Odessa

Odessa

Russian: Odessa

The origin of the city’s name can be traced back to the Greek settlement of Odessos, which is thought to have been situated near the Bulgarian city of Varna. Another theory attributes the city’s name to the problems with the drinking water supply during its early days. According to this account, the city’s founder, Tsarina Catherine the Great (1729–1796), ordered that the French expression ‘assez d’eau’ (enough water) be read backwards and that the city be named accordingly.^[1] The British writer Shirley Brooks, however, writes: “Her Majesty deigned to name the place ‘Au dessus’, but it has since taken on a more Italian-sounding name.”^[2]

The town is situated in the south of Ukraine at^46° 29' north latitude,^30° 44' east longitude, 40 m above sea level, approximately 50 km from the Moldovan border.

Odessa lies on the bay of the same name (Odesskyj zaliv) in the Black Sea. Large parts of the city are situated on a high plateau, which lies some 40 metres above sea level. The city is surrounded by a dry steppe landscape. The main source of water is the Dniester (an aqueduct approximately 40 km long).

Ukraine. Odessa is the capital of the Odessa Oblast (Odess’ka oblast’) and the seat of the regional administration. The city is currently divided into four districts (Primorskyj, Kiïvs’kyj, Malinovs’kyj and Surovs’kyj).

With the accession of Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825) in 1801, Odessa’s ‘Golden Age’ began. The city owes its rise in particular to the French Duke Armand Emmanuel des Plessis, Duke of Richelieu (1766–1822), who guided Odessa’s fortunes from 1803 to 1814. De Richelieu secured numerous concessions and financial support for the city; the importance of the port and trade (particularly the grain trade) grew, and Odessa was able to prevail over its rivals Chersson/Cherson, Očakiv and Mykolajiu/Mykolaïv. The city effectively became the administrative centre of New Russia. The city’s leader permitted all denominations to erect religious buildings, thereby contributing significantly to the climate of tolerance in Odessa. Odessa was regarded as particularly European and thus became increasingly popular amongst the local upper classes of the Tsarist Empire as the ‘Russian Italy’. During the tenure of Mikhail Vorontsov (1782–1856) from 1823 to 1846, Odessa – which by 1850 was the wealthiest city in the Russian Empire – underwent impressive development, particularly in economic terms.

The city’s ‘Silver Age’ began around 1860 with the major reforms of Alexander II (1818–1881). The new liberal way of life and mindset in Russia seemed to render Odessa superfluous. On the other hand, following the emancipation of the serfs, more and more people flocked to the mythical ‘Golden City’, yet there was little demand for their labour during the economic crisis that followed the Crimean War (1853–1856). Thus, Odessa found itself confronted with widespread poverty for the first time.

Odessa is, above all, a trading city. Its rise was largely due to the grain trade, which remained firmly in Greek hands until around 1860. With increasing poverty in the second half of the 19th century, the cliché of the ‘accidental city’ began to circulate, coined by envious voices in the region and the Russian capital. Odessa, it was claimed, had been artificially conjured out of thin air and owed its rise solely to favourable circumstances, such as its status as a free port (until 1859). The city was said to lack substance; it lived at the expense of others and should finally become ‘truly Russian’. The connection to the railway network (1865) was slow to materialise and ultimately failed to bring about the hoped-for economic revival.

Odess’s seaport is the largest in Ukraine and remains a major employer to this day. In recent years, many unprofitable industrial enterprises have had to close, which, on the other hand, has had a positive impact on the environment – particularly water quality – and thus on Odessa’s status as one of Ukraine’s most important tourist centres and one of its leading health resorts.

Armenians, Bulgarians, Germans, English, French, Greeks, Dutch, Italians, Moldovans, Spaniards and Turks, in particular, heeded the Tsar’s call to settle in the new city in the south of Russia. Above all, however, Odessa held great appeal for Jews, who enjoyed freedom of settlement and equal rights here. Even runaway serfs were able to settle here legally. Particularly in the city’s early years, it was strongly shaped by foreigners, whose residential areas could once be identified by the (now partly renamed) street names. For instance, ulica Remeslennaja (Craftsmen’s Street) owed its name to the German craftsmen who lived there. Lustdorfskaya doroga (Lustdorf Road), one of the city’s longest streets, leads to the former German settlement of the same name. The legendary Moldavian quarter is still known today as Moldavanka.

The multi-ethnic character of ‘Babylon on the Black Sea’ led to a linguistic diversity that was unique in Russia at the time. In the mid-18th century, one could hear the locals speaking “Russian, English, Italian, German, Yiddish, Tatar, Polish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Armenian, Moldavian, Hungarian, Dalmatian, French, Swedish, Spanish and several other languages.”^[10] Under the influence of this linguistic diversity, “an enchanting variant of theRussian language”thus emerged in the city, one that “has never failed to stir the imagination.” Opinions range from “passionate declarations of love [...] to condemnations of the detestable ‘Odessisms’, which are destructive to the Russian language ”.^[11] In 1930, the writer Vladimir Žabotinski (Jabotinsky; 1880–1940) responded to the accusation that the city’s lingua franca was a ‘corrupted’ form of Russian by stating that, firstly, it was not corrupted and, secondly, it was not Russian at all. This language, he argued, demonstrated that the people of Odessa simply think differently from their friendly neighbours, the Russians and Ukrainians. Nowadays, however, Odessa Russian is “an endangered linguistic variety.”^[12]

