Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (2 page)

City on a hill: A nineteenth-century engraving of the Odessa city center and port.
Author’s collection.

V
isitors don’t arrive in Odessa so much as stumble upon it. From the landward side, the city appears unexpectedly on the Pontic steppe, an ancient grassland now covered in Ukrainian farms and the detritus of Soviet industrial agriculture. The slight roll in the landscape, dipping into dry draws and ravines that cut down to the sea, hides the city until you are well inside it. “Here is the steppe, and a yard further the city,” noted a German traveler more than a century ago, “and one might almost fancy it exercised no influence whatever on the surrounding country.”
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From the sea, Odessa rises atop a range of low cliffs, with the city center coming into view only once a ship is around the prominent headlands that hide the bay. Tall apartment blocks dot the outer suburbs, but the older parts of the city seem oddly absent until a ship turns its bow toward the small lighthouse at the end of the mole. “Europe was once more before our eyes,” recalled a French visitor in the 1840s upon seeing the public buildings silhouetted against the sky.
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The same sentiment would echo again and again among both locals and strangers. The low roofs and wind-blown trees announced a dreamlike city rising out of nothing, a surprising blip on the blank horizon formed by steppe, sea, and sky.

Odessa is still best approached from the water, the way that the earliest recorded visitors to the Black Sea world—the ancient Greeks—would have experienced it. Here, the coast sneaks into view, appearing as a low ridge of dun-colored limestone bluffs that can turn dull orange or even pink in full daylight. It must have been a tremendous sight for seafarers from the Aegean, who had hugged the coast for days staring out at the monotony of wavy grassland and rippled sea, the one barely distinguishable from the other. It is still an astonishing view. The broad bay opens azure from the blue-black sea, flanked by craggy promontories rising a hundred feet or more above the beach.

On some parts of the Black Sea coastline, the land ends in imposing mountains, wooded and alpine, that tumble straight into the water. In others, it falls away suddenly as immense limestone cliffs, the dark waves crashing noisily against the gray-green walls. Yet around Odessa, in the sea’s northwest corner, the water doesn’t so much meet the land as complete it. The flat earth slips gently into the brackish shallows. The sea floor, choked in places with seaweed and algae, forms a continuation of the steppe, once a vast prairie of undulating feather grass and fescue, now divided into strips of plowed and planted farmland, the soil burled in blacks and browns.

Yet if anyone in antiquity found the cliff-top location of modern-day Odessa remarkable, they failed to mention it. The wide-open bay would surely have been known to the ancients, but none of the extant written records gives an unambiguous account of long-term settlement there. Other modern cities on or near the Black Sea—the grimy port of Constan
a in Romania, the storied Russian naval station at Sevastopol, and the jewel of the Black Sea world, Istanbul—all have ancient pedigrees. Beneath modern concrete and asphalt lie Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ruins. But Odessa has none of this. The site had little to offer beyond a bay open to harsh northeasterly winds. When you see the city from a cruise ship or ferry, you are looking at a recent creation, a place that for two hundred years has both reveled in and regretted the fact that it has no history.
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Explorers found more attractive destinations in other parts of the Black Sea. Arriving in shallow-draft rowed vessels, perhaps in the early first millennium BCE, sailors from the Mediterranean gradually colonized much of the Black Sea coastline, beginning with the south and eventually extending their reach to the north. The draw was substantial. The southern and eastern coasts yielded precious metals. The legend of Jason and the Argonauts’ search for a mysterious golden fleece may have recalled a time when Greek traders scoured what are today the coasts of Turkey and Georgia in search of gold that natives sluiced from the fast-running rivers of the Pontic Alps and Caucasus. The north provided contact with the flat interior, which in turn offered access to the grains that were cultivated by the non-Greek peoples already living there when Mediterranean sailors first ventured north from their warmer, saltier sea.

Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BCE, either visited the Black Sea himself or, more likely, heard some of the tall tales about the region that flowed southward all the way to his hometown, Halicarnassus, along the western coast of modern-day Turkey. Already by his day, the Black Sea was a place of mixed cultures and allegiances. The area north of the sea was the realm of the Scythians, a word that Greek writers used as a catchall for different non-Greek tribes of herders, farmers, and nomads, united to a degree by commonalities of custom and belief. In his
Histories
, Herodotus describes the peoples living at the mouths of the Dnieper, Bug, and Danube rivers, near the future Odessa. The Callipidae and the Alizones, he says, were a “Greco-Scythian tribe,” the offshoots of marriages between Greek colonists and inlanders, who resembled the Scythians in their dress and manners but grew onions, leeks, lentils, and millet, some for their own consumption and some for export.

