Kyiv under attack

The day before I travelled by bus from Warsaw to Lviv in mid-November 2022, Russia launched a mass-missile attack on Ukraine. A friend in Lviv contacted me and asked whether I was sure I really wanted to come? She had taken refuge in a shelter when the air raid siren had sounded, but she had heard the explosions when the missiles struck. Since the previous month, Ukraine had faced regular such missile attacks targeting its energy infrastructure every week or so in an obscene attempt by Russia to make Ukrainians freeze that winter. I had realised that such attacks were likely to occur during my stay. But I didn’t know quite what to expect. During my stay in Odessa that summer, people had largely ignored the air raid sirens. Would it be different now? Ukraine had not yet been provided with the kind of modern air defence systems that could more or less reliably shoot down Russian missiles. And even though they did shoot down many of them, the debris still had to fall to earth. Central Kyiv had been struck a short while before, and there had been victims, ordinary people going about their business, walking or driving in the city.

I arrived in Lviv on an autumnal evening just after the electricity had been restored. Meeting my friend for dinner, it was striking how normal things seemed, at least on the surface. The pizzeria we went to was packed with people out enjoying themselves. But of course, the situation was far from normal. The first snow of winter fell while I was in Lviv. Whether Ukraine could cope with the repeated missile attacks, whether the energy supply could be maintained, whether the heating could be kept on and the water kept flowing, these were all questions with uncertain answers that autumn. There was even talk of Kyiv potentially having to be evacuated if the city became uninhabitable.

Arriving in Kyiv after an overnight train journey, I took the metro and went straight to one of my favourite cafés, close to the Golden Gate. I drank coffee and ate an excellent almond croissant. It seemed extraordinary to be back. Having freshened up in my hotel, the same hotel where I had stayed many times before, I met a friend for lunch in an excellent nearby Georgian restaurant. Unlike Odessa during my visit in the summer, with its half-empty streets and closed shops and cafes, Kyiv seemed much more alive. Most of the cafes and restaurants I had previously frequented were still working normally. A city-centre shopping mall was bustling with people. The spirit of the city seemed undimmed.

Glass Bridge and Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People

But of course, all was not normal. Many streets around key government and administrative buildings were closed off. Statues were covered up for their protection: Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the leader of a 17^th century Cossack revolt against Polish rule; Princess Olha, who as regent in the 10^th century was the first ruler of Kyivan Rus to be baptised as a Christian; the author Mikhail Bulgakov, who was born in Kyiv. The glass bridge connecting two hills in the city centre was closed, having been damaged by a missile strike the previous month. The Soviet-era monument to Ukrainian-Russian friendship at one end of the bridge had been dismantled. The monumental arch that rose above it, which had been constructed un 1982 to commemorate Ukraine’s union with Russia, had been renamed the Peoples’ Friendship Arch after Ukraine’s independence, but after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine it had been renamed again, the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People.

Graffiti on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti

Concrete blocks and iron-girder tank traps had been pushed to the sides of the road by Independence Square, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti. An artwork attributed to Banksy, painted on one of the concrete blocks, appeared to show a girl and a boy using one of the tank traps as a seesaw.

On the square in front of St Michael’s monastery, by Princess Olha’s covered statue, a selection of wrecked tanks, armoured personnel carriers and other military vehicles had been lined up as trophies of Russia’s defeats before Kyiv in the spring. People walked around them, clambered over them, and posed in front of them. President Zelensky had brought various visiting foreign dignitaries here. On some of the vehicles people had written graffiti, “for Bakhmut”, “for Severodonetsk”, “for Mykolaiv”, towns that had been subjected to Russian destruction. And alongside the wall surrounding the monastery, the lines of photos of fallen soldiers grew ever longer. Mostly young men, and some women, some of them posing formally in their uniforms, others smiling happily for the camera, lives cut short by Russia’s brutal aggression. On Independence Square, an impromptu memorial consisted of hundreds of little Ukrainian flags commemorating, according to placards, foreigners and Ukrainians killed by Putin.

The scrap of Russia's failed assault on Kyiv

The day before I left Kyiv, there was another mass-missile attack. I later heard that this was one of the most devastating strikes. Electricity and water were knocked out in much of the city. Somehow, although the streets around were without power, in my hotel the lights remained on, although we were without water. Many restaurants and cafes had generators and were still able to operate, although some of them, which had not prepared, were unable to provide tea or coffee, or anything that required water. Eating my lunch in a large basement self-service canteen, there were many people who had not come to eat, but were rather taking shelter, and using the opportunity to charge their phones and use the wifi. The shopping mall which had seemed so busy when I arrived a few days earlier was now quiet, with few shoppers.

That evening, before catching the overnight train back to Lviv, I ate in a burger restaurant. Generators were still whirring up and down the pitch-dark street. The restaurant was full of people, and, as at the self-service canteen earlier, many of them were not eating or drinking. Here was a place where they could sit in warmth, with electricity to charge their phones. As I had seen in other cafes and restaurants, no one objected to people sitting without ordering anything. This was the solidarity among the people of Kyiv. Facing the horror of Russia’s aggression, people pulled together and looked after each other. The government was establishing “invincibility centres” where people could go for warmth, a hot drink and a wifi connection. But the atmosphere that evening felt more subdued. Despite the resilience and determination that was so impressive, after several weeks of such attacks, people were weary. There was snow on the ground, the weather was getting cold. How would the city fare under these repeated Russian attacks?

As I pulled my suitcase up to the railway station, I felt sad to be leaving. The assistance the world had provided Ukraine was significant, but it was not enough. Ukrainians were being left to face the Russian missiles and drones without adequate protection, without the means to strike back at the places from which they were being fired with impunity, far away. The West had modern military aircraft and missile-defence systems far superior to those employed by Russia, but they were not being supplied to Ukraine. The suffering of the Ukrainian people would be on our consciences, as we could have done more to help. I was leaving, going back to a home where I had electricity and no one was trying to make me freeze. As Ukrainians anxiously faced winter under Russian attack, our slowness to provide the help they needed shamed us all.

A visit to wartime Odessa

Travelling down by bus from Chişinău to Odessa in July 2022, my first visit to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, I was not sure what to expect. I had been following the news from Ukraine compulsively. I knew there was a night-time curfew, and that there were frequent air raid alerts. I had heard life in Odessa had normalised somewhat since those first fraught weeks when the threat of a Russian assault on the city from the land or the sea had seemed very real. The tank traps on the city streets had largely been removed. But how was life in the city? How were people coping? Having previously lived in Odessa, I had a huge attachment to this beautiful city, with its unique spirit and its frenetic nightlife. A largely Russian-speaking city with a significant pro-Russian element among its population when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Odessa had briefly appeared at risk of going the same way as Donetsk and Luhansk. How had the city fared in face of the new Russian onslaught?

