in the 19th century. After the October Revolution of 1917, a Rumaiic revival occurred in the region. The Soviet administration established a Greek-Rumaiic theater, several magazines and a newspaper, and a number of Rumaiic language schools. The best Rumaiic poet Georgi Kostoprav created a Rumaiic poetic language for his work. This process was reversed in 1937 as Kostoprav and many other Rumaiics and Urums were killed as part of Joseph Stalin's national policies. A new attempt to preserve a sense of ethnic Rumaiic identity started in the mid-1980s. The Ukrainian scholar Andriy Biletsky created a new Slavonic alphabet for Greek speakers. Though a number of writers and poets make use of this alphabet, the population of the region rarely uses it. The Rumaiic language is declining rapidly, most endangered by the standard Modern Greek which is taught in schools and the local university. The latest investigations by Alexandra Gromova demonstrate that there is still hope that elements of the Rumaiic population will continue to use the dialect. Along with those speaking Rumeíka, there were and are a number of Tatar-speaking Orthodox villages, the so-called Urums, which is the Tatar term for Romaios or Rumei. This subdivision had already occurred in Crimea before the settlement of the Azov Sea steppe region by Pontic Greeks which began following the fall of the Empire of Trebizond in northeastern Anatolia in 1461. It occurred on a larger scale after the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1779, as part of the Russian policy to populate and develop the region while depriving the Crimea of an economically active part of its population. Though Greek- and Tatar-speaking settlers lived separately, the language of the Urums was the lingua franca of the region for a long time, being called the language of the bazaar. There are also a number of settlements of other ethnic communities, including Germans, Bulgarians, and Albanians (though the meanings of all such terms in this context is open to dispute). Native languages of the population as of the All-Russian Empire Census in 1897: Religious communities 11 churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchy. 3 churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchy. 52 various religious communities. The city is adorned by the St. Nicholas Cathedral (in the Tsentralnyi borough) and other churches of the city, namely: St. Nicholas (Primorsky borough) St. Michael (Livoberezhnyi borough) St. Preobrazheniye ("Holy Transfiguration")