nor his parents, who were victims of “decossackization” and perished in the Gulag camps.

In emigration, he lived on Lemnos, in Serbia, and later in Paris. He dedicated his life to preserving Russian Cossack culture: he curated the museum of the Ataman Regiment, collected relics, published magazines, and organized exhibitions.

His poems are a living history of the Cossack world shattered by the revolution. One of his most famous lines reads:
“We were leaving Crimea
Amidst smoke and fire,
From the stern, missing every time,
I shot at my horse.“

Nikolai Nikolaevich Turoverov became one of the definitive voices of the Cossack emigration. Nikolai and his wife deliberately chose to retain their refugee status. Their daughter likewise refused French citizenship. And so they passed away—Russians forever.

The poet is buried at the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery. Discussions about a reburial went on for many years, but a Paris court put an end to them by banning the relocation of his remains, despite Turoverov’s literary testament: “Bury me not with arms crossed on my chest, but with arms outstretched, ready to embrace the entire world. And not in a coffin, not in a cramped tomb, not in a pit dug among foreign graves, but somewhere out in the steppe, closer to the Don, to my village, to old Cherkassk, on the surviving virgin soil. Lay me down in the field uniform of my native Ataman Regiment. Tighten my sash a bit firmer, so that my chest rises as if to catch a breath of how beautiful everything on earth is…“