Odessa: International City of Intrigue
Throughout its history Odessa has lured travellers, artists, poets, entrepreneurs, radical dissidents, and the Ukrainian Mafia.
Ukraine’s biggest commercial port was founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great as she expanded the maritime presence of the Russian Empire. Her lover, General Grygory Potemkin, helped lay the groundwork of her vision and – in 1789 – a great city emerged with beautiful neoclassical buildings and statues. Duc de Richelieu, a French dissident who served in the Russian Army and later became one of the city’s first governors, is also credited as one of the city’s most visionary designers. It’s a timeless sun, surf and relaxation destination packed with history and nestled right up to the Black Sea.
The Potemkin Stairs is a giant stairway in Odessa, sweeping down to the ocean immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film The Battleship Potemkin .The Many other films pay homage to the scene, including Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box, George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode II, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
This best known symbol of Odessa isalso considered the formal entrance into the city from the seafront. The top step measures 12.5m wide, and the lowest step 21.7m. The staircase is 27m high, and extends for 142m, but somehow gives the illusion of greater length because the stairs were designed to create an optical illusion. If you look down the stairs you see only the landings and the steps are invisible. But, if you look up, you see only steps, – the landings are invisible. A secondary illusion creates false perspective since the stairs are wider at the bottom than at the top. Looking up the stairs makes them seem longer than they are and looking down the stairs makes them seem not so long.
Pryvoz Market, a farmers’ market is the largest open-air farmers market in the former Soviet Union. Pryvoz Market is a cross between a recycling centre and a department store. Fully-fledged shops are mingled with street-side vendor stalls – haggling is expected and pickpockets commonplace. It’s crammed with wares – old and new – cheap bargains and luxuries. Most of all it’s an excellent way to people watch and experience the local culture.
The market has become a place where just about anything can be found: construction materials, clothes, consumer goods and second-hand parts are everywhere, cheap clothing, pirated movies and music CDs are commonplace. You can buy caviar, shoes, perfume and toiletries; rusty tools and old floppy disk drives – there is virtually no end to what you can find – some have joked that it’s even possible to purchase nuclear devices here.
One of Odessa’s most famous international characters was Sidney Reilly – born Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum. He has been described as the first ‘professional’ English spy. Loved by women and loathed by their husbands, Reilly lived a life of intrigue as his own master. A known war-profiteer and philanderer, he spied for at least four countries before his ambitions and lifestyle caught up with him.
Widely regarded as the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond character, Reilly was a cold and ruthless man who dined with kings and tsars and conducted or arranged some of the biggest business deals of the times. He was lured into Russia on false pretence and executed by the Bolshevik Russians in 1925 in a frozen forest outside Moscow for his role in an aborted plot to capture and kill Lenin.
Destination: Ukraine