Many of my fellow passengers were women who had sought refuge abroad and were returning for a visit. As men under 60 were mostly not allowed to leave the country, families had been divided, and several of the women said they were returning to visit their husbands. Crossing the border, I confess to feeling quite excited to be returning to the country and the city I loved. The roads near the border were chock-a-block with trucks. A deal had been reached a few days before between Russia, Turkey, the United Nations and Ukraine to enable ships carrying grain to leave Ukraine’s ports. But it hadn’t yet been implemented. In the meantime, as much as possible was being transported out by road.

I had travelled this road so many times before, crossing back briefly into Moldova to skirt the liman, the wide body of water at the Dniester estuary that separated southern Bessarabia from the rest of Ukraine, and then crossing the Dniester bridge at Mayaky. The traffic as we entered Odessa at the “Dva Stolpa” (Two Pillars, the joke being there are three of them) roundabout was as busy as usual, and as we drove into the city my first thought was that everything appeared quite normal. We arrived at the central bus station on a warm sunny evening, and I felt almost elated to be back in Odessa.

A friend had told me that that evening a band I had seen before would be playing at one of the best bars in Odessa. So I had to go. The bar was in the city centre, a good hour-and-a-half walk from my accommodation, but I decided to go on foot. It quickly became clear that my first impressions had been wrong, and that all was very far from normal. The main road into the city may have been busy with traffic, but most of Odessa’s broad boulevards were unnaturally empty. And while the tank traps had gone, there were numerous military checkpoints along the way, with barricades halfway across the road. The soldiers weren’t stopping people, but their presence underlined the uneasy atmosphere in a city which had been hit by missiles, which was not all that far from the frontline, and from which a large part of the population had fled.

The bar was packed, the music frenetic, and the atmosphere frenzied as the revellers danced and yelled their appreciation. It was glorious. The spirit of Odessa unbowed, unbeatable. What a joy. There were people I knew there as well. Next to the band there was a box for donations for the Ukrainian army, which was being filled generously. Between the songs, the singer spoke to the audience in Ukrainian, a significant and meaningful change in Odessa. It seemed extraordinary, almost surreal. My first evening back in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion, and here I was enjoying Odessa’s nightlife, as intense and feverish as ever. Except that it all had to end quite early, in time for the 11pm curfew. I had imagined it would be easy to get back before the curfew. I would take a taxi at 10pm, no problem. Wrong. At 10pm it was completely impossible to find a taxi, and the marshutkas, minibuses that ferried passengers around the city, had all stopped for the night. It was too far to walk home in time. With the help of a friend, I tried to hitch a ride, but without success. By this point I was getting anxious. What would happen if I were caught out after curfew, I wondered? Thankfully my friend was still with me, and at 10.30 she said that I’d just have to stay at her place, which was close-by. What a first evening back in Odessa. A magnificent concert, and then I almost missed the curfew.

The Duc de Richelieu covered

Strolling in Odessa the next day, I was still more struck be the contrast between things that appeared quite normal, and the things that were absolutely not normal at all. Many cafes and restaurants had closed, including some of my favourites. While all the supermarkets were working and well stocked, many other shops, clothes shops etc., were closed. City centre shopping malls were eerily quiet. Self-service canteens that were usually bustling at lunchtimes were nearly empty, if they were still open at all, food sitting too long without customers, dried out and unappetising. The emptiness was sad. Yet there were cafes and restaurants working much as normal. One of my favourite places in the garden next to the opera house was open, and I spent a very pleasant lunchtime there, although there were few customers. City centre streets close to the seaside, above the port area, were closed off. Odessa’s most famous landmark, the Potemkin steps, were unreachable. The statue of the Duc de Richelieu, Odessa’s most famous mayor (and governor of Novorossiya province, which encompassed southern Ukraine), which stands at the top of the steps, was covered up for its safety.

By contrast, the nearby statue of Catherine the Great, founder of Odessa, was uncovered, unprotected. The writing was on the wall for the Russian Empress, as the pressure to remove all trace of Russian associations became irresistible. Some Odessans told me they would not like to see the statue removed, that Catherine was part of the city’s history. But times had moved on. The bust of Pushkin that stood at one end of the seaside boulevard, in front of the city council building, would probably also not survive, I thought. The great poet had lived in Odessa for a time, but for many Ukrainians these were no longer associations that they wished to celebrate.

On a warm Sunday afternoon I strolled with a friend along the seafront, as I had so many times before. People ate ice creams. Children ran about playing. We sat and drank iced coffees on a café terrace by the water’s edge. No one was in the sea. There was a risk from mines. But otherwise the impression again was of a striking level of normality. But there were always reminders of how abnormal things were. The closure of so many shops and cafes, the emptiness of the streets was not only because so many people had left Odessa, fled abroad or to safer regions of Ukraine, further from the frontline. It surely also reflected the collapse in economic activity. While some could still afford to eat in nice restaurants, many others had lost their jobs and incomes. We didn’t see them in the city centre because they had no reason to come there, no money to spend. Many were probably eking out a poor existence in modest apartments in the suburbs. How did they manage, I wondered? How did the elderly and vulnerable cope? Ukraine’s social welfare system was limited even in the best of times. No doubt volunteers and NGOs had stepped into the breach to some extent. But was it enough?

In Shevchenko Park, close-by the monument to the unknown sailor, there were plaques commemorating the hero cities of the Soviet Union for their courage in the Second World War. Now those commemorating cities in Russia had been covered over, leaving only the six in Ukraine and Belarus uncovered, including Odessa. But the spellings were in Russian, not Ukrainian. Would these plaques survive the cull of symbols, statues and street names associated with the Soviet Union and Russia? Following the full-scale Russian invasion, President Zelensky had designated several towns and cities as hero cities of Ukraine, marking their courage in standing up to the Russian aggression. It occurred to me that this repetition of a Soviet practice, naming hero cities, was rather odd in a country determined to reject all Soviet associations.

The first time I heard the air raid siren I was walking across Kulykove Pole, a large open square in the city centre. It was loud, a sound that had such associations for someone from London. It was a sound that would have been very familiar to my mother. To think that I was now hearing it in a European city in 2022. I looked around to see how other people reacted, the Odessans who had been living with this for months already. Everyone I saw completely ignored it and just carried on walking, without any change of pace or direction. So I did likewise. Odessa had already been hit a few times by missiles, including the port. But I was told by a local that when the siren sounded, it was not yet clear where the missiles were headed, and that several cities over a wide area southern Ukraine sounded the alarm. They rarely hit Odessa, although on that occasion I was told that a missile impact had been close enough for people in the city to hear it. I did not hear it myself. Missiles had several times hit smaller towns along the coast, perhaps targeting Ukrainian air defence systems, although that was only speculation as, naturally, the Ukrainian authorities did not divulge such information.

