The incorporation of Crimea in the late eighteenth century into the Russian empire, was accompanied by efforts to reimagine its ethnically and religiously diverse territory and past as a homogenous part of the Orthodox state. The emphasis of Mara Kozelsky's book is on Christianising understood as a ‘set of cultural and institutional practices designed to transform a territory irrespective of group or individual conversion’ (p. 5). Kozelsky provides a detailed account of the ways in which Crimea has been reimagined as a birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy, the site of an ancient city, Korsun, mentioned in a medieval chronicle, where the Russian prince Vladimir was baptised in 988. Furthermore, Crimea has become known as the New Athos: in an effort to emulate the monastic republic of Mount Athos in Greece, the Dormition monastery was established in 1850 at the intersection of sacred Muslim and Jewish monuments. Bishop Innokentii Borisov (1848–57), a prolific moral theologian, was instrumental in the Christianising project in Crimea. During the Crimean war the role of the Orthodox Church increased while the programme of Christianising became ‘overt and unfurled with the assistance of Russia's military elite’ (p. 129). In the patriotic discourse of the period the war was perceived as holy, ‘a culmination of Russia's destiny and the fulfilling of a Christian obligation’ (p. 134), while the territory of Crimea was rhetorically constructed as a sacred land. The construction of the war as holy had a harmful effect on the Muslim Tatar population of the peninsula who left Russia in large numbers after the war. The legacy of the myth of Crimea as a holy land had repercussions in both the imperial and post-Soviet history of the region. While Crimea's sacred sites became popular destinations for Russian tourists during the late imperial period, the battles over land and property between various religious institutions of the post-Soviet era highlighted the controversial nature of the Crimean sacred past. The book comments on the striking similarity of the current attempts to recreate Crimea as an Orthodox holy place and past efforts by the imperial Russian state, suggesting that today the process of reclaiming territory on the grounds of its ancient Christian past is as important as it every was. The book provides a rich case study of the phenomenon of the sacred landscape and deals with the ways in which environment is reimagined, interpreted and transformed through the efforts of the state, archaeologists, priests, bishops, settlers, monks and pilgrims. This is an elegantly written and original contribution to the ecclesiastical history of the Russian empire which shows the centrality of Orthodoxy to the imperial projects of the state.