Odessa

Odessa is a place of delightful spring evenings, the spicy smell of acacias and the moon shining regularly and irresistibly over the dark sea, Isaac Babel once wrote about his native city.  The famous Russian writer called Odessa 'the most charming city in the Russian empire- a city in which one lives easily and free of worries'.  It's true even now.  Odessa is entirely different from other Ukrainian and Russian cities at the coast of the Black Sea.  It is open, playful, merry and careless.  Being the biggest Black Sea port, Odessa is also one of the youngest Ukrainian cities, founded on 1792 by the Ukrainian Cossacks, who had defeated the Turks near the Eni-Dunja fortress.  Upon the request of Czarina Catherine 2, General Suvorov started building the city as the principal Russian Black Sea naval base.  A commercial and military port, jetties as well as a shipyard were built on the ground seized from the Turks.  Odessa allegedly received its name by mistake: its founders believed that a Greek settlement called Odisos once stood on the place. 

In less then two decades, Odessa became the third most important Czarist city (after Moscow and Petersburg), gaining the status of a free port in 1815.  The privilege of duty-free trade attracted merchants, not only Russians and Ukrainians, but also a lot of Jews, Greeks and Armenians settled down there, contributing to the cosmopolitan character  of the place, where nationality or religion never mattered.  The most important thing was that one was an 'Odessite', as the locals say up to the present day.  Even the Czarist absolutism once stopped in front of the gates of Odessa, where revolutionary democrats Bielinsky, Tchernychevsky and Dobroliubov led passionate discussions without any worries.  Gogol strolled along the wide boulevards in the shade of the acacias.  Pushkin spent his most prolific period in Odessa and now has a monument on Primorsky Boulevard.

Expelled to Odessa in 1820 for his liberal verses, the famous poet spent 13 months there, finishing The Fountain of Bahcesaray and beginning The Gypsies.  In Odessa, he comleted two and a half chapters of his verse novel Eugene Onegin and wrote more than thirty lyrical poems, including The Night.  A fountain contributes to the unique magic of the Pushkin monument from 1888.  With a low whisper, water springs from the mouths of bronze dolphins, falling into large bronze bowls.

'In Odessa,  there is a port with steam ships from Newcastle, Cardiff, Marseille and Portsaid.  There are Blacks, Englishmen, Frenchmen and Americans', writes Babel.  The seamen contributed to the exotic atmosphere here.  Sacks of coffee beans recounted stories of Africa and clove instilled dreams about the Spice Isles.  But most importantly, there were the merchants, selling timber, Donbass coal and Ukrainian wheat.  They knew Alexandria and Varna as well as Paris.  They kept correspondence with business partners in London and Lisbon.  They loved Odessa and, in a slightly snobbish manner, took pride in their support of the arts.  They invited prominent architects, who filled the streets with Neoclassicist.  Thanks to musicians, the city was merry and plebeian, far, far away from the Czarist bureaucracy.  No governor here was all-prowerful.  The free-minded port always attracted restless minds, dreamers, adventurers, visionaries and enterprising people of all kinds, no less than poets, composers, musicians and painters.  No other provincial place in the Old Russia-including the much larger Kiev-gave birth to so many dazzling talents as the 'Russian Marseille', with its almost Mediterranean charm.  Emil Gilels and David Oistrakh started their musical careers in Odessa.  Tchaikovsky was a conductor in the Odessa Opera Theatre.  In the 1920s, Odessa became famous for its writers.  Babel, Kuprin, Paustovsky, Ilf and Petrov emerged shortly after the October Revolution, beginning a new chapter in Russian literature.
  
