‘Odessa MAMA’ – Odessalılar yani Odessitler sevgiyle ve bir anneymişcesine anarlar kentlerini odessa “bizim annemiz” derler.
1794’te Çariçe 2’nci Ekaterina’nın ordularınca ele geçirilmeden önceki adı ‘Hacıbey’di.. Çariçe Ekatherine kararıyla. Başlangıçta bir “Avrupa’ya açılan pencere” olarak 1794 de kurulan Odessa ve gri komünist ev bloklarıyla çevrelenen Odessa adeta iki ayrı şehir.
The work assignment to Odessa had come at short notice leaving scant opportunity for preparation or research, and my plane had arrived in the dark and rain meaning that, as I surveyed the scene from the 18th floor of the Hotel Yunost next morning, I knew precious little about the place beyond cliché. Odessa has the Primorsky Stairs as featured in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin – surely one of cinema’s iconic moments when the runaway pushchair bounces down them. Lazy stereotypes also attach themselves easily to port cities such as Liverpool, Marseilles and Baltimore, so I wasn’t surprised to be warned that Odessans too had a wry sense of humour, and were the salt of the earth – apart from those who would as readily slit open your throat as your purse.
So here was a chance to dig a little deeper and find other versions of the truth. Maybe also to discover some of Odessa’s sumptuous architecture, of which the hotel receptionist had proudly boasted as he checked me in. Trouble was, even a cursory scan from my 18th floor lookout told me I was a good three or four miles from the historic centre so there would be no chance of nipping out during coffee breaks at my conference. An expedition would be necessary.
I finally stole more than a few moments and headed for the tram stop. It quickly became apparent that the shabby Soviet-era Yunost (Youth) stood in less than splendid isolation, surrounded on three sides by large areas of scrubby woodland. I paid it no heed but, as I was rummaging for a few hryvna for the fare, I started to realise it wasn’t as empty as it had first seemed. As my eyes accustomed I could pick out a shape here and there – walls, buildings, statues… or the remains of them. By the time the tram swept by, curiosity had already clutched me and I was off, probing for a weak point in the perimeter fence. I didn’t have to look far before discovering a decrepit gateway through which I could slip.
I picked my way around trying to rebuild some sense into the apparent chaos. It looked like it had been a diverse and integral community, with homes, offices, shops, what looked like a former cinema… and even a library.
They had probably been built between the ‘50s and ‘80s but their level of decay suggested they should be much older than this, and that meant just one thing to me. They were of a woefully shoddy Soviet construction, whereby seemingly adamantine concrete can be reduced to flakes and dust within only a generation’s wear and tear.
Clearly, though this was no mere functionalist suburb. It had been designed as a place for pleasure – even, hard as it might seem, a place to delight. There was a band-stand and the remnants of benches encircling it. And scattered around were several fountains from which water would once have sprinkled with no purpose other than to relax or enrapture passers-by.
Although the largest I came across obviously also carried with it a more ideological injunction to embrace the healthy, physical demeanour of the new, superior Soviet citizen, whether at work or play. Like some Ancient Greek marble, the diving careless nude seemed stranded above her rotting plinth.
And therein lay the answer to the puzzle. We were not meant to be in a distant Black Sea-coastal outpost at all. We were in Arcadia.
Russia has always had a thing about ancient Greece and Byzantium, seeing itself as the heir and guardian of those traditions in the East. The Soviet Union, if not explicitly, also assumed these airs, particularly in its monumentalism. What I had stumbled upon was a vast, abandoned component of that once great mythology and machine – a holiday and sanatorium complex. This was no empty hulk of a former steel mill or power station – though it had as vital a role to play, by recharging the batteries of the Soviet labouring masses. This was Arkadiya which, between the 1920’s and the sudden collapse of the empire in 1991 had been one of the largest and most desirable places of rest, recuperation and reward for the fatigued stakhanovites and hassled commissars of Stalingrad, Sverdlovsk, Gorki and Magnitogorsk. This was sanatorium city – a place of elaborate water cures and special diets as well as the more conventional pleasures of sun, sea and sand – the Odessa Riviera!
Accounts from the 1980s boast of over 20 separate sanatoria here, with attendant residences and various pleasure domes. A large auditorium now stands trashed and forlorn but I can still imagine it being full to the gunnels with happy families looking for a good night out. Perhaps they were guffawing to one of Odessa’s saucy comedians, swaying to Leonid Utesov’s dance band (pictured), or harmonising with one of the sentimental shansons of the city’s ‘national treasure’ crooner and silver screen idol Mark Bernes. Odessan song seemed to be accorded a special place in Soviet life similar to that of Canzone Napoletana in Italy. Its style is lush and full of longing and melancholy, with just a hint of false romanticism for the free-spirited criminality of the dock-side, as well as a strong Yiddish influence, reflecting the fact that Jews once made up over a third of the population.
But I am jolted suddenly out my reverie. Scanning the wreckage of a housing block across from the theatre, I do a double-take. Is it? Can it be? No, surely not. But yes, it really is a washing line full of someone’s drying smalls. With a shudder it dawns upon me that along with the Soviet ghosts, Arkadiya now has a new clientele – part of Odessa’s small army of homeless and destitute people.
