Our next stop was at Odessa, about as far north as one can get on the Black Sea. This former and present free port is connected to Europe by railways and pipelines. It's a huge manufacturing site and historically Russia's 3rd largest city.
Look carefully to see raindrops and a passenger ship...
...reflected in this baritone.
Our arrival was greeted by one of the best brass bands I've heard in a long time. If you missed the reflection of our ship in the horn, check it out behind the band. Odessa is a famed center for the arts and our classically trained pianist Serjay was a graduate of their institutions.
The city was established as a Russian naval fortress in 1794 when this lady, Catherine the Great, had been ruling for more than 3 decades. The old town architecture is heavily influenced by French and Italian neo-classical.
Catherine was born German and educated by French Tutors. Her marriage to Peter III may have never been consummated in these pre-viagra days. She eventually overthrew him and went on to expand Russia by taking over the Crimea and much of Poland. Through the years, she took several lovers (often younger) including a politician named Grigory Potemkin.
Enough of Catherine: this is Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis -- memorialized in Odessa as the Duc de Richelieu. This neo-classic bronze is by the Ukraine-Russian sculptor Ivan Martos, best known for his statue of Monument to Minin and Pozharsky in Moscow's Kremlin.
The statue sits between two arc-facaded buildings at the top of the Odessa steps (often called the Potemkin steps). These were built around 1830. Around the turn of the 20th century, its partner on the other side of the square was the Gorky Science library, the first public library in Southern Ukraine in 1898. Italian architects built the early Odessa and this one was designed by Franz Karlowicz Boffo who had perhaps the most significant impact on how the neo-classical sections of this town look today.
A French noble and Army officer, he saved Marie Antoinette's life as the mob stormed Versailles. Fleeing the French storm, he joined the Russian Army. in 1803 as Odessa was rising, the Tsar appointed this 36-year-old governor. He did a masterful job, then fought the post-Elba Napoleon in the Tsar's service. He then rejoined France -- as Prime Minister, helping to negotiate an easier settlement for France based upon his friendship with the Tsar. Note how this statue, the first monument in the city, rises above construction materials that seem to be everywhere in Odessa.
The good Duc's statue is at the top of this famous space -- the Potemkin Steps, so renamed after Sergei Eisenstein's created one of the most famous scenes of filmdom in the propaganda classic "The Battleship Potemkin." Less than 90 feet high, it looks much higher because the steps are almost twice as wide at the bottom, giving the impression of parallel lines merging in the distance. The small statue of the Duc de Richelieu contributes to this deception. While these appear to be continuous steps, in fact, there is a landing every 20 steps -- but these can't be seen be seen from the bottom. Originally there were 200 steps but shortening the stairs reduced them by 8.
He's a still from the silent move "Battleship Potemkin" commemorating the failed 1905 revolution. 20 years later Sergei Eisenstein's directed the film; a half century later, the steps were renamed Potemkin steps. In real life, this powerful scene happened on the streets near here, not on the steps. You can view the episode on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec so it must be real.
The optical illusion is continued by looking down where it's hard to see steps other than the few at your feet. Mostly you see the 10 landings. Up here the steps are 41 feet wide and expand to 71 feet at the bottom. This serves as the gateway into the city from the port. Our ship is in the distance just to the right. The steps were built from 1837 to 1841 by an forger fleeing his native England. The stones were replaced a century later with rose and grey colored granite.
If you can't walk the 200 steps, take the funicular, this one a 2004 replacement of the one constructed in 1906, a year after the Cossacks didn't storm down the stairs and kill that kid in the baby carriage.
The Duc's statue on its semi-circular square bisects a long park promenade called Primorsky Boulevard. At each end is a palace, including one for Prince Vorontsov. (This is his winter palace, we saw where Winston Churchill had stayed at his summer palace in Yalta.)
The sea sideof Primorsky Boulevard descends down a landscaped hill to the port; the other is fronted by stately buildings.
Formerly owned by Intourist in Soviet times, the Londonskaya Hotel is an Italian Renaissance revival built in 1893. We're looking at the top 2 (or 3) stories. Supposedly the stone available when this was built was very soft, causing much facade repair.