My sleep was disturbed by the sirens a few times during my stay in Odessa. I had asked whether people went to a basement in the building where I was staying, for shelter. I was told the advice was to go to a room with no exterior walls or windows, which in my case meant the bathroom. The first time I did just that. But Odessans I spoke to told me almost nobody bothered, so I didn’t either. Such a blasé attitude presumably was not the norm in towns closer to the frontline which had more often been struck by missiles.

I left Ukraine by bus to Bucharest, travelling down through southern Bessarabia. We stopped for a break at the roadside hotel and restaurant in Tartabunary where I had stayed on a number of occasions, and which had been a regular stop-off during journeys in this beautiful region. The first ships filled with grain had left Odessa under the UN-brokered deal while I had been in the city, but the roads were still choked with lorries, backed up for several kilometres as we approached the Romanian border. We crossed the Danube by ferry close to Orlivka, a little town where the head of the village council had talked excitedly about the potential of the this watery paradise for tourism when I had visited a few years earlier. He had told me of his plan to introduce water buffalo, which would control the vegetation in the area’s waterways, as well as producing mozzarella and drawing tourists. He had realised his dream as well, before Russia’s aggression struck.

As I crossed the Danube from Ukraine to Romania, it really struck me. A short river crossing, and on the other side no air raid sirens, no curfew, no roadblocks, no evil bastards wrecking the lives of innocent, peaceful people. Despite the awful circumstances, Odessa retained its wonderful spirit. Its resilience and that of all Ukraine was awe inspiring. I was very glad to have had the chance to be there, and to spend time with wonderful friends. And I was more than ever convinced that Ukraine would prevail.

Travels in Moldova and Bucovina

It was a long, slow train journey from Bucharest to Bucovina, in the north-east of Romania, close to the border with Ukraine. I arrived late in the evening at the little railway station at Gura Humorului, to the west of the county capital, Suceava. My main purpose in coming to Gura Humorului was to visit a couple of the famous medieval painted monasteries nearby. Bucovina had been part of the principality of Moldavia since the 14^th century, but in 1775 it was annexed to the Hapsburg Empire. The name Bucovina, or Buchenland in German, meant beech land, a reference to its rolling forested hills. In 1918, Bucovina was incorporated into the newly united Romanian state. However, in the second world war, the Soviet Union annexed the northern half of the region to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Northern Bucovina, officially known as Chernivtsi Region in Ukraine, remains part of Ukraine.

I set off in the morning under a hot sun to walk to the monastery of Voroneț (pronounced Voronets), about 3 or 4 kilometres south of the town. Founded in1488, its church is one of eight in the area that are now UN World Heritage sites. The idea of covering the exterior walls as well as the interior with frecoes is credited to the mid-16th century Orthodox Metropolitan of Moldavia, Grigore Roşca, to illustrate biblical stories for the benefit of the illiterate peasantry. Sitting amid wooded hills and protected by a walled stockade, it is a beautiful, peaceful place. The colours of the frescoes are in remarkably good condition given the passage of time, and the faces and features of the saints are still clear. From Voroneț, I headed back to Gura Humorului, and decided that, rather than walk, I would take the local bus to the Humor Monastery, about five kilometres away.

Voroneț Monastery, Bucovina

Built in 1530, the Humor Monastery church is architecturally similar to that at Voroneț, but it lacks a spire. There is, however, a tower a few metres away from the church. The frescoes at Humor have suffered more from weathering than those at Voroneț, especially on the side that is more exposed to direct sunlight. In the frecoes at the Humor monastery, the colouring is different from that at Voroneț. At Voroneț, a particulalrly vivid blue stands out, known as Voroneț blue. But the biblical stories they depict are much the same. I was particularly drawn to the depiction of the Last Judgement that covers the back walls of both monastery churches. As the figure of Christ presides, with the saints seated to either side, the dead rise from their graves, summoned by Angels blowing horns, while wild animals offer up the bones of those they have devoured, and a ship rises from the depths of the sea. While the righteous press to enter the garden of heaven, the damned are pushed by demons, themselves prodded by Angels with their lances, into a flaming river that takes them down to Hell. It is a very vivid scene, no doubt intended to be instructive and frightening to sinful believers.

The next morning I set off by minibus to the city of Iaşi (pronounced Yash), close to the border with the Republic of Moldova. Iaşi had been the capital of the principality of Moldavia from 1564 until 1859, and then of the United principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia until 1862, when Bucharest became the capital of the new, united Romanian state. Historic Moldavia had been much larger before the eastern half of the principality, Bessarabia, was ceded to Imperial Russia in 1812 by the Ottoman Empire, of which Moldavia was a vassal state. After the First World War, the Romanian state expanded to include Bessarabia, as well as Bucovina. But during the World War II, the Soviet Union took back Bessarabia, the majority of which today forms the independent Republic of Moldova, while southern Bessarabia was incorporated into Ukraine.

Church of the Three Hierarchs, Iaşi

Iaşi is known as an important cultural centre in Romania, and is home to the oldest Romanian university and theatre. It is an attractive town, with numerous fine churches and monasteries, as well as civic buildings and gardens which I found were generally better maintained than is the case in Bucharest. The historic theatre is especially beautiful, as is the remarkable Church of the Three Hierarchs. The church was built by one of Moldavia’s most famous rulers, Vasile Lupu (Basil the Wolf), who was of Albanian origin and ruled the principality for nearly 20 years in the 17^th century. The outside of the building is decorated from top to bottom with strikingly original intricate stone lacery. Vasile Lupu also introduced Moldavia’s first printing press and its first codified law. He was a noted champion of Orthodox Christianity, hosting the Synod of Iaşi, which was convened by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in 1642 to counter what were seen as Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrinal errors. The spirit of Vasile Lupu appears to live on. Apart from numerous churches, I don’t think I had ever before visited a town whose streets were so full of people in priestly garb. I visited the monasteries of Barboi and Golia, tranquil walled refuges in the heart of the city. There is also an Armenian church, indicating the widespread influence of the Armenian diaspora over centuries.

From Iaşi, I travelled by minibus across the border to Chişinău, capital city of the present-day independent Republic of Moldova. Chişinău was a small town when Bessarabia was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812, but as the capital of Bessarabia province it was developed over the following decades, with broad avenues, a cathedral and a triumphal arch to mark the Russian victory in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29. Following Bessarabia’s unification with Romania after the First World War, in the 1920s a statue of Stephen the Great, medieval Moldavia’s most notable ruler, who reigned for nearly half a century from 1457-1504, was erected in the city centre. The statue has had an unsettled history, reflecting the shifting borders in the region. In 1940, it was moved to Vasliu, in Romania, days before the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia, then back to Chişinău in 1942, when Romania, allied with Nazi Germany, had recovered not only Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, but had expanded into Odessa region in Ukraine. In 1944, as Bessarabia was again occupied by the Soviets, it was moved back again to Romania, and then in 1945, as ordered by the Soviet authorities, it was returned to Chişinău. Finally, in 1989, it was restored to its original place in the city. 

