Palaces and Princes at Yalta

Along the coast from Sevastopol, Yalta is also marked by history. What student of modern history would not be stirred by a visit to the nearby Livadia Palace, where the February 1945 Yalta Conference took place, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on the post-war fate of Europe? To see where the meetings took place, where the document was signed, where the famous photograph of the three leaders was taken?

Where the Yalta Conference Agreement was signed

The Livadia Palace had earlier been a summer residence of Tsar Nicholas II. Upstairs, wandering through rooms where they once stayed, now lined with photos of the imperial family, is also to feel the ghosts of history, from a different era. And the little chapel where the last Tsar and his family prayed, and where the Tsarina was received into the Orthodox Church before their accession to the throne.

A few miles further along the coast is the Vorontsovsky Palace, built as a summer residence for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, a governor-general of New Russia. Vorontsov was raised and educated in Britain, where his father was Russian ambassador. He employed a British architect to design the palace, which mixes the typical style of an English country house with pronounced Moorish influences. It is a striking combination.

Vorontsovsky Palace

The palace sits above the Black Sea, with the Crimean mountains behind, and fits wonderfully into its setting. Churchill and the British delegation stayed at the Vorontsovsky palace during the Yalta conference. He was apparently not impressed, describing Yalta as the ‘Riviera of Hades’. He also joked that one of the lions in the gardens overlooking the sea looked like him.

One of the lions at the Vorontsovsky Palace

Vorontsov had a notable career, serving with distinction in the Napoleonic wars, and later leading Russia’s campaigns to subdue the north Caucasus. But he is perhaps best known for being cuckolded by Pushkin while the latter was exiled to Odessa. Visiting Vorontsov’s former residence in Odessa, looking at the remains of the terrace that overlooks the bay, one can imagine the great poet dancing with and seducing the princess at one of the balls that were no-doubt thrown.

Yalta was once a fashionable resort for the Russian aristocracy. Signs of its previous, now faded elegance remain as one strolls through some of the streets behind the seafront. In Soviet times, the town and its surroundings were designated by Lenin as a resort for the rest and recuperation of the workers. Numerous sanatoria were built up and down the coast around the town. What is left now is a rather gaudy, tacky seaside resort, frequented mainly by tourists from the former Soviet Union. This combination of faded elegance and mass tourist tat is in some ways reminiscent of Brighton.