The Pearl of the Black Sea — Potemkin Steps, catacombs, and Odessa humour
Odessa is Ukraine's most cosmopolitan city and its Black Sea jewel — a city of Neoclassical boulevards, the famous Potemkin Steps (the setting of Eisenstein's 1925 battleship scene), a 2,500km network of catacombs beneath the streets, and an Odessite sense of humour so distinctive it has its own linguistic category. The city was built from scratch in the 1790s by the Duc de Richelieu (a French aristocrat) and his successors as a duty-free free port — its racial and cultural mixture of Greeks, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and Moldovans produced one of the most vibrant literary and comedic cultu…
Odessa was founded by Catherine the Great in 1794 on the site of the Turkish fortress of Khadjibey, after Russian forces took the Black Sea coast from the Ottomans. The Duc de Richelieu (who later became Prime Minister of France) built the city as an open duty-free port that attracted merchants from across Europe and the Mediterranean — at its height in the 1880s it was the fourth largest city in the Russian Empire and exported more wheat than any other port in the world. The Jewish population (the Pale of Settlement ended here) produced writers including Isaac Babel, whose 'Odessa Stories' a…