Crimea, Sevastopol and Simferopol: these were words which I had rarely heard, never mind read, before the year 2008, when I began reading for my master's dissertation. While my exposure to them, and other people, places and events associated with them, expanded during my research for that degree, conducted at University College Dublin, and during my subsequent doctorate conducted at Queen's University Belfast, my popular exposure to the region remained all but non-existent. For six years I researched the Crimean War and Ireland's involvement in it, initially and specifically through the efforts of Catholic priests and nuns in their capacity as chaplains and nurses with the British Army in the Black Sea theatre and the Crimea. Later, this included Irish society's broader political, economic and social responses to that conflict, its issues and events. Then, in early 2014, Ukraine was gripped by large public protests, which in turn led to the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych, the subversive military incursion by Russia into the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the declaration of independence by the Crimean parliament and the region's absorption into the Russian Federation. All of which occurred in the space of only several months. During that period one could not turn on a television or radio, read a newspaper or digital news stream, or even sit on public transport without reading or hearing Crimea being mentioned. For the first time really since the 1850s the Crimea became a prominent part of popular parlance in Ireland, Europe and indeed much of the world. During the aforementioned six years of research I felt myself to have been the only person (at least in Ireland) talking about that region, the particular conflict which had occurred there between 1854 and 1856 and Ireland's reaction to it. Everywhere I went during those years I was more often met with the odd reference to Balaclava, the charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale, but very little beyond that. Without my stimulation the word Crimea or anything related to it was rarely ever uttered with earshot of me. That all changed in 2014. It is the re-entrance of the Crimea into Irish, and indeed global, popular parlance which made the completion of my dissertation in the year that unrest truly erupted in Ukraine and Crimea perhaps most appropriate, although lamentably so.