A Hero of Our Time
For much of the succeeding century, the area was sparsely populated. The largest settlement was the Cossack town (later a "stanitsa") of Taman, succeeded by the port town of Temryuk in modern times. Mikhail Lermontov describes the town of Taman (disparagingly) in his novel, "A Hero of Our Time". The peninsula contains small mud volcanoes and deposits of natural gas and petroleum.