Single crystal sapphire is an anisotropic material and its mechanical behaviour depends on the crystallographic orientation. In this work, a systematic study is performed to investigate the effect of crystallographic orientation on the deformation and cracking of sapphire by means of nanoindentation using spherical indenters. It aims also at determining the physical origin of the "pop-in" appearing in the nanoindentation curves.For that purpose, nanoindentations were performed where the load was increased until