Perhaps the most notorious event in the history of the city was the Russian Revolution in 1905.  On 14 June in the evening, the rebellious battleship Prince Potemkin-Tauridsky, bearing a red flag on its mast, entered the harbour of Odessa.  Fighting on the barricades was raging in the city at that time.  The insurgents welcomed the ship enthusiastically, while the dock workers provided it with coal and food.  The police and the military were chasing the people who gathered at the port and on the boulevards.  But the people kept coming back.  Crowds filled the Primorsky Boulevard and 192 steps of the wide stone stairs leading down to the harbour.  When the seamen brought ashore the body of Grigory Vakulinchuk, one of the rebel leaders killed by a navy officer, the  citizens of the town wanted to bid farewell to the dead hero.  then suddenly a call pierced the air:'The harbour's burning!'  Panic broke out, people started to run and the Czarist officials let started shooting them down.  Blood stained the harbour, the pavements and the stairs.  More than 2000 people died.  Finally, the rebel battleship had to leave Odessa and sail to the Romanian Constanta.

As a tribute to the killed, the stairs were named Potemkin Stairs.  They are also the focus of Sergei Eisenstein's famous film Battlership Potemkin, which was made in the manner of ancient tragedies.  The most scene is that of the massacre on the stairs, which later became an emblem of the city.  The film culminates with the image of a dying mother, who lets her hand off a perambulartor with a wailing baby.  It then weaves its way down the stone stairs among the blood-stained bodies.  In some shots of Battlership Potemkin, there appeared more than 10.000 extras, mostly inhabitants of Odessa. The film premiere took place in December 1925.  One year later, it received the American Academy Award and in 1958, the International Committee for Film History declared it the best film of all times.  History declared it the best film of all times.  Today, it doesn't matter anymore that  Battlership Potemkin  was made at political commission-what matters is only its huge inner power, withstanding all regimes, political ideal and effects of time.  Without acquainting oneself with  Battlership Potemkin, one cannot grasp the soul of Odessa.

From the Potemkin Stairs there is a splendid view of the sea port, called the 'morskij vokzal' by the locals.  Dozens of cargo, pleasure and fishing boats cruise on the surface of the bluest sea in the world, entering the port surrounded by high cranes.  Set out from here for a tour of the city: visit the Church of the monastery of St.Panteleimon, the Opera and Ballet Theatre, the Fine Arts Museum ir the Passage shopping center.  Finding your way around Odessa is amazingly easy as the streets intersect in right angles. They are lined with the alleys of spreading acacias and tall planes trees.  With the exception of the city centre, the houses have no more than two or three stories.  There is no central square here.  As a matter of fact, there are no square at all, the only exception being the parks where pensioners use to play chess and dominoes on afternoons.  The commercial centre of Odessa is Deribasovskaya Street, named after one of the foreign founders of the city-Spanish general Don Jose De Ribas.  Street artists show off their art there and street merchants compete with each other in offering matryoskhas, baloons, badges and other souvenirs.  You can also encounter street clowns, ponies and dancing apes.

Enjoying the present relaxed atmosphere of the city, it is hard to believe what difficult times Odessa experienced during the World War 2.  Even though Germans sacrificed for its conquest a quarter million of their soldiers, the city resisted for 73 days.  The defenders of Odessa then gathered in the underground catacombs, which were created during the construction of the town as a result of mining the Black Sea shelly limestone.  It is this material that most of the palaces in the city centre were built of.  The underground quarries gradually spawned into a multi-storey elaborate labyrinth with total length of two thousands kilometres.  During the war, fourteen partisan brigades could hide there comfortably.  The fighters had underground weapon stocks, hospitals and dining and lodging rooms, out of which they infiltrated into the rear of their enemies through secret entrances.  They'd crawled out of house cellars, drainage holes and wells, only to return in the morning.  The Nazis tried to fill the underground with water and poisonous gas, sent dogs and commandoes, but failed to drive the rebels out.  Today you can visit the Odessa catacombs with a guide.  Were you cold underground? 'In the summer, the town beaches are full of shiny bronze bodies of muscular young men engaged in sports, stately bodies of the fishermen not engaged in sports, pimply and emaciated visionaries, inventors and stock brokers,' says Babel.  Check this statement for yourself while visiting the Arcadia, Otrada or Langeron beaches.  The stock brockers and businessmen returned to Odessa soon after the depature of the Communists.  The muscular young men, fishermen and visionaries never left.

Michal Zacharda, Review
May - June 2006