The best way to approach the great port city of Odesa is naturally from the sea. Hellenic settlers crossed the Black Sea in ancient times; Genoese traders came in the Renaissance. Ottoman mariners set sail from Turkey to explore the Black Sea coast and, like others before them, saw the red dun bluffs where the Pontic steppe drops down to meet the sea.
By the 17th century, the Black Sea was effectively an Ottoman lake. The sultan’s vessels could sail at will through waters where foreign ships were hardly tolerated. Even the Dutch and the English — who generally presumed that the world’s seaways belonged to them — were barred from entering the Black Sea other than on Ottoman-flagged ships. The Austrians had free run of the Danube, but woe betide any Austrian ship which ventured beyond the delta into the open waters of the Black Sea.
The northern littoral of the Black Sea, for so long the empire of the Golden Horde, was now the preserve of the Turks. But there was not much ado on the shallow cliffs where today Odesa stands. While elsewhere along the coast the Turks had great strongholds — such as those at Akkerman on the Dniestr and Özi on the Dniepr — there was no great Ottoman fortress in the area that was to become Odesa. There was merely a dusty garrison settlement called Khadjibey.
Tatar raiding parties ventured out from the Crimean Peninsula — in those days an Ottoman Khanate — and tussled with the Cossacks. But the Tatars had no interest in acquiring land, either for themselves or for the Sultan. They sought a commodity far more valuable than the dry steppe. The Tatars sailed up the great rivers into territory nominally controlled by Poland and Lithuania; they even went into southern Muscovy. And everywhere they went, they took captives, huge numbers of ordinary people who were sold into the buoyant Ottoman slave trade.
The Ottoman outpost of Khadjibey slumbered. Bored soldiers sat by the dry ravines overlooking the beach. But the climate was benign and there were advantages to being on a forgotten corner of the Black Sea coast. The arrival of a handful of Jewish traders in the 18th century brought a new dimension to life in Khadjibey.
Enter Catherine the Great
Two millennia after the Greeks had arrived, the ebb and flow of peoples and power along this coast and on the sparsely populated Pontic steppe was dramatically transformed by a woman who came from the far-distant Baltic land of Pomerania — a territory which had been variously Polish, Swedish and German. Her name was Sophia and she was born in 1729 in the port city of Stettin (nowadays Szczecin in Poland). Judicious marriage into the House of Romanov secured for Sophia access to Russian power, and at the age of just 33 — having ousted her husband, Tsar Peter III, in a coup — she was crowned Catherine Empress of Russia. Catherine the Great had arrived and, as Russia’s new sovereign ruler, she meant to do business.
The story of Russia’s great expansion to the south, challenging Ottoman hegemony in the Black Sea region, is well known. Catherine had imperial ambitions. In 1776, her troops occupied the Perekop Isthmus — the only land connection between Crimea and the European mainland. The following year, the installation of a pro-Russian khan effectively made Crimea a tributary state of Russia.
By the mid-1780s Catherine’s lover and politic advisor, Prince Potemkin, was planning the great expedition on which the empress could inspect her new southern dominions. Seven magnificent galleys sailed down the Dniepr, attended by a flotilla of supply boats. This journey revealed Potemkin’s capacity to combine statecraft with stagecraft. No expense was spared to communicate an impression of a bountiful land populated by citizens entirely happy with the new Russian royal authority. The dreary solitude of the steppe was eclipsed by colourful riverside villages teeming with abundant produce, all of which Potemkin had shipped in from Moscow and Warsaw to impress Catherine.
The horizons of Muscovy were expanding. If England could have New England, if Madrid could look west across the Atlantic to Nueva España, why should not Russia look south to Novorossiya (Новороoссия) or New Russia?
Catherine surely harboured plans to defy Ottoman power in the entire Black Sea region. When the empress stepped ashore in Kherson, the last major city on the Dniepr before the river’s delta, Prince Potemkin escorted Catherine the Great through the streets, taking care to stick to those thoroughfares which had been well scrubbed just prior to the arrival of the royal party. Potemkin drew Catherine’s attention to an allegedly ancient Greek inscription over a gate in the city wall. It had almost certainly been carved only days before. Potemkin translated the words for the monarch: “This is the road which leads to Byzantium.”
Cosmopolitan Odesa, the city which lazed by the sea; sunny, southern, seductive Odesa, the third city of the Russian Empire, was a counterpoint to the restrained formality of Moscow and St Petersburg.
Were it not for the Ottoman ships which waited in the sandy shoals by the Dniepr delta, Catherine might plausibly have believed that the Ottoman lake was now truly a Russian sea.
The imperial city is born
The secret to understanding Odesa, a city created from almost nothing in 1794, is an appreciation of Muscovy’s relationship with the Black Sea. It was Catherine, no less, who decreed that, on the site of Khadjibey where the steppe falls down to the sea, a great port and imperial city should arise. So, on the dry bluffs, Odesa developed and became one of the great cities of the Tsarist Empire — an elegant town of boulevards shaded by chestnuts and acacia trees, of Italianate palaces which in their ornamental extravagance rivalled even those of St Petersburg.