This is a reminder that since 1991, and probably long before, Odessa has been the home of many people, particularly orphans and youngsters, who have been abandoned to their own fate. Hard drug use and HIV reached catastrophic levels during the chaotic years after the collapse of the USSR and the founding of Ukraine and, whilst things are still awful today, there does at least now seem to be will and a system for helping these poor souls. I left quickly, not wishing to impose myself as a gawping intruder into their world.
Just over the wall from here, however, there is another intruder which will impose itself soon enough. ‘Biznesmen’ have not been slow to recognise the availability of prime real estate with sea views and dubious tenure. A new Arkadiya is rising (pictured). Brasher and more charmless than their predecessors, a string of seafront developments are now springing up to tempt the cash-rich winners of the all-or-nothing game which has been Ukraine’s 23 years of independence.
I make a discrete but hasty exit in the direction of Boulevard of the Proletariat – the avenue which links this erstwhile workers’ paradise with the Odessa’s city centre. Only now it’s returned to its pre-Revolutionary title of Frantsuzsky Bulvar (French Boulevard).
Before I get there however I tumble unsuspectingly into another world entirely. French Boulevard alerts me to the fact that Odessa has long been keen to associate itself with other countries and cultures. After all, it was founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great, and her consort Grigoriy Potemkin, to be Russia’s window on world and it had no compunction in inviting influential foreigners to make their mark. A refugee from the French Revolution, Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septimanie de Vignerot du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, became the city governor and imposed a decidedly gallic flavour upon its rapid expansion.
If I had known this at the time I would not have been quite so surprised to have stumbled through the undergrowth to find a ruin which might easily have been transported from the Palace of Versailles.
This turned out to be The Orangery, a now battered remnant of what had once been some of the most desirable real estate in the whole of Tsarist Russia. Long before biznesmen or commissars, Odessa had been the place where the Russian aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie came to get away from it all. They built themselves small summer palaces and dubbed them ‘dachas’ – something I had always tended to associate more with a suburban shed and a cucumber patch. By the way I’m sure you’re wondering about the intrusive yellow pipe. It could conceivably be a recreational gymnastics bar for sanatorium residents, but, I’ll wager it’s more likely to be for gas supply. It’s the way they do things around here.
I’m very grateful to Sergey Kotelko for subsequently explaining some of the history of French Boulevard, as well as its current plight. He is one of a small handful of local people who cherish Odessa’s early history and are trying to preserve it before it’s all swept away. You can find out more about what he’s been doing and the scale of his task here and here, along with some ravishing pictures of Odessan architecture.
One of the dachas had been built by the French Baron Jean Rainaud, who played host many times to the father of Russian literature Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. Pushkin was a passionate man and wouldn’t have been a Romantic poet worth his salt if he hadn’t been having an affair of the heart with someone he shouldn’t have. As if he needed an extra challenge, Pushkin just happened to choose Lise the wife of the serving governor of Odessa, national hero and vanquisher of Bonaparte, Prince Vorotsov. Worse, he didn’t seem to mind who in Odessa found out about it, and even composed some pretty suggestive verses inspired by his tristes with Lise in a hidden cove next to the dacha:
Love’s refuge is ever filled
With a coolness, murky and damp.
There the waves, unabashed,
Never silence their prolonged roar.
The Orangery itself was part of a neighbouring estate built by Grigoriy Marazli, prominent scion of Odessa’s Greek community and a popular mayor and philanthropist of the late 19th century. He is reputed to have imported the whole of its 40 metre metal framework from the United States. After his death, ownership passed to the auspiciously-named Pyotr Tolstoy, who died in mysterious circumstances during the chaos following the Revolution of October 1917. It was later absorbed into the giant Chkalov workers’ sanatorium, but now its future – or even survival - must be very uncertain, and its days numbered – unless some oligarch, imagining himself to be a latter day Pushkin, decides to restore it.
I decided to push on towards the city centre, leaving behind Arkadiya, but not before pondering what, if anything, it all meant. It’s easy, I guess, to get all maudlin and think that for this part of Odessa it’s been all downhill since the 1800s. From aristocratic elegance, to gerry-built workers’ playground and now transmogrifying into a brash symbol of the Ukrainian criminal crony capitalism, that is even now being fought over by masked men in Kyiv’s Independence Square. But who are we to say that those Tsarist dachas and palaces were any less ostentatiously tacky or egocentric than today’s edifices? Or, in a Russia where serfdom/slavery was not abolished until 1861, that the money used to build them was any less ill-gotten than the oligarch bling? Nor should we belittle the experiences of the toiling millions who found a few weeks of rest and pleasure in Arkadiya, whatever the merits of the system that built it. At the same time, millions were doing likewise in Britain – including me, perched on the knee of my coal-mining grandfather as he sank another pint of ale and coughed up coal dust from his raddled lungs, overlooking an ocean of less-than-elegant caravans and the chilly North Sea.