Chişinău

When I visited, in the summer of 2022, Chişinău still had some of its Soviet-era monuments, among them an equestrian statue of Grigory Kotovsky, a notorious gangster turned Red Army commander during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. He had a town named after him, Kotovsk, just across the border in Odessa region, in Ukraine. I had stayed there a few years previously. Kotovsky, who was murdered in 1925, was interred in a mausoleum in a Kotovsk park, and there was also a statue of him in front of the railway station, in a heroic pose with his sword pointing to the sky. In 2016, the town was renamed Podilsk, in line with a Ukrainian law forbidding place names or monuments commemorating communist figures.

Although Kotovsky was from Bessarabia, in today’s Moldova, he was of mixed Polish-Russian parentage, typical of the multi-ethnic makeup of the region. Like Odessa to the south, Chişinău had a significant Jewish population, nearly 50 per cent by the end of the 19^th century. And like Odessa, the city’s Jews experienced murderous pogroms in the first years of the 20^th century. During World War II, the Romanian regime of Ion Antonescu carried out the holocaust against the Jewish population in the territories it annexed from the Soviet Union, including Bessarabia.

In the early period of Soviet rule, Moldovans suffered the same trauma as other territories newly incorporated into the Soviet Union, in the Baltic states and western Ukraine, of mass executions and deportations. Despite that, and despite three decades of independence and the ongoing Russian occupation of a part of Moldova’s territory, Transnistria, a part of the population has maintained a pro-Russian stance, voting for pro-Russian parties. Moldova’s Soviet rulers attempted to separate a Moldovan identity from Romania, with its own language written in Cyrillic, unlike Romanian, which is written in the Latin script. Following independence, the country reverted to the Latin alphabet, and the declaration of independence referred to the country’s language as Romanian. However, the question of the country’s identity and language continued to be contentious. The 1994 constitution referred to the official language as Moldovan, while in 2013 the Constitutional Court ruled that the independence declaration took precedence, and that the country’s language was thus Romanian. My confusion during this, my first visit to Moldova, was compounded by the fact that Russian continued to be spoken by many in Chişinău. In the family-run hotel where I stayed, my hostess spoke Russian with her family members, although she informed me that she was Moldovan and could speak Moldovan.

Away from the avenues and squares, the park with its well-tended flower beds, Chişinău is a scrappy, uncared for city. The minibus I arrived on dropped me in the central market area, a mess of dirty streets, rubbish, greasy, broken pavements and evident poverty. By early evening these streets were largely deserted. Chişinău is certainly a far less impressive capital than Iaşi.

Moldova has had more than its share of troubles in recent years. Its development stunted by persistent meddling from Russia. Abused as a money-laundering centre by corrupt Russian and Ukrainian state officials and organised crime groups, a banking scandal in 2014 underlined the corruption and dysfunction of a state that has singly failed to meet the expectations of its citizens since independence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a big impact on Moldova. Whether it can find a way to shake off the debilitating burden of Russian interference and affirm its identity as a European country, either independently, or reunified with Romania, remains to be seen. The opportunity is surely there.

Ceausescu's Bucharest

I had briefly visited Bucharest 20 years before, for an academic conference. On that occasion, there was hardly time to see very much, but with some companions I had a short tour in a taxi. While Bucharest has many attractions, including fine old churches and a beautiful neoclassical concert hall, it was the buildings associated with Romania’s communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, which were particularly fascinating to me then, as now. The monstrous Palace of the Republic, now the Palace of Parliament, became notorious as an enormous folly, one of the largest buildings in the world, a colossal monument to the megalomania of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena. The destruction of a large part of Bucharest’s old city, the levelling of a hill, and the forced displacement of some 40,000 people to make way for Ceauşescu’s vanity project brought wide condemnation as an act of wanton vandalism. Apart from the palace itself, a whole new district was constructed, including a broad avenue that was deliberately designed to outdo the Champs-Elysée in Paris, in scale, although not in style.

The Palace of Parliament, Bucharest

Before visiting the Palace of Parliament, I walked to the Piața Revoluției, Revolution Square, to the former headquarters of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. Now government offices, it was on the balcony of this building that in December 1989 Ceauşescu made a speech to a huge crowd denouncing the uprising that had unfolded in Timişoara over the preceding days. The shock and disbelief on the ruling couple’s faces as the crowd jeered and whistled at them, and chanted “Timişoara, Timişoara”, was one of the defining moments of the revolution. Worse for Ceauşescu, it was broadcast live on national television, so that the whole country witnessed the mass defiance. The convergence of demonstrators on to the square, and the violence of security forces which turned it into a battle ground, was followed by the flight by helicopter of the ruling couple, and their trial by a kangaroo court and execution on 25 December.

These were heady times. As a student at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the time, I watched with rapt attention. The previous month, I had been attending a regular weekly seminar on East-central Europe at the London School of Economics. During the seminar, a lady slipped in and whispered something in the ear of the seminar’s chair. He paused, took a breath, and announced that the East German government had resigned. It seemed extraordinarily dramatic, one among a whole series of momentous changes that autumn, as the geopolitical map of Europe was redrawn in a matter of weeks, and long subject peoples reclaimed their freedom from communist oppression. And what seemed particularly remarkable after the decades of Cold War confrontation, was that it happened mostly peacefully. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the crowds that thronged central Prague during the Velvet Revolution. It was all overwhelmingly joyful. And then came the violence in Romania, as Ceauşescu’s dreaded security forces fought back. Such dramas playing out before our eyes on our television screens were quite a novelty in 1989. Excitement and awe at the courage of the revolutionaries waving their flags, with holes in the middle where the symbol of the communist regime had been, mixed with nail-biting horror at the violence, and the shocking end of the Ceauşescu couple.

Ceauşescu’s speech had been intended as a reprise of an earlier speech he had made from the same balcony in 1968, condemning the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia to quash the Prague spring. That speech asserted Romania’s independent line from Moscow, which Ceauşescu pursued for the rest of his rule, and it won him genuine support in Romania at the time. But those days were over, and by 1989, in the brave new world ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ceauşescu was out of step not only with the region, but with his own people.

A collection of memorials in front of the building includes a rather shabby marble-clad monument inscribed with the words “Glory to the Martyrs”. Some of the marble panels were cracked, and weeds grew up between them. Nearby is a tall column, with what looks like a metallic bird’s nest attached near the top. The monument sparked controversy when it was inaugurated in 2005, with many artists saying its symbolism was unclear. Next to it is a semi-circular wall bearing the names of those who fell. On the corner of the square is perhaps the most striking monument, the brick shell of a ruined building that once housed the headquarters of Ceauşescu’s feared security service, the Securitate, now with a glass and steel tower emerging out of it.

