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In January, almost four years after Moscow's second annexation of Crimea, pro-Russian authorities started restoring the oldest and holiest part of the complex - the Big Khan Mosque built in 1532. They also announced plans to restore the entire palace. But experts, community leaders and Ukrainian officials have lambasted the restoration as the destruction of the complex's authenticity. They call it part of Kremlin's drive to reshape, ban and erase the cultural identity of Crimean Tatars, a Muslim ethnicity of 250,000 that largely resisted Crimea's return to Russia. "This is a blueprint for the restoration of the entire palace," Edem Dudakov, a construction engineer and former official in Crimea's pre-annexation government, told Al Jazeera. "The palace will be lost; what they're building is a sham."

The palace's gradual destruction and "remodelling" exemplifies Russia's fraught relationship with Crimean Tatars. The Turkic-speaking ethnic group once controlled the Great Silk Road's westernmost branch and warred with Moscow for centuries. Crimean Tatars consider the palace the most significant symbol of their lost statehood.

Shortly after the annexation, Moscow banned ATR and several other media outlets. It made Tatar-language kindergartens bilingual and reduced Tatar classes in public schools to two voluntary hours a week

Humans have become adept at shaping plants and animals to our needs and desires, but orchids have been more resistant to our interventions than most of the wild things we covet. Collectors and gardeners devoted their whole lives to cultivating orchids, and still struggled to get seedlings to emerge, to make the plants comfortable in our homes, and to encourage them to reproduce. Corralling orchids—coaxing out the secrets that let us germinate, replicate, and commodify them—took a century of dedicated floriculture. Now there is a multinational apparatus of orchid science, sales, and shipping. An orchid might travel across the globe, from Taiwan to California to New Jersey, before it lands in a bathroom in Brooklyn.

From roots to flowers, there are orchids smaller than an inch. The largest can weigh a ton. Vanilla is an orchid, the only one used in industrial food production. Some orchids grow on trees, others in bogs. Some have petals fringed like a leaf of frisée. Some have petals that look like the face of a monkey. But the ones we see available everywhere are all the same, derived from one tiny branch of the orchid family—phalaenopsis.

Europe has hundreds of orchid species of its own, but the orchids that drove plant people to madness and obsession came from across the ocean. In the early 1800s, naturalists started shipping flouncy, bright cattleya orchids from tropical Brazil back to England. These flowers grow larger than a person’s palm, and they drip with color and ripple along their petal edges. But no one could figure out how to create more of them. A single pod can contain millions of seeds, and all of them might fail to grow, whether they’re sown on pieces of fern, strips of cork, patches of moss—at one time growers tried anything that seemed like it might work. Demand for these tropical orchids kept rising, but no one in Europe could reliably produce them. Orchid fever ran so hot that the wealthiest orchid lovers hired professional collectors to travel to faraway jungles and send plants back home.