This is a city which from its earliest days was mythologized within Russia. If St Petersburg was the Northern Palmyra, Odesa nudged aside its ancient Syrian forebear in laying claim to be the Southern Palmyra — and, just as the desert Palmyra was a place where cultures mingled, so Odesa developed in the early 19th century into one of the most heterogeneous of European cities: one that, in the mix of races, religions and cultures, stood on a par with Smyrna, Salonica or Trieste. There were Armenian and Greek voices in the cafés, Tatar and Jewish traders rubbed shoulders on the quaysides and there were Italian and French accents in the streets — and even the governance of the city was in the hands of migrants. The name of Odesa’s principal thoroughfare, Deribasovskaya, recalls the city’s first governor. José de Ribas was born in Naples of a Spanish father and Irish mother. Odesa’s founding governor set out a vision for the new city, although his plans were only fully realised by his successor, the French-born Duke of Richelieu who in 1803 succeeded de Ribas and two years later was given a much wider brief as governor-general of the entire imperial province of Novorossiya, which extended from Bessarabia to the Donbass.
It is de Richelieu’s statue which stands at the top of Odesa’s signature landmark — the grand flight of steps which leads from the Primorsky Boulevard down to the port. The former governor is styled in the manner of a Roman senator, hand outstretched as he gazes over the harbour. Here, there is a web of ambiguity. Is the outstretched hand a gesture of welcome? Or is it raised in warning? This gesture captures the duality of Odesa. For, beyond the sedate boulevards and the colonnades of the opera house (and the fake Roman colonnades by the one-time home of the governor-general) there is a different Odesa — a hidden city which has also become part of the mythology of Odesa.
The location of Odesa on the Black Sea.
A city of many stories
Cosmopolitan Odesa, the city which lazed by the sea; sunny, southern, seductive Odesa, the third city of the Russian Empire, was a counterpoint to the restrained formality of Moscow and St Petersburg. The Odesa temperament was fiery and the city was (and still is) a place for dark humour. The real stars in this other mythologized Odesa are the stevedores and the smugglers, the swindlers and the Jewish gangsters who coloured Odesa life for so many decades. This is the other side of Odesa, one which is celebrated in the writings of Isaac Babel and a dozen other Jewish writers from Odesa.
To the Jewish Soviet actor and jazz singer Leonid Utesov, his home town of Odesa was more than ceremonial promenades and the Potemkin Steps. “So you think Odesa is just one city?” he asked in the literary journal Moskva in 1964. “No,” he explained, “Odesa is a federation. The centre is one Odesa. Moldavanka is another and Peresyp a third.” The grittier side of Odesa had its fulcrum in Moldavanka, a part of the city which from the mid-19th century developed as Odesa’s Jewish quarter.
Memorial to Isaac Babel, whose writing about Odesa was central in sealing the city’s place in the literary imagination (photo © hidden europe).
Moldavanka is a shadow in all Odesa stories, and that district’s scullions and satirists populate the streetscapes of the Odesa imagination. And not merely the imaginary streetscapes, but also the city park on Deribasovskaya where a lone empty chair recalls the fictional entrepreneurial conman Ostap Bender, created by Odesa authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov. Bender stands centre stage in two novels by Ilf and Petrov: The Twelve Chairs and its sequel, The Little Golden Calf. Leonid Utesov is there in the same park: relaxed, smiling, a great statue cast in bronze on a park bench, encouraging all who pass to come and sit beside him for a chat.
The scents and sounds of old Odesa colour modern perceptions of the city. Every impression of Odesa is filtered through the pages of the city in literature (Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales are just one example) or through images of the city on film. Ah, yes! That pram in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, a film often hailed as one of the greatest pieces of cinema of all time. The pram teeters on the steps, and then it slips down them. All Odesa stories lead inevitably back to those steps, which are not named after Catherine’s ally Prince Potemkin, but rather after Eisenstein’s film, where the ‘steps’ scene — Cossacks advancing on the Odesa workers as the latter scatter pell-mell down the steps — is a filmic reference so deeply inscribed on the imagination that there can be no Potemkin Steps without Odesa, no Odesa without the famous steps.
It is of course all an illusion. There were no Cossacks on the steps in 1905. And the real crew of the real Battleship Potemkin were a shade less plucky than Eisenstein would have us believe. They did not set sail boldly out from Odesa to confront the Tsarist Navy, but slipped quietly out of the harbour to seek refuge in Romania. But illusion is everything in Odesa. From the neoclassical pretension of the National Archeological Museum to the fake archeological remains on the Primorsky Boulevard, the dance of truth and deceit underpins the very spirit of Odesa. And even the celebrated steps are based on a double illusion. From the top of the steps, seen from the perspective of the Duke of Richelieu on his plinth, only the flat landings are visible. From the bottom of the steps, the view seen by newcomers alighting from a boat on the quayside, only the risers are visible. It is this very fluidity of interpretation, this duality, which underpins the story of Odesa — and that, in a nutshell, is what makes Odesa one of Europe’s most interesting cities.
