 However, the opening of the Suez Canal greatly diminished the international trading position of the city.In the last decades of the 19th century, the city saw some demographic changes.Many residents from the wider region (mostly Christians, but also some Jews and Greek or Turkish speaking Muslims) started to migrate to the Crimea and southern Ukraine, in search for farmland or employment in one of the booming cities along the northern and eastern coasts of the Black Sea.