These trees are supposedly Horse chestnut which bloom white in the spring and provide chesnuts for strollers in the fall. We were grateful that they shielded us from a slight rain which soon ceased.
While rebuilding Primorsky Boulevard, these Greek tombs (so we were told) were unearthed. These will be displayed under glass a little like a tiny Paris Louvre pyramid when construction finishes. The land under this promenade had been the Turkish fortress when the Black Sea was an Ottoman lake.
At the end of Primorsky Boulevard rises what Odessans view as the most realistic Pushkin bronze; it was sculpted by Janna Polonskaya and A. Vasilyev. Polonskaya. While in exile, Pushkin spent 13 long months working here in the service of the famous Prince Vorontsov. (He who built the palace here and in Yalta where Winnie stayed). Pushkin was a much better poet than employee and Vorontsov disliked him not without reason. Pushkin's affair with the Prince's wife probably didn't help things, especially after she bore Pushkin's daughter. Is there poetic justice in a rhythm baby?
At the end of Primorsky Boulevard is the former neo-classic stock market, now city hall. This is a Boffo building -- by Franz Karlowicz Boffo, a Sardinian who architected many Russian buildings including the Vorontsov's Palace at the other end of this promenade and the first pass at what would become the Potemkin Steps. Boffo's vision is all over this area and produces neo-classic jewels where one expects dingy Soviet-style rocks. Check out the niche on the right...
...it appears to be the god Mercury in the Boffo except for his winged hat. As the god of commerce, Mercury serves the stock market well. (It has since moved.)
Originally the two solid rectangles were separate wings and the columned portico was left open. In the 1780s, the room in back of the columns was created, changing the open space to a grand entrance. Every half hour, the clock at center top sings out a chorus of "Odessa, my Town" by Odessa my town" from the operetta "White Acacia" Isaac Dunayevsky. The clock is guarded by two marble statues representing day and night. It'd be boffo if they'd hide some of the guy wires.
A cute sign next to city hall in case you are looking for an afternoon hike. It helps if you can walk on water.
Immediately behind city hall is this square with the Archeology Museum. It's another colonnaded neo-classic building which holds 11 galleries.
By this time I was a little museumed out -- but enjoyed their copy of the Laocoön statue (the original, of course, is in that snakepit called the Vatican.) Laocoön told his fellow Trojans that the Greek horse was, in fact, a weapon of mass destruction. When the serpents devoured Laocoön and his sons, the Trojans interpreted it as a sign from the gods to let the horse behind their defensive walls. The rest, as they say, is myth.,
A few shots taken at the same time show an Odessa violinist unfazed by what the rain might do to his fiddle...
...as well as that classy guy Laocoön turning the other cheek to the graffiti plaguing the construction site across the street. What butthead is responsible for this desecration?
We'll spare you the details of the 160,000 exhibits but given what was on CNN news that morning in August 2008, I thought this looked like John Edwards. (I thought a Monica of humor would lighten things up here.)
Back outside, I couldn't get my mind of Laocoön...
...or my lens off this statue copy; Laocoön here doesn't give a fig about his outfit.
Beckoning us from the museum was this glimpse of everyone's favorite Odessan building: the Opera House.
That is the Odessa National Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet -- a wonderful Italian baroque building with pieces visible from the Black Sea. It's pretty than the Paris Opéra Garnier which opened about 12 years earlier and its nowhere near as over-the-top as the Garnier.
Here's the same view as before but after the Opera House finished its daily Yoga. (Just kidding, this is another software-stitched-fisheye-lens abomination. Check the busts in the niches on either side of the arched facade with its 4 Ionic columns.
Like its Paris cousin, the Odessa Opera hold statues of famous Russian literary figures, but not necessarily music artists as Pushkin is here, but not Beverly Sills whose mother was born here. Maybe with the next remodeling job.
Two carriage entrances provide access but the longer south side, parallel with the Black Sea, has this lovely garden.
On top of one of these entrances is the Muse Melpomene with panthers pulling her chariot. (We expected Euterpe, the Muse of Music, but apparently muses aren't that territorial. Melpomene was originally the muse of singing and her name means "song and dance" in Greek.))
