Ukraine II - Crimea and Odessa

Europe » Ukraine » Krim » Yalta
July 22nd 2009

Published: August 3rd 2009

Edit Blog Post

Ake Och Emma

Sergey Bubka

Statue of the pole-vaulter Sergey Bubka

Crimea and Odessa

After we left Kiev we headed for the somewhat unusual tourist destination Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. Donetsk is dominated by mining and heavy industry and there are very few tourist attractions in the city. Add to this that the city is located far into the east close to the border with Russia, far away from the main tourist attractions in Ukraine, you realise that very few tourists visit the city. Our guess is that there are at the most two things that come from Donetsk you have ever heard of:

1 The winners of the 2009 UEFA Cup in football, the team FC Shakhtar Donetsk

2 The pole-vaulter Sergey Bubka

Sergey Bubka has been honoured with a statue outside the Olympic Stadium in Donetsk. We actually went to Donetsk just so Ake could take a photo of that statue. Emma can't really understand why a statue of a pole-vaulter is such a big thing. Ake on the other hand think that anyone who has the world record in pole vault is a hero and visiting a statue raised in his honour is a perfectly normal thing to do. Remember, it's not just any world record

Yalta

Yalta as seen from the Black Sea

either. Bubka has jumped 6,14 meters outdoors and 6,15 meters indoors, 8 centimetres higher than anyone else. In pole vault 8 centimetres is a lot!

We did see some other things when we were in Donetsk and we also spent part of the day at a seaside resort named Mariupol. But none of that is interesting enough to write about on this blog entry. Maybe we'll get back to that if we decide to make a blog entry on "Dull and boring things we did when we were in Ukraine". But for now let's move on.

After Donetsk we went to the city Yalta on Crimea.

Yalta is a seaside resort next to the Black Sea that for decades has been a popular holiday destination. Today there are mostly Ukrainians, Russians and others from the former Soviet Union who visit Yalta. A few westerners also come here but they are easily outnumbered by the Russians.

Around Yalta there are several sanatoria all dating back to the times before Ukraine became independent. In the Soviet Union travel within the country was restricted. To be allowed to travel you had to provide a good reason. One such reason

Livadia Palace

Livadia Palace was a summer residence of the Russian Tsar

could be to visit a sanatorium by the Black Sea. The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991 and the restrictions on travel were then lifted. But still the tradition of visiting a sanatorium still lives on. Today people come to the sanatoria around Yalta to seek remedy for a wide variety of ailments. It really is not much different from visiting a spa.

In 1945 the leaders of the victorious countries in the World War II, Joseph Stalin representing Soviet Union, Winston Churchill representing United Kingdom and Franklin D. Roosevelt representing USA met in the Yalta Conference to decide on what would happen in Europe after the war. They were there to talk about things such as where to draw borders, how to deal with Germany and what to do with certain refugees and war prisoners. This conference was held in Livadia Palace, a former summer residence of the Russian Tsar, outside Yalta.

When you start analyzing these gentlemen's health you quickly realise they were a pretty pathetic bunch.

Winston Churchill was having a bad time coping with the heat and humidity of Crimea. It makes sense if you take into the equation that he lived in London at the

Livadia

It was here the Yalta Conference was held in 1945

time and that made him more used to rain than any other weather. 😊 In case you don't know I can inform you that it rains so much in London that if you live there more than half a year you start developing gills, your skin slowly starts to turn into fish scales and you begin to sprout webbed toes just like a frog. 😊

Franklin D. Roosevelt was in an even worse condition - he was dying. Roosevelt was at the time suffering from arteriosclerosis, an illness that less than two months after the conference took his life. So while he was deciding the fate of Europe he had one foot in the grave.

Joseph Stalin's physical health was probably pretty good at the time. But instead he was as mad as a hatter.

Livadia Palace is today open for visitors and inside the palace there is one exhibition on the Yalta Conference and one on Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

Around Yalta there are also several other castles. One of them is called Swallow's Nest and is very popular to visit mostly for its dramatic position. Swallow's nest sits on a cliff over the ocean and looks

Livadia

The front entrance to Livadia

like it could slip off from its foundations at any time and fall down and disappear into the water.