For Herodotus, the Dnieper River—which he knew as the Borysthenes—represented a kind of boundary. To the east lived rogue bands of Scythians who had little regard for outsiders. There were the Androphagi—literally, “man-eaters”—who were said to live on the edge of a vast desert. Other peoples marched across treeless prairies or engaged in almost constant warfare and slave-taking. To the west, Scythians and Greeks intermingled freely, enriching themselves through commerce with the Mediterranean. The flatlands watered by the Borysthenes and its tributaries were a veritable paradise, a river system that was “the most valuable and productive not only…in this part of the world, but anywhere else, with the sole exception of the Nile.”
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Lush pastures unrolled themselves along the riverbanks. Great schools of fish churned in the shoals. Tidal flats nearer the coast yielded salt that was used to pickle fish for transport to the south, a delicacy lauded by Greek and Roman gourmands—“even though it causes severe flatulence,” warned Pliny the Elder in the first century CE.
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The physical remnants of this civilization—part native, part Greek and Roman—can still be found along the northwest coast of the Black Sea, at archaeological sites such as Olbia, Chersonesus on the Crimean Peninsula, or Histria in Romania. Stone houses lined narrow streets, some even paved and fitted with complex drainage systems. Rocky breakwaters reached out into the sea, welcoming ships from the Mediterranean and small sailboats coming from other cities, commercial emporia, and distant outposts. These cities were destroyed, resurrected, and refashioned over the centuries following the first Greek forays, yet the archaeological digs still give modern visitors a sense of what it was like to live there in antiquity—a place that Mediterranean Greeks considered to be the true edge of the world.

Cities such as Olbia, Chersonesus, and Histria lasted for perhaps half a millennium. They grew and expanded in some periods and fell prey to raiders in others. Relations between colonists and locals not only gave rise to cordial trading relations but also produced bloody warfare. While many Greeks tended to see the peoples of the region as uncouth, unlearned, and prone to violence, some observers found the foreign colonists themselves to be the source of social problems. “Our mode of life has spread its change for the worse to almost all peoples,” commented the Roman writer Strabo, “introducing amongst them luxury and sensual pleasures, and, to satisfy these vices, base artifices that lead to innumerable acts of greed.”
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Strabo was himself a product of the Black Sea world, born just inland from the southern coast in the old Greek colony of Amaseia, today the city of Amasya, Turkey. Reared in a Greek-speaking environment, in the green valleys that lead down toward shimmering stone beaches, he was perhaps predisposed to see his own part of the world with more sympathy and nuance than were many outsiders. The poet Ovid, for example, was exiled to the sea’s western coast in 8 CE as punishment for offending the emperor Augustus. Accustomed to the comforts of his native Abruzzi or his villa on the Capitoline hill in Rome, he found the site of his enforced
relegatio
singularly unappealing. The Black Sea’s name in Greek and Latin—Pontus Euxinus—meant literally “the sea that welcomes strangers.” But Ovid’s view was clearly different. “They call it hospitable,” he wrote curtly in a letter from the Pontic coast. “They lie.”
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Barbarians walked freely about the cities, their long beards covered in icicles during the harsh winters. Raiders from the interior descended with fury on the communities of Greek-speaking seamen, frontiersmen, and political exiles who inhabited the settlements. In the continual tug-of-war between hinterland and seacoast, the former came to dominate by the late Roman period. A region that Greek authors had once compared to Egypt—which they believed to be the most civilized society outside the Greek world—was again beyond the ken of most foreigners.

A millennium later, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Italian city-states revived the ancient connections between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The great military and commercial powerhouses of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, cities such as Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, extended their reach beyond their own waters and established global empires of profit that leached into the Black Sea world and beyond. The sea provided an essential water link to the heartland of Central Asia and, farther still, the overland passage to China.

Italian towns and cities, most built on top of older Greek foundations, flourished as nodal points in a vast commercial network. Just as Greek sailing ships had returned laden with grain and preserved fish, Italian trading companies crisscrossed the sea in their fat-hulled vessels carrying silk, furs, and slaves from among the Tatars, Circassians, Georgians, and other peoples—a substantial source of profit to European powers seeking servants as well as oarsmen on naval and commercial galleys. They overshadowed the dominant political power at the time—the Byzantine Empire, centered in Constantinople—and effectively bankrolled the Greek-speaking Byzantines as traders and creditors, a fact not lost on contemporary writers who decried their “arrogance” as “masters of the Black Sea.”
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At this stage, the wider Black Sea region was a part of the world so intimately familiar to Genoese sailors, Venetian tax collectors, and Florentine financiers that adventurers such as Marco Polo could write about it with studied nonchalance. “We have not spoken to you of the Black Sea or the provinces that lie around it,” he wrote in the late thirteenth century, “for there are so many who explore these waters and sail upon them every day…that everybody knows what is to be found there. Therefore I say nothing on this topic.”
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Polo was writing primarily about the southern and eastern coasts, which gave access to the riches of Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and China. If the northwestern corner of the sea had been one of the breadbaskets of antiquity, providing barley and millet to Athens and other Greek city-states at the height of their power, it was the eastern parts of the sea that benefited from the growth of global commerce during the Renaissance. Generations of businessmen made and lost fortunes in the Italian outposts at Caffa in Crimea and Tana on the Don River. A detailed Florentine business guide from the early fourteenth century, Pegolotti’s
La pratica della mercatura
—a combination of
Rough Guide
practicality and chamber-of-commerce boosterism—listed wax, iron, tin, copper, pepper, spices, cotton, cheese, oil, apples, silk, saffron, gold, pearls, caviar, and cattle hides as some of the many commodities shipped through the Black Sea ports.
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