Approaching the enormous Palace of Parliament, I was most struck by how dead and soulless the surrounding area was. None of the bustle of what remains of the old city after Ceauşescu’s destruction, just a short distance away. The tree-lined Bulevardul Uniri, Boulevard of Unity, that connects the palace with the Piața Uniri, has fountains, but it lacks the shops or cafes that might have given it life. There were few pedestrians. There was nothing for anyone to do there. It was all built on a grand scale, but without people in mind. At the end of the boulevard, in front of the palace itself, there is a big open space. A few cars were parked on it, and a handful of tourists were taking pictures of the late dictator’s monstrous edifice. Almost entirely empty, a great big hole in the heart of the city. There was nothing alive about this place. Nothing that would draw people there other than to gawp at the grotesque pile. A curiosity to be looked at, but not a place to linger. I wondered whether there would be anything that could improve this, that could bring life to a place whose origins were so flawed?

At the time of the Ceauşescus’ demise, the building was not yet completed. So much had been destroyed in its making. But however grotesque, it had been built at great cost, and it could hardly be abandoned. Uses had to be found for it. So it became the seat of the two houses of parliament, a venue for international conferences, as well as a museum. The scale and extravagance of the interior is as striking as that of the exterior of the building. Vast quantities of marble were used, as well as enormous numbers of chandeliers. Different rooms were designed in different styles, with different materials and different colours. The megalomania of the ruling couple is as striking inside as out. Two sweeping marble staircases descend into an expansive entrance hall. Apparently it was intended that the Ceauşescu couple would descend from both sides to greet visiting dignitaries. At either end of one large and opulent reception room are two spaces which were apparently intended to be filled with large portraits of the couple.

Inside the Palace of Parliament

I had been prepared for the scale of the place. I had expected a palace of kitsch. But touring the building, I found myself surprised by the quality of the craftsmanship. The materials used were mostly sourced in Romania, and they are of the highest quality. The details are all finely worked. I have visited many state buildings from the communist era in several east European countries that were shabby, with a veneer of quality that had quickly faded and deteriorated. This one in Bucharest was not like that. Its halls, its galleries are genuinely impressive.

But to be truly grand, a palace should have a soul. The grandeur of Versailles is inextricably linked in our minds with the glory of Louis XIV, the sun king. Blenheim Palace near Oxford reflects the great victories of the Duke of Marlborough. The Palace of Parliament, by contrast, is associated with one of the most absurd little dictators of the 20th century. It was intended to project the grandeur of a couple who were as small and petty as they were nasty and vicious. Their rule was a tragedy for Romania, and it is hard to see how their building can ever escape from such awful origins. Perhaps future architects and town planners may find a way to reshape the palace and its surrounding area that allows it to escape the legacy of its appalling creators. More than 30 years after they were swept away, it hasn’t happened yet.

Histories and Legends in Transylvania

Criss-crossed by migrations over millennia, settled by successive waves of nations and tribes, many regions of Europe have been the subject of conflict among different claimants, each advancing their own historical assertions to ownership. Few lands in modern times have been the subject of such intense competition as Transylvania. Dominated for centuries by Hungarians, many of its towns islands of German settlement and culture, and, until its incorporation in Romania in 1918, with a downtrodden Romanian majority, Transylvania’s history has been a battlefield in the clash of national claims.

My journey through Transylvania in the summer of 2022 began in Cluj, known as Kolozsvár in Hungarian and Klausenburg in German. Settled in the Middle Ages by German “Saxons”, the city became the centre of the Hungarian landed aristocracy in Transylvania, and of Hungarian national and cultural life in the region. The city retained its ethnic-Hungarian majority well after Transylvania’s unification with Romania after the First World War. However, industrialisation under the post-1945 Communist regime, which transformed Cluj into one of Romania’s largest cities, led to an expansion of its Romanian population and the steady dilution of its Hungarian character. For many Hungarians this process of Romanianization has been deeply painful.

As a student in 1989, I attended a conference on Romania at Cambridge University. We didn’t know at the time that the violent end of the regime of the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was only a few weeks away. As we arrived at the lecture hall, men at the entrance photographed every one of the participants. We supposed they were officers of Ceauşescu’s dreaded Securitate secret police, sent by the Romanian embassy. The affect for any Romanians attending must surely have been intimidating. A large part of the audience was made up of Hungarians, mostly emigres. For these Hungarians, the overwhelmingly important issue of the day was Ceauşescu’s rural systematization programme, which had got under way the previous year. Under this programme, thousands of villages were to be razed, and their inhabitants resettled in agro-industrial towns. Hungarians saw this as an attack on Hungarian communities, aimed at their assimilation into the wider Romanian society. At that conference in Cambridge, their anger was boiling over. Some of the British speakers, specialists on Romania, reacted with irritation, pointing out that the problems facing Romania went beyond the tribulations of its Hungarian population. One of them gave a presentation on the ideological motivation of the programme, to eliminate the differences between rural and urban societies. But this cut little ice with the Hungarians. What they could see was that Hungarians in Transylvania were under attack. As I walked towards Cluj’s city centre that morning, this history was on my mind.

St Michael's church, Cluj

While Cluj expanded in the 20^th century, its historic centre has nevertheless retained its charm. The central square is dominated by the 15^th century Gothic church of St Michael. Built when the city was under Saxon control, it became a protestant church for a time following the reformation, firstly Lutheran and then Unitarian. Cluj was a centre of Unitarianism. However, the church was later returned to Catholicism with the support of Hungary’s, and Austria’s Hapsburg rulers. Next to the church stands an equestrian statue of the great 15^th century Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, which was erected at the beginning of the 20^th century, when Transylvania was still part of Hungary.

Outside the house in Cluj where Matthias Corvinus is thought to have been born is a plaque put there during the tenure of the controversial city mayor, Gheorghe Funar. It states that Matthias Corvinus, Hungary’s greatest King, the son of the great Voivode (military leader) of Transylvania, Iancu de Hunedoara (János Hunyadi in Hungarian), was in fact Romanian. This assertion is based on the Wallachian ancestry of Hunyadi’s family, although an improbable legend has it that Hunyadi was actually the illegitimate son of King Sigismund of Hungary. Funar, who was mayor from 1992-2004, was an extreme nationalist who took a petty delight in baiting the city’s Hungarian minority. He was famous for having objects such as park benches, pavements and rubbish bins painted in the colours of the Romanian flag. Funar was also responsible for the rather grotesque statue of Avram Iancu, a leader of the Romanian revolution against Hungarian rule in 1848, that towers above the square in front of the city’s Orthodox cathedral, an archetypal example of nationalist kitsch. The Orthodox cathedral itself, built between 1923-33, after Transylvania’s incorporation into Romania, was a triumphal statement in the centre of Hungarian life in the province, that this was now Romania.

