Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ODESA
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Odesa is a city straight from literature - an energetic, decadent boomtown. Its famous
Potemkin Steps sweep down to the Black Sea and Ukraine's biggest commercial port.
Behind them, a cosmopolitan cast of characters makes merry among pastel neoclassical
buildings lining a geometrical grid of leafy streets.
Immigrants from all over Europe were invited to make their fortune here when Odesa
was founded in the late 18th century by Russia's Catherine the Great. These new inhabit-
ants gave Russia's southern window on the world a singular, subversive nature.
As well as becoming a duty-free port, Odesa also attracted ordinary holidaymakers
with its sunny climate and sandy beaches. True, the city's appearance grows tattier as
you head south past half-empty sanatoriums towards its beachside nightclubs. However,
this east-west crossroads makes up for that with sheer panache, and Odesans are known
across the old USSR for being stylish, funny, savvy and not easily impressed.
History
Catherine the Great imagined Odesa as the St Petersburg of the south. Her lover, General
Grygory Potemkin, laid the groundwork for her dream in 1789 by capturing the Turkish
fortress of Hadjibey, which previously stood here. However, Potemkin died before work
began on the city in 1794 and his senior commanders oversaw its construction instead.
The Spanish-Neapolitan general José de Ribas, after whom the main street, vul Derybas-
ivska, is named, built the harbour. The Duc de Richelieu (Armand Emmanuel du Plessis),
an aristocrat fleeing the French Revolution, became the first governor, overseeing the
city's affairs from 1803 to 1814.
In 1815, when the city became a duty-free port, things really began to boom. Its huge
appetite for more labour meant the city became a refuge - 'Odesa Mama' - for runaway
serfs, criminals, renegades and dissidents. By the 1880s it was the second-biggest Russi-
an port, with grain the main export, and an important industrial base.
It was the crucible of the early 1905 workers' revolution, with a local uprising and the
mutiny on the battleship
Potemkin Tavrichesky
. Then, between 1941 and 1944, Odesa
sealed its reputation as one of the 'hero' cities, when partisans sheltering in the city's
catacombs during WWII put up a legendary fight against the occupying Romanian troops
(allies of the Nazis). Around 100,000 Jews in the Odesa region were shot or burnt alive
by the Romanians implementing the Nazi ethnic purification doctrine.
Odesa was a very Jewish city in the 1920s when many village Jews moved in here,
while Russian bourgeoisie and intellectuals were fleeing the Bolshevik revolution. But
