Odessa

I first travelled to Ukraine in 2008. The Orange Revolution had just rebooted national identity towards Europe & it felt like a new path had been forged. Eight years on, Maidan power had forced another Government overthrow, brutal & monochrome this time with snipers on the roof & thousands dead. I returned to a trimmer country, its Eastern border still blurred by violence & the exotic southern peninsula of Crimea cut & pasted onto Russia.


Odessa port

It took me two days & three flights to get to Odessa; the city of Battleship Potemkin, the wild-haired Eisenstein & a pram bouncing down the stairs. Odessa is a Slavic Trieste with the thrust & polyglot babble of a port city. Even the gypsies were multilingual, pleading “money mister,” flashing silver teeth & flirty smiles. Creamy 19^th century architecture stood among right-angled Soviet blocs & onion domes but the staircase was a crushing disappointment, under renovation; Cossack troops replaced by hard hats, guns with drills.


Potemkin Steps

Odessa was a city of small parks & bronze statues, surrounded by swaying wheat fields & flanked by the Black Sea. A strong Jewish heritage had been reduced to plaques & grim memorials. I stamped the streets & peered into courtyards, plaster peeling under taut lines of drying clothes, looking for vegetarian cafes & Turkish coffee. I stayed at the Londonskaya Hotel, a Victorian-era classic still living on the radiance of glamour from a century ago.

From Odessa I travelled by minibus, fuzzily hungover from Odessa Champanska, through fields of vines to Chisinau in Moldova. I sat at the back, a seat with a view, plugged into music & the stories of Isaac Babel. It was a beautiful journey across rural Bessarabia, sharply lit by winter sunshine & the trace of village wood smoke in the air.