The nationalist agenda can be seen even in the name of the city, which, since 1974, is officially Cluj-Napoca. The addition of Napoca by Ceauşescu was intended to draw a link with the pre-Roman Dacian settlement of that name on the site of modern-day Cluj. In the competing narratives about Transylvania, Romanian nationalists claim a continuity between ancient Romano-Dacian civilisation and modern Romanians, as opposed to a counter-claim preferred by some Hungarians that modern Romanians are descended from Vlachs who migrated northwards from the Balkans at a later date.

Excavations of Roman remains in Cluj, some of which can be seen covered by glass on the central square, did not escape from this modern competition over history. For Romanian nationalists the finds bolstered their claim to have preceded Hungarians in the region, while some Hungarians retorted unconvincingly that the remains were fake. In any case, the whole debate is sterile. Our knowledge of the historical ethnic-make-up of this and other regions is limited. What can be said with certainty is that numerous peoples have settled in the region, including Goths, Huns, Avars and Slavs, as well as both Romanians and Hungarians. Both nations have been present in Transylvania for centuries, and Romanians were in a clear majority well before the region’s unification with Romania.

From Cluj, I travelled to Sighişoara (Segesvár in Hungarian, Schässburg in German), and then on to Braşov (Brassó in Hungarian, Kronstadt in German). Along with a number of other Transylvanian towns, Sighişoara and Braşov were settled by the German Saxons in the Middle Ages. The Saxon elite enjoyed a privileged position in Transylvania, as one of the three estates recognised in the 15^th century Unio Trium Nationum (“Union of the Three Nations”) together with the largely Hungarian nobility and the free military Székeleys, a Hungarian sub-group mainly residing in eastern Transylvania. Thus the Romanian population, as well as the Hungarian peasantry, were excluded from political life.

Clock tower, Sighişoara

Sighişoara and Braşov were both fortified towns, with city walls and defensive towers at regular intervals. Each of these towers was assigned to one of the city’s craft guilds, which were responsible for their upkeep and defence. Sighişoara’s beautifully preserved hilltop citadel, with its cobbled streets and brightly coloured buildings, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Nine of the fourteen defensive towers remain, as well as the imposing clock tower at the citadel entrance. I particularly liked the tinsmiths’ tower, perched on a steep bank on the edge of the citadel, which still carries traces of shots fired during the last siege of the town, at the start of the 18^th century. Inside the clock tower, there is a museum which includes many of the instruments associated with the crafts of the various guilds that were so central to the town’s life.

Tinsmith's tower, Sighişoara

A steep covered wooden staircase, the Scholars’ Stairs, dating from the 17^th century. leads up a hill to the Bergschule (School on the Hill), and the Saxon Church on the Hill, another of Transylvania’s impressive Gothic churches. A graveyard slopes down the other side of the hill. Most of the German Saxons have left Transylvania. Having already declined in numbers during the 20^th century, most of those who had remained left after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime. Sighişoara is now a mainly Romanian town, with a sizeable Hungarian minority, a smaller number of Roma, and very few Germans. But the graveyard bears witness to the town’s Saxon past, almost all the graves bearing German names, testament to a bygone age.

Sighişoara’s most famous son was Vlad the Impaler, who is thought to have been born in a house close to the town’s main square. Vlad’s bloody career as ruler of Wallachia, and his notorious brutality, may have inspired Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula. Vlad’s family name was Dracul, derived from the chivalric Order of Dragons, of which his father had been a member. But although Romania and the wider region had a long tradition of belief in vampires, there is no evidence that Vlad was ever believed to have been one. That has not stopped Transylvania’s tourism industry from milking the connection for all it is worth.

In the middle of Braşov’s beautiful central square is the Casa Sfatului, the old town hall, now a historical museum. The broad square is lined with what were once the houses of wealthy merchants, now lively cafes and restaurants spilling their terraces out on to the square. Braşov’s situation, close to the Carpathian passes, was important for defence and also for the trade between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, which enriched the town’s Saxon merchants. As in Sighişoara, the town’s defensive towers were maintained by the craft guilds. Some of them remain, although less of the city’s walls are preserved than is the case in Sighişoara. Two of the city’s gates, the Şchei Gate and Catherine’s Gate, remain. Viewed from the surrounding hills, the old town is dominated by the huge bulk of the medieval Black Church (the name relates to its colour, which was at one time black, some say due to a seventeenth-century fire that destroyed much of Braşov). Built in the Gothic style, it is now a Lutheran church, the faith of the dwindling numbers of Saxons.

Braşov

Braşov holds an important place in the history of Romanians in Transylvania. As a lady at the town tourism office explained to me, in the past Romanians had not been allowed to reside within the city walls. They could enter the city at certain times to sell their wares, but only through Catherine’s Gate. Romanians, as well as Bulgarians, lived outside the city walls, in the Şchei district, although by the 19^th century the Bulgarians had been Romanianised. There, in the grounds of the 15^th century Orthodox Church, the first school to teach in the Romanian language was established. Built at the end of the 15^th century, it had switched to Romanian-language teaching a century later, from the Church Slavonic that had hitherto been used. It was also in Braşov that Transylvania’s first Romanian-language newspaper was established, in 1838.

Today the square at the heart of the Şchei district is a pleasant, quiet refuge from the much more touristy centre of the old walled city. I enjoyed a supper in a very good traditional Romanian restaurant. In the 19^th century, Braşov was a centre of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania. For many Hungarians, the loss of Transylvania continues to be painful. In Hungary, one can still see maps of pre-1918 Greater Hungary, and hear people lamenting how the country lost two-thirds of its territory. Yet in an age of nation states it would surely have been anomalous if the Romanian majority, which had for centuries suffered an inferior status in Transylvania, would not have been able to assert its right to unite with Romania. To have continued to maintain that this was Hungarian land would have meant disregarding the Romanian population. That they simply did not count. To be sure, having been subjected to Magyarization pressure during the 19^th century, Romania was far from a model of respect for the rights of national minorities, including Hungarians, during the 20th, including under Ceauşescu and afterwards, as exemplified by the Funar period in Cluj. During my travels, I was told more than once that relations between Romanians and Hungarians are now much more comfortable than had previously been the case. Hopefully that will continue.