The day after we went to see Livadia Palace and Swallow's Nest we decided to go for a trip to the mountains and there visit a popular waterfall named Uchuansu. This excursion turned into a big fiasco. When we came to the top of Mt Ay-Petri there was such a thick fog that we couldn't see more than 20 meters. So the view from the mountain, a view that is supposed to be spectacular, we saw nothing of at all.

When we went down the mountain back to Yalta we stopped at Uchuansu. But that particular day the waterfall was empty of water so there was nothing to see there either.

The next day on Crimea we went to Sevastopol. When Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union Sevastopol was home to a large Soviet naval base and was therefore a closed city. Being a closed city means that only people working on the naval base and their families were allowed into the city. Foreigners could for obvious reasons not travel here. Now the big secrecy is all

Sanatorium

One of the several sanatoria around Yalta

history and we were free to roam around more or less as we liked.

Every city and town in Ukraine has monuments, often many of them. As a start at least one monument over World War II seems to be more or less compulsory for a town to have. Many cities actually have two or three World War II-monuments. Many cities also have a statue of Lenin and then there are often statues over Taras Shevshenko, a Ukrainian author. Add to this a few statues over people we have never heard of and maybe a monument over the 1932-33 famine and you realise that there are monuments everywhere. We often saw monuments that we didn't have a clue what they meant. Sevastopol had more and bigger monuments than other cities, probably due to the city's history as a naval base. We put up two photos of monuments on the blog so you can see what they look like.

On the way back from Sevastopol we stopped at a town named Foros. Foros church sits on a cliff high above the town. The views from the church are impressive and the positioning of the church makes for very nice photos.

Swallow's Nest

Swallow's nest sits on a cliff over the ocean and looks like it could at anytime slip off and fall down into the water.

When we arrived in Foros we were let off the bus down on the road almost a kilometre away from the church. We asked a man we met on the road about the best way to get to the church. He turned around and walked with us back on the road where we came from. After a while the church came into view and we thought that he would just point at the way we should take and leave us. But instead he walked with us until we came to a spot straight below the church. The church was then well visible to us but it was 500 meters above us and the mountain was steep. The man now walked straight into the forest and he signed to us to come along. We noticed some trails among the trees and decided that this probably was a short cut to the church. The trail was steep but fairly easy to walk and after a while we came to a road. It was obvious to us that this road once had been paved and drivable by car but also that it had been abandoned a long time ago. The surface was

The view from the mountain... uuuh?

No views because of the thick fog

full of potholes, parts of the road had been washed away and there were trees growing over the road. The man from the road kept walking. Why he walked with us from this spot we don't know. He could easily have just told us to follow the road. But he kept walking. All the time he was chatting away in Ukrainian about all sorts of things. Once in a while we could grasp what he was saying. For instance he mentioned that he was Hare Krishna himself and he even tried to sell us a book on the Hare Krishna religion. But most of the time when he talked we couldn't understand a word. It is possible that what he was saying didn't make much sense in the local language either because he was constantly drinking beer while we were walking.

Eventually we came to the church and the man who guided us left. We looked around the church, enjoyed the view over Foros and went back down to the road again.

On the last day we were on Crimea we first went to Bakhchysaray and visited Khan's Palace. In the 15th century a Khanate, an autonomous region ruled

The waterfall... uuuh?

Somebody forgot to turn on the water in this waterfall. Can you believe that they actually had the guts to charge money to have us see this?

by a Khan, was founded on the peninsula today known as Crimea. The Khan who ruled over Crimea had his palace in Bakhchysaray, where the Khan's palace still stands. Visiting the palace was very nice. They have furnished several of the rooms with furniture and carpets in the style that the Khan would have had it.

Not far from Khan's Palace there is another site of historical importance - Çufut Qale. On Crimea there were once close to 20 so called cave cities. These cities had houses above ground just like most cities have. But in these cave cities they also dug caves into the rock and had shelters, storage rooms and sometimes entire "houses" under ground as well. Of these cave cities the one that most easily can be visited is Çufut Qale. We walked around among the ruins and the caves for a while until we had seen it all. After that we went back to Bakhchysaray and then on to Simferopol, the transportation hub on Crimea, so we from there could catch the night train to Odessa west of Crimea.

We arrived in Odessa in the morning.