The 19th century design was by Viennese architects Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer who designed over 20 theaters in their career. Air conditioning was provided by bringing ice to the basement and hoping the cold would drift up through the vents.
This was Russia: Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, and Anna Pavlova performed here amid perfect acoustics.
These cherubs look pretty happy since they've been given instruments and a fire escape. This was a shifty place even from the beginning: The 1884 foundation stone (and the rest of the foundation) came from Italy but within a few months, it sagged under building's weight -- over 6 inches on the east side in the first few years. Around 1929 a 42-ton firewall was added inside, causing the inside walls to crack. The root cause of the problem was that the place was built on a filled-in ravine. Its weight rested on shifting clay (not unlike most homes in Houston). To fix it required drilling 1800 holes down to the rockbed and filling them in to make concrete pilings.
Supposedly the Opera is horseshoe shaped to accommodate many exits inside to quickly evacuate the place in case of fire. (This was not idle threat as the previous opera house on this site burnt down. This building escaped most WWII damage even though Odessa was heavily bombed by the Germans). The Germans attempted to destroy the building as they left by placing explosives in 40 spots inside -- but the quickly advancing Soviet troops arrived before the Germans could have their way. The next few pictures highlights some of the sculptures that embellish this entrance and sum up the performing arts inside...
...starting with the about twice life-sized statue groups on either side of the central portico at ground level. The left one represents tragedy and this one on the right comedy. Working on a good neoclassic building, the sculptor was inspired by the 414BC comedy "the Birds" by the Greek Aristophanes. In that play, a king is turned into a bird (a king-fisher, of course) and the Greek chorus consists of birds that promise not to crap on the audience if presented with first prize in the competition. Both statues appear recently restored and free from droppings. Hmmm. Sounds like the inverse of our Odessa here in Texas where, during the Texas drought, the trees bribe the dogs.
This portico is capped by the statue of Melpomene and her panthers (including the happy guy at left. Usually Melpomene has flowing robes with a high belt and long sleeves to symbolize tragedy. Not so here. No wonder the panther smiles. The middle one gives the Michelle fist bump. They may be white, but they are hip. We could go out on a limb and say Melpomene is a bit hippy, but, of course, we wont.
An opera house also does music. So the middle of this side, recessed onto a porch that forms the roof over the entrance, are the the half-human, half bird Sirens -- daughters of Melpomene by the river god Achelous. Their voices were so musical that their songs lured sailors to their destruction on the rocks. Those great travelers Jason and Odysseus were each able to escape to tell their stories. Now these Sirens guard the Odessa coat-of-arms.
As the Soviet Union began to implode, money dried up and maintenance suffered, causing even more settling of the building as water began to accumulate below after every rain. (No, this is not the lake in the Phantom of the Opera -- that was in Paris.) The roof leaked badly as well. What the Germans were unable to do with dynamite, the Soviets were doing with time. Luckily this was reversed and today the Odessa Opera sparkles inside and out.
The opera neighborhood is quite tony including this 1904 building next door.
And across the street from the opera was this statue. Our guide pretty well ignored him even though (or because) he's pretty typically a Soviet Realist statue, Proletarian and lifelike, except for those white bucks.
He appears to be part of a monument now called the former "Regional scroll of honor." Built after WWII, this appears to honor local communist heroes. A few pockmarks in the walls is all that's left of old symbols such as the hammer and sickle as the Orange Revolution takes hold. This is all somewhat confusing. Apparently this is a vestige of the former SSR days.
Our next stop was to Cathedral Square -- a large and lovely green space in the heart of the old city -- and teeming with Odessians of all ages enjoying this August day.
You would expect Cathedral Square to have a cathedral -- and it did and it does, but for a while it didn't as Stalin destroyed the one on this spot that looked a lot like this one (except for the distortion caused by the fisheye lens.)
The original cathedral started with only a steeple that resembled this recent structure. Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, who took over as mayor/governor of Odessa, hired an Italian architect named Torricelli who thought towers should stand apart from their churches as is the case in the great Italian Gothic cathedrals of Sienna and Pisa.
The rest of the church was completed by 1827 -- but townspeople hated the idea of a separate belltower -- so the space between steeple and church was filled in. They still disliked the completed structure.