On the other side of the old town from the Şchei district are signs of more recent strife. At the end of 1989, I watched with mixed excitement and horror as the drama of Romania’s uprising against the Ceauşescu regime played out on our television screens. The media focused largely on events in Timişoara, where the revolution started, and in Bucharest. But the violence afflicted many other towns, including Braşov. On the side of a building not far from the city centre, a scattering of bullet holes have been framed, with a plaque commemorating the revolution. In a little park nearby, a row of graves commemorates those who died in the revolution in Braşov, including a six-year old girl caught in the crossfire.

A short distance from Braşov, in a pass linking Transylvania with Wallachia, is Bran Castle. The castle was built in the 14^th century by the Saxons of Braşov, to defend the pass. Perched high on a rocky crag, with its towers and ramparts it looks just the part to be a vampire’s castle, and indeed the tourism industry has made much of the Dracula story and the vampire legends of Transylvania. In fact it appears the castle was built purely as a fortification and a garrison for troops defending the pass. There is no evidence of any connection with either Bran Stoker or Vlad the Impaler, although Vlad did travel through the pass on many occasions. The description of Dracula’s castle in Stoker’s novel is quite different.

Bran Castle

The castle today looks much as it did in the 1930s, when it was a favourite residence of Queen Marie of Romania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Having been built for defence rather than luxury, a warren of small rooms and narrow staircases, the castle is perhaps an unusual residence for a Queen. But it has considerable charm, and it is easy to see why Marie loved it. Having spent her childhood largely in England and Germany, Marie became highly popular in Romania. Having persuaded her husband, King Ferdinand, a member of the German Hohenzollern family, to enter the First World War on the side of the western Triple Entente in 1916, she won admiration for her work as a nurse treating wounded soldiers. Following the war, she attended the Paris Peace Conference and, using her international connections, proved to be a highly effective lobbyist for recognition of Romania’s enlargement into neighbouring territories.

Ottoman Budapest

I first visited Budapest in the summer of 1991, travelling up from Belgrade to take a short break from the increasingly fraught atmosphere amid the gathering storm of war in former Yugoslavia. Hungary had only recently freed itself from the yoke of Soviet rule, and there were still Soviet soldiers in the city. Like many visitors, I was impressed by the grandeur of Budapest, by the splendid views along the Danube of the parliament building, the Chain Bridge and Buda castle stretched along the hill overlooking the river. I feasted on rich, spicey Hungarian food, and tipped the obligatory Romany musicians. Over the years I visited Budapest several more times. I spent over a week there in 1993, visiting the Yugoslav (Serbia and Montenegro) embassy on Heroes Square every day in a forlorn attempt to acquire a visa to go to Serbia. I went mushrooming with a friend’s family in the Buda hills, north of the city, and stayed in an ethnic-Slovak village, enjoying the local specialities of goat’s cheese and yoghurt. I visited the Serbian Orthodox churches and the art galleries in Szentendre, north of Budapest.

Spending nearly two months in Budapest in the spring of 2022, I searched out the city’s Ottoman heritage. The city’s separate parts, Buda and Pest, were united only in the 19^th century. Buda, overlooking the Danube on the western side of the river, had been the medieval capital of Hungary before the cataclysmic defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent at Mohács in 1526, and the capture of Buda itself in 1541. The Ottomans held sway in Hungary for not quite 150 years before they were expelled by the Hapsburgs at the end of the 17^th century. Their influence was shallower than in the Balkan lands to the south, where Ottoman rule lasted for several centuries. Most of Hungary’s population remained Christian, although many left and sought refuge in territory still under Christian rule. But as in the Balkans, towns became largely Muslim bastions surrounded by predominantly Christian inhabited countryside. So it was with Buda, where in the 16^th and 17^th centuries the view across the Danube was dominated by minarets, and the splendid Matthias church was converted into a mosque.

Rudas baths, Budapest

Not a lot remains of Ottoman Buda. But remnants can be found, notably in some fine Ottoman-era baths. Communal baths were important centres of urban Ottoman life. Architecturally beautiful, they were not just places for keeping clean, but for social gathering, where people could catch up with friends, with news, and with business. Buda is blessed with hot thermal springs that had first attracted the Romans to the area a millennium and a half before, when they built the city of Aquincum. After the Romans, Christian Europe largely lost the habit of cleanliness and of regular bathing. But the Ottomans revived the custom in the lands they conquered, and took full advantage of the hot springs in Buda.

I visited the Rudas baths one evening. Enclosed within a more modern building, nothing can be seen of the Ottoman building from the street. But inside it felt like I was entering a bygone world. The baths were built not long after the Ottoman conquest, and were rebuilt and used by the governor of Buda Vilayet, Sokollu Mustafa Pasha. The octagonal bath is surrounded by eight pillars supporting a cupola with small openings through which shine shafts of light. Around the central bath, in the corners of the room, are smaller baths with different water temperatures. Men wandered around (I went on a men-only day), many of them wearing skimpy loin cloths. They sat in the baths, relaxing, contemplating, chatting in soft tones, against the background of the gentle tinkling of falling water. It was all very relaxing. I could not know how it would have been in the bygone days of Ottoman Buda. No doubt there were customs, etiquette from that era which would have been unfamiliar to us today. But somehow I felt that the essence of the baths, as a place of rest, relaxation and social intercourse, was probably not so different. If the experience was not quite of a time warp, I had perhaps caught some inkling of a past age.

Király baths

Another of the Ottoman-era baths, the Király baths, tucked behind the foreign ministry, was closed to the public when I was there, but, unlike the Rudas baths, the low, stone building, with its green domes, can be seen from the street. The modern city has been built around it, leaving it a little forlorn and out of place, deprived of the context of the city it once inhabited. Yet its discreet presence reminds of the world that was once here.

Another such reminder, renovated with Turkish funds, is the Gül Baba türbe, or tomb, a steep walk up the hill overlooking the Margaret Bridge, not far from the Király baths. Gül Baba was a Bektashi dervish who died either during the Ottoman conquest of Buda, or shortly after it. He was declared the Wali, or patron saint of the city, and Suleiman the Magnificent was said to have been one of the coffin bearers at his funeral. The tomb became a place of Muslim pilgrimage, but after the reconquest of Buda by the Hapsburgs it was converted into a Christian chapel. Perhaps that is why it was one of the few buildings of Ottoman Buda to survive. By the late 19^th century the building was in private hands, and was again accessible to Muslim pilgrims. The Ottoman government commissioned the restoration of the tomb, which was completed in 1914. Today the property of the Turkish state, the most recent renovation was completed in 2018, and the site was opened by the Hungarian prime minister and the Turkish president, a marker of the close ties between the two countries and their like-minded leaders. Like other such tombs in the Balkans, it is a simple, but elegant little building, nowadays shaded by trees and surrounded by rose gardens. Gül Baba was known as the “father of roses”.