The first thing we saw in Odessa was

World War II monument

A World War II monument in Sevastopol

the train station. Most train stations in Ukraine are spectacular buildings. They are monuments over an era when train travel was an adventure and not only a means of transportation. The exterior of the stations are usually large and monumental in the style but the indoors are often even better. There are chandeliers in the ceiling, marble on the floors, the stairs are like those in a castle and sometimes there are also statues up on the walls.

Odessa is a nice city with beautiful houses and shaded parks. The city had very much a laid back feeling. Odessa reminded us of Paris, Vienna or Krakow.

The most famous place in Odessa is the Potemkin Stairs. The stairs by themselves are impressive in size and length but would hardly have been known outside of Odessa had it not been for a scene in the movie the Battleship Potemkin. In one of the key scenes of that movie Tsarist troops open fire and kill hundreds of people standing on the stairs. In that scene a baby in a baby buggy rolls down the stairs. The scene with the stairs and the baby buggy holds such power that versions of it can be

Eagle column

The Eagle column is a monument in Sevastopol harbour

seen in many other movies. If you are not familiar with the movie and want to see the famous scene you can try this link or, if that doesn't work, try this search link and see if you get any hits that look promising. If you are interested in seeing versions of this scene from other movies you try this link.

We tried desperately to find a baby buggy to replicate the baby buggy scene for our own photos but failed. No matter how hard we looked there just weren't any baby buggies around. After a while we were so desperate to get anywhere close to get our own version of the Potemkin scene that we even started to look for a pregnant woman we could throw down the stairs. The only baby buggy we ever saw near the Potemkin Stairs was locked up inside an art installation and we just couldn't get our hands on that one.

The Potemkin Stairs attract many tourists and local businessmen linger there to make money. They sell water and photographic film of course. There were people there offering to paint a picture of you. It is even possible to have a photo taken of you

...and the spelling is Ringo Starr

A night club in Sevastopol. Look carefully and you'll see that they got the spelling wrong.

while you have a bird or a monkey sitting on your shoulder. That was disgusting to see by the way. It was obvious that the animals were badly treated. But what we can't understand is why nobody have come up with the idea of hiring baby buggies so you can stage your own Potemkin photo. It is such an obvious business idea and they would make tons of money on that. Even we would happily have paid to rent a baby buggy for a few minutes.

In the morning of our second day we decided to jog a few kilometres before breakfast. Have a run up and down the Potemkin Stairs was a given thing to do. Now afterwards we realise that the photos we took of us running in the stairs were the wrong way around. In the photos we are running up the stairs but in the movie people are running down the stairs.

In one of the corners of City Park in Odessa there is a strange little statue of an upholstered chair. The statue looks simple and not very interesting. Is spite of that hundreds of people have their photos taken with this statue

Foros church

Foros church sits on a cliff high above the town.

every day and if you don't know the story behind it you don't understand what the whole thing is about.

It's all about a novel from 1920-ies called the 12 Chairs. The story is about a family who used to be rich but had all their wealth confiscated after the Russian revolution. It turns out that the family jewelleries were never found because they were hidden in an upholstered chair. The leading character is told about the jewelleries in the chair by his mother-in-law on her deathbed. So immediately after she dies he starts to hunt down the chair, or rather the chairs because the chair with the jewelleries was one in a set of 12 chairs. To make the story more complicated these chairs have been sold and resold and are hard to locate. Also it is a race against time because when the secret with the chair was revealed it was overheard by a priest who also starts looking for the chairs. While the race for the chairs go on there are also others who find out about the jewelleries in the chair and join in the search. In the search for the chairs they end up in Odessa

Khan's Palace

A room in Khan's Palace. In the centre there is a fountain. We want a room like this is our future house...

and there are several locations in Odessa mentioned in the novel. So this novel is the reason there is a statue of a chair in Odessa.

From what we understand this novel is well-known and quite popular in Russia and Ukraine. It ought to be considering the crowds around the statue having their pictures taken.

The last place in Odessa we would like to mention here is a shopping mall named Passazh. Our guidebook says that it is an "example of neo-renaissance architectual style". We don't have a doctor's degree in "architectural styles from the 19th century" so we can't tell the difference between neo-renaissance architectural style and other architectural styles. But we can tell that Passazh is a place that more resembles a French royal palace, like Versailles, than a shopping mall. The mall actually looks like something dreamt up by Elton John or Liberace.

Additional photos below

Photos: 36, Displayed: 33