Strolls through Odessa

I had long been attracted by an idea of Odessa. I imagined a romantic city, a city of writers (Isaac Babel, Pushkin, Gogol were all there), of revolution (the uprising commemorated in Eisenstein’s classic 1925 film “The Battleship Potemkin”), a cosmopolitan melting pot, like a number of other great multi-ethnic ports of the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Of course, some of the romance of Odessa was either fantasy or had slipped irrevocably into the past. But the city retains plenty of allure. Its name, it is said, was to be Odessus, after a former ancient Greek port along the coast. But Catherine the Great decided that the city should be feminine, and named it Odessa.

Odessa views

Like Salonika, Trieste and Istanbul, its multi-ethnic character suffered under the blows of the modern nation state and the conflicts of the 20th Century. Most of the city’s Jews, perhaps a third of its population at one point, those who survived Nazi occupation, left for Israel or New York. Eisenstein’s famous scene of the massacre on the Potemkin Steps was a fabrication (killings had taken place elsewhere in the city during the 1905 revolution). Indeed, the Potemkin Steps, the city’s most famous feature, are an anti-climax today. Looking down them, from the top, they lead nowhere. Just a main road and a wall, with a high-rise hotel behind it. What a shame. Once the steps swept down to the sea, linking the port with the city above. It does not help that the stages between the flights of steps are tarmacked over, or that they are flanked on the sides by corrugated iron and wasteland. Looking up from the bottom, however, the drama of the steps is more evident, the tarmac invisible, and the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, governor of New Russia early in the 19th Century (and later a prime minister of post-revolutionary France), majestic in classical pose at the top.

The appointment of a Frenchman as governor, a general in the service of the Tsar during the French revolutionary wars, was an indication of the cosmopolitan nature of the city, whose inhabitants came from around Europe to build the new city, a free city that flourished in the first half of the 19th century, its wealth built on trade. And maybe something of that spirit has survived. There is still a Jewish population. Wandering through the tree-lined streets of the 19th Century city centre, I came across the synagogue, across the road Orthodox Jews sitting and chatting at an outdoor café, while their children, the boys sporting kippas, ran about on the pavement.

Odessa still has a vibrant atmosphere, and an active cultural life. The bottom of the Potemkin steps and a few modern eyesores notwithstanding, it is a stylish city, both its buildings, in their faded, and in some cases restored elegance, and its inhabitants. One of its most elegant inhabitants told me Odessa was a “slut”, in that its people follow whichever rulers come along. Now, she told me, it is potentates from Donetsk who call the shots, and impose their tastes on Odessa. Yet Odessa’s charms have survived revolution, Stalinism and Romanian occupation during the Second World War. They survived the drabness of the Brezhnev era, and hopefully they will survive the vulgar tastes of Donetsk tycoons as well.

Odessa is a joy to stroll through. Street after street of elegant buildings, many of them with beautiful courtyards, some with statues or old wells. Will these lovely old buildings, with their great iron gates, survive the impetus to modernise? Odessa is a green city, almost all its streets lined with great old trees. Loveliest of all was walking down the central Deribasovskaya Street on a cool evening, with the pungent scent of the linden trees in bloom.

Catherine the Great, Odessa

There are many statues in Odessa, of the people who made the city or who lived there: its founder, de Ribas, the Spanish-Irish soldier who founded the city, as well as Pushkin and Richelieu. Statues have also been a cause of controversy. Not far from the top of the Potemkin Steps is a statue of Catherine the Great, in whose reign Odessa was founded. Her statue had been erected in 1900, but was dismantled by the communists, and later replaced by a monument commemorating the 1905 mutiny. The decision to put Catherine back in her place, in 2007, sparked the ire of Ukrainian Cossacks and many other Ukrainians, who revile Catherine as the ruler who subdued the Zaporizhia Cossacks in eastern Ukraine, and incorporated Ukraine into imperial Russia. More recently, there was an unsuccessful move to raise a statue of Stalin in the city.

Odessa is an under-appreciated jewel of the Black Sea. Still stylish, with little of the tourism tat that has afflicted Yalta and many other places. It is a beautiful city, with a relaxed pace of life reminiscent of the Mediterranean, and a cultivated city, proud of the legacy of the writers who lived there, and with a rich cultural life still.