Gül Baba türbe

While the visible legacy of Ottoman rule in central Europe may be slight, Hungarians acknowledge other enduring influences apart from the handful of buildings in Budapest and elsewhere. These include borrowings from the Turkish language, as well as dishes such as stuffed cabbage leaves and paprika, a key ingredient of Hungarian cuisine. It was also through the Ottomans that coffee was introduced to central Europe. For Christian Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Sultan’s armies reached the gates of Vienna, the Ottomans represented an existential threat. Recovering Buda and the lands of central Europe at the end of the seventeenth century must have been a profound relief. Yet when we consider the legacy of the Ottomans, not only their aggressive expansionism, but also the fine architecture and the beautiful baths of Budapest, it is hard not to concede the rich contribution they made to European civilisation.

Isaac Babel's Odessa

The Odessa of Isaac Babel’s youth was a vibrant, notoriously rumbunctious place. A city of wealthy merchants and squalid poverty, of high culture and unbridled gangsterism. A melange of nationalities drawn by the opportunities offered in one of the Russian Empire’s most important ports. Odessa was one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, along with Istanbul, Smyrna, Salonika and Alexandria. Babel was born there in 1894, in the rough and tumble district of Moldavanka, a largely Jewish neighbourhood notorious for its lawlessness and dissipation. The family soon moved to the nearby town of Mykolaiv, but returned to Odessa, to a more salubrious district, in 1906.

Babel wrote his Odessa Stories during the early 1920s. His portrayal of life in Moldavanka in the first two decades of the 20th century, with its close-knit Jewish community and its notorious gangsters, did much to build the legend of old Odessa that continues to define the city to this day. According to this legend, while they preyed on their fellow Odessans, these flamboyant hoodlums became popular heroes, a part of the city’s heritage. In her book, Tales of Old Odessa, Roshanna P. Sylvester portrays the “unsavoury terrain” of Moldavanka, with its “dark allies, filthy streets, crumbling buildings and violence”, but also the “businesslike criminality” of the “thieving aristocrats” and “gentlemen burglars”.

Comprising up to 30 per cent of the city’s population, the Jews of Odessa played a crucial role in the city’s life and its character. As Charles King describes in his history of the city, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, they had mainly come from western Ukraine, in the Pale of Settlement on the western fringes of the Russian Empire. Many of them thrived in Odessa, becoming rich from the trade in grain from their old homelands in Galicia down to the port of Odessa and onwards from there. Odessa, with its freeport status, offered a degree of freedom denied to Jews elsewhere in the Empire, although Odessa too was scarred by murderous anti-Jewish pogroms. The world of the Jewish community in Odessa was quite different to that of the shtetls of the western border lands, with a higher degree of integration in the wider community. Just as Odessa’s Jews were prominent among the city’s wealthy bourgeoisie, they were also conspicuous in the seamier side of the city, in the slums and among the criminal gangs of Moldavanka. This was the side of Odessa that Babel portrayed in his stories.

Benya Krik, as portrayed in the 1926 Soviet silent film

Among Babel’s rich cast of characters, most famous of all was Benya Krik, the gangster “king” of Moldavanka. It was a world of filth and squalor, of thieves and prostitutes, violence and murder. But in the character of Benya Krik there was also a kind of gallantry. There was honour among these thieves. When Benya extorted money from Odessa businesses, he sent them his terms in polite, business-like letters. When a senseless murder takes place during one of Benya’s raids, the gangster provides a pension to the victim’s mother and a lavish funeral for her son. For while Benya Krik preys on his fellow Odessans, in his fashion he also provides for the people of Moldavanka.

Babel based the fictitious character of Benya Krik on a real-life Moldavanka crime boss, the notorious Mishka Yaponchik (real name Mikhail Vinnitsky), Mishka the Japanese, so-called because of his physical appearance. According to a profile of Yaponchik in the October 2020 edition of the Odessa Journal, while still in his early teens he took part in a Jewish self-defence unit during the 1905 pogrom. He held on to the weapon he had been given, and was soon robbing the shops and the homes of the wealthy, and extorting money from businesses. Through guile, force of character and sheer nerve, Mishka Yaponchik established himself as the leader of Odessa’s gangs of thieves. Merchants and shopkeepers paid him tribute, and the police were in his thrall. Despite the fear he inspired, Yaponchik presented himself as a dandy, with his well-cut suits, his bow tie, and lilies in his buttonhole. He had a seat at the Opera and his own table at the fashionable Fanconi Café. But like the fictional Benya Krik, he didn’t forget Moldavanka, putting on lavish feasts for the people from whom he had sprung.

Eventually Yaponchik’s luck ran out. With the coming of the Bolsheviks, the world which had made him, in which an astute gangster could reach an unspoken accommodation with the authorities, was gone. He tried to adapt to the shifting sands of the Russian Civil War, making approaches to General Denikin’s Whites when they controlled the city, and even forming a Red Army unit when the Boslsheviks took over. But his cunning and wiliness were not enough to preserve him. Betrayed by his fellow gangster, Grigory Kotovsky, who had also become a Red Army commander, Yaponchik was shot in the summer of 1919.

By the time Babel wrote the Odessa Stories, in the early 1920s, the Odessa he depicted, the Odessa of Misha Yaponchik and Benya Krik, was already a thing of the past. But the image of Odessa from those times lived on in peoples’ imaginations, both in Odessans’ sense of themselves and their city, and in the way that others perceived them. Odessa’s reputation as a free-wheeling port city, and that of its people as sharp-witted hucksters, living off their wits, not always on the right-side of the law, has endured. Odessans are especially proud of their distinctive humour, which, while the Jewish population of the city is much diminished, is said to have its roots in Jewish wit.

Moldavanka is no longer the slum portrayed by Babel, although many of its old buildings are crumbling and run down, and the district is in a much worse state than the vibrant city centre. At weekends, Moldavanka holds a sprawling flea market. Among souvenir stands selling Soviet era medals and other memorabilia, traders lay out pitiable little assortments of tattered clothes and dilapidated household ornaments, the wretched possessions of impoverished households hoping for a bit of change to keep their heads above water. Perhaps this desperate commerce is in some way a throwback to the shady entrepreneurialism of Babel’s Moldavanka.

Was the romance of old Odessa, with its gallant gangsters and gentleman crooks ever real? I have my doubts. Corruption and criminality in today’s Odessa take a different form, and are found above all in the corridors of power and among the well-connected business figures who are granted government contracts, and the construction tycoons who are allowed to flout planning rules. As in Babel’s day, many in the police are biddable, and prosecutors are all too often for sale. In the face of these modern-day besuited hoodlums, ordinary Odessans are powerless and largely resigned. They pay their bribes when they have to, and their expectations of the corrupted state are low. But that they are resigned does not mean they like it. Were Odessans of a century ago who accepted the gangsters who preyed upon them but who every now and then threw a big party any more content with the state of things?