So extensive modifications were made: domes were enlarged, side chapels were added, and the spire changed. The completed church was one of the largest in Russia, bigger than an American football field and could hold 10,000 worshipers.
Vorontsov who had built so much of what we saw on the Northern Shore of the Black Sea made a last construction: his mausoleum inside the cathedral. And here he rested with his wife Elizabeth, faithful in death but not in life. Lady V gave to Pushkin inspiration for his greatest love poetry. To prince and husband, she probably gave Pushkin's daughter.
What we see today looks as good as new -- and it is. This was rebuilt after the Ukraine ended its Soviet days. In 1936, Stalin had the original cathedral dynamited in the middle of the night. The square had long before been renamed Soviet Army Square and the Vorontsov's remains relocated.
While the exterior has been rebuilt and sparkles in Cathedral Square, only the basement of the interior has been recreated.
During WWII the Axis-aligned Romanians who occupied Odessa sought to rebuild the cathedral, hoping to gain the affection of the the townspeople. Plans were drawn up and reconstruction materials delivered to the site -- but then the Soviets took the town back. Don't think of the Romanians as the preservers of pre-Soviet religions. Before they came, nearly a third of Odessa was Jewish. Here the Romanians created their own Holocaust with all the terror and none of the efficiency of the Nazis.
On the ceiling: Christ Pantokrator, a mainstay of Eastern Orthodox religious icons. When independence came, Odessa thought they would have to settle for what many pre-soviet landmarks had become -- an outline in the soil. This would decorate the town's main square as if it were a crime scene with a chalk outline showing where the murdered body fell.
Channeling Vorontso, mayor Rouslan Bodelan helped get the tower rebuilt in 2001. Bodelan has had many lives as school teacher/coach, Communist First Secretary, Mayor of Odessa, and now is eagerly sought by Interpol. God works in strange ways -- and Bodelan got his share. And he got away to Russia where he is protected.
In 2002, the town gathered at the square to watch the cornerstone laying for the new church even though funds were insufficient. Spontaneously a collection ensued and spectators threw in cash and jewelry.
Perhaps these were the Odessa bishops who were buried in the previous cathedral with Prince and Elizabeth Vorontsov.
An Archangel with the head of St. John the Baptist. Nice that they can keep the haloes even after the neck is detached.
If this is the basement, we can't wait to see what the rest of the place will look like.
Going back outside, just behind the cathedral is a fountain commemorating the resolution of Odessa's long-standing water supply problems in 1873 when a pipeline brought water from the Dniester River,
The square is a lively spot where ordinary Odessans go about their daily lives -- watched over by this statue of Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov.
Vorontsov fought nobly in many wars, including those against Napoleon. His servicecelebrated in relief on the 1862 base by F. Brugger.
But across the street from our noble prince is an old jewel severely in need of restoration.
Obviously once quite elegant, this building may be beyond saving.
These two appear to be much newer and so with the moment.
Some day their princes may come, but in the meantime, they have their square and their phones. Odessa lives...
...and thrives as grandmothers ignore real horses when push ponies are available...
...and the market in Cathedral Squares sells lace for Odessa's great past...
,,,and eggs of its great heroes including John Lenin (Vladimir has been declared so passé.)
During Soviet days, artists were employees of the state and expected to help keep the population in line by staying on message. Now these entrepreneurs line the fountain area with their work.
Finally it was time to sail to Bulgaria. We passed the terminal, newly created to block the Potemkin Stairs descent to the Black Sea. At center is Ernst Neizvestny's 1995 Golden Child statue. Somehow we liked the Stairs better.
We spent the afternoon by visiting a delightful Odessa family. The young women took us back to our shift and posed for this picture with us: Left bottom: Alina Slusarchuk, top her cousin, Anya; Center middle: Robert and Christiane Vandenplas, top Dick; Right: Tanya Nemchenko, Jane.
This replaced a picture I tried to take with my new camera which has a delayed shutter -- but for only 2 seconds as I learned in this picture. This photo does have Alina and Ayna's mothers (who are sisters).
Sailing out of the harbor, we go by what I thought to be the nicest Harbor traffic controller station.
And behind it rises the new Odessa -- quite a city!