Pushing on I pass a strange concrete structure. It’s the entrance to a deep dark echoing well. The debris around it suggests that it almost certainly is, or has been, occupied by homeless people. I wince and move on. Emerging from the woodland and ruins I’m into a different place entirely, but perhaps more typical of life for the majority of Odessans. Firstly a scruffy, rough-and-tumble but rather friendly and democratic little resort. Two guys, perhaps trying to snooze off last night’s vodka, are sprawled across my path. They overlook the beach - and all of human life is there.
Girls totter along on heels which always seems a centimetre higher in Ukraine than anywhere else. Their beefy, thickset paramours look incongruous trailing behind them the tiny toy dogs that seem to be this season’s fashion accessory.
Around the corner and there looms the garish pink rococo wedding cake which is Chernomorets Stadium, home of FC Odessa. I somehow think Pushkin would have approved of the colour scheme.
There’s a match on too, so bunches of men and whole families are scattered around the grass making impromptu picnics of beer and sausage, and posing for snaps on the balcony overlooking Odessa’s still sprawling and vibrant port complex.
The walk was drawing to a close. Yet there’s much I’d still like to say and write about Odessa. The exotic jumble of different architectural styles which evoke Odessa’s short but tumultuous history, and the jostling of so many cultures cheek by jowl. I’d like to look more into the way extremes of poverty and wealth seemed to live side by side. For example, across French Boulevard from Marazli’s dacha had stood the city’s principal manufacturer of champagne, but beyond that lay Odessa largest and most benighted slum, before it was unceremoniously swept away. I’d like to evoke the smells and noises which must have characterised Odessa in its buccaneering heyday when it supplied much of Europe with Ukrainian wheat and beef. Peasants would converge on the city driving huge herds of cattle from the vast rural interior, before slaughtering and butchering them en-masse close to the quayside. It wasn’t all elegance and charm! There’s also a story to be told of the spectres, past and present, who occupy the miles and miles of catacombs which riddle the soft limestone beneath Odessa.
I’d like also to tease out more about Odessa’s lofty aloofness from the rest of the country which, even now is being played out; it being said that the city regards the current Ukrainian insurgency with bemused insouciance. But more than anything else I want to get under the skin of the trope that Odessa has always been a city of tolerance and creative hybridity which, given that the city erupted in a major pogrom at least every generation through the 19th centurey, can only be partly true. And, crucially, the almost forgotten invasion and occupation of Odessa by the army of Romania in 1941, which led to the disappearance of over 200,000 Jewish people, with hardly any assistance from the Waffen SS. To all of this I must return, at another time, in another place.
I drifted out of Shevchenko Park and past a Jugendstil masterpiece which, in another city would have a preservation order upon it, but here has vegetation clinging to its façade and is up for sale. I was making for the dockside now and, block by block, there were increasing signs of restoration, gentrification or new-build. However, Odessa still had one more surprise for me.
Riven as the landscape is by deep ravines running down to the sea, Odessa lies on two levels. This means – a little like in Edinburgh – that you can be walking along an apparently normal street and suddenly find yourself looking down on another layer of street life twenty metres below. And thus – in the very heart of the city - I discovered Devolanivs'kyi Descent – quite easily the most battered and abused piece of inner-urban real estate I’ve seen. It’s hard to imagine how idiosyncratic Devolanivs'kyi Descent actually is, because on all sides it is surrounded by the typical, bustling infrastructure of a modern city. Yet this street is so extravagantly and comprehensively abandoned that it feels like the set from a dystopian movie shoot.
I get down to street level – literally – and the very surface is bubbling and erupting like acne. It’s as if the road has taken on sentient form and is slowly morphing and metamorphosing into a Ballardian nightmare, or some phantasm from a David Cronenberg film.
I’m jolted out of such musing by the crash of rocks around me. I’m being stoned by a bunch of punks on the roof of one of the ruins. This is probably their home and they assume I’m here with malign intent. I try to explain otherwise but my Russian’s not good enough. Retreat seems judicious.
Subsequently I’ve tried finding out more about Devolanivs'kyi Descent from my various Odessan contacts. They say nothing – or pretend I hadn’t asked the question – as if I’d drawn attention to a scar or blemish on their face. I suspect the backstory is no more mysterious or romantic that a grimy real estate scam. Someone is waiting for property prices to reach the level where it will be profitable to clear the lot and erect another swathe of hideous apartments. I just hope someone takes care of the punks.
Not 500 meters from the end of Devolanivs'kyi Descent and I am in the one place in Odessa which almost anyone would recognise – the foot of the ‘Potemkin’ stairs.
As I start my ascent, a couple with a pushchair are coming down. Fortunately their grip on the handlebars is secure and there’ll be no repeat of cinematic history today.
The steps are steep. It’s been a long walk and I’m more tired than I thought. I turn and catch, out of the corner of my eye, a collection of prone figures sprawled across the steps. Have Eisenstein’s white-tunicked Tsarist guards been spreading mayhem again?
No, for all of its many and fearful challenges, Odessa is a place rather more relaxed than in the past, with the world and with itself.