A Jewish gravestone bearing the date 1770 suggests that Jews were already settled in the region before the town was actually founded. In 1795, there were 250 Jewish residents in the town.^[13] In the years that followed, Jews emigrated to the Black Sea region, primarily from Volhynia, Podolia and Lithuania; later, Jews from Germany and Galicia arrived in Odessa, particularly from the Galician town of Brody, after which one of the largest synagogues was named in 1841. At that time, there were already around 12,000 Jews living in the city.^[14] Owing to the difficulties of settling in the major cities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow/Moskva, Odessa was a magnet for secular and educated Jews from across the Tsarist Empire. Thanks to the liberal atmosphere in the city, they enjoyed extensive rights and played an active role in the city’s affairs. Jews were primarily active in the medical sector, in trade and banking, or as lawyers. However, the oft-cited cliché of the city’s wealthy Jewish upper class does not correspond to the facts. Most Jews belonged to the urban middle class, and a third lived in poverty. By the end of the 19th century, Odessa was to become one of the centres of the Zionist movement (in particular the ‘Palestine Committee’ led by Leon Pinsker [1821–1891]), which attracted an ever-growing following in the face of increasing anti-Jewish sentiment, culminating in pogroms. By 1900, more than one in three inhabitants of Odessa was Jewish. This proportion had almost doubled since 1854.^[15]

As early as 1826, the first Russian-Jewish school was founded, which, under its headmaster Basilius Stern (1798–1853), enjoyed a high reputation not only in New Russia. A girls’ school followed in 1835, and by the mid-19th century there were around 70 Jewish educational institutions in Odessa. Today, there are once again six schools offering regular lessons. Jewish pupils also attended state schools and grammar schools, not least the prestigious Richelieu Lyceum, where in 1902 almost 10 per cent of the pupils were of Jewish origin.
(see also ‘Science’ below)

The first synagogue was built immediately after the town was founded at the end of the 18th century. Since 1859, the Main Synagogue has stood on the site; after being repurposed as a natural history museum and a gymnasium during the Soviet era, it has been used once again as a place of worship and a community centre since 1997. At the beginning of the 20th century, Odessa had around 70 synagogues and smaller places of worship. By the early 1990s, only one synagogue remained in use.

The city is of central importance to Jewish culture and scholarship. (See also ‘Literature, Music, Film’ below.)

In the wake of Alexander II’s liberal reforms in the 1860s, the city’s Jewish community increasingly shifted from Yiddish and German to Russian, thereby contributing significantly to strengthening the Russian character of the city – which was characterised by its foreign population – and, not least, of the community itself. Charitable institutions founded by Jews, which were open to all citizens, played a major role in social cohesion.

However, coexistence between Jews and the rest of the population was not without tension in Odessa either: the city was the scene of the first pogrom in Russia (1821), which was followed by seven more in Odessa, the largest of which took place in October 1905, claiming 299 victims over four days. During the Second World War, the ‘self-defence units’ – recruited from members of the German minority – actively participated in the extermination of their Jewish fellow citizens. On 19 October 1941, the German occupiers and their Romanian allies burned to death some 25,000 Odessans of Jewish nationality, to whom a memorial now stands as a tribute. In the wake of a reprisal for an attack on the occupiers (67 dead), thousands of Jews were murdered; thousands more died in the Odessa ghetto, and a far greater number were deported to the extermination camps.^[16] The Jewish community of Odessa never recovered from these atrocities; the Jewish proportion of the total population is now negligible, partly due to the emigration of many of the city’s remaining Jews.

The city’s most important cultural institution and architectural landmark is the opera house, designed by Ferdinand Fellner (1847–1916) and opened in 1887. Also worth mentioning are the Russian and Ukrainian theatres, the Philharmonic Hall housed in the New Stock Exchange (built at the end of the 19th century), the Musical Comedy Theatre, and the numerous museums, in particular the Literary Museum, the Museum of Local History and the Archaeological Museum, which was founded as early as 1825. German residents ran several cultural centres; one of these gave rise to what is now the Academy of Music, situated directly opposite St Paul’s Church. Today, the centre of German culture and language is the Bavarian House. Café Liebmann, named after its first owner, the Saxon confectioner Bernhard Liebmann, was a popular meeting place for artists and intellectuals in Odessa. The Jewish cultural centre ‘Beit Grand’ and the International Jewish Community Centre ‘Migdal’ are the main focal points of Jewish life in the city.

Odessa is one of Ukraine’s most important centres of learning. The New Russian University emerged from the Richelieu Lyceum in 1865. Some of the most renowned professors at the New Russian University – the predecessor of the city’s most important university today, Menchikov State University – were of German descent, such as the well-known German-Baltic historian Ernst von Stern (1859–1924). There is also a large polytechnic university, as well as smaller institutions for training lawyers, doctors, economists, administrative specialists and marine scientists. A Jewish university was established in 2007.

The regular layout of the streets in the centre of the city is reminiscent of the then capital, Saint Petersburg. The buildings in old Odessa were initially constructed in the Empire style, and later predominantly in the Neoclassical style. The German Karl Desmet founded the Botanical Garden (1822). The city owes its European character not least to German architects such as Hermann Scheurembrandt, Waldemar Kundert and Paul Ulrich Klein. The damage caused by Soviet urban planning in Odessa was very limited, particularly in the city centre, which had been largely spared from war damage. The buildings erected in the socialist style after 1917, such as residential estates (in particular the ‘Khrushchevys’, named after Party leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev [Nikita Khrushchev, 1894–1971] ), or sanatoriums, blended into the cityscape and today often exude a nostalgic charm. Since 1991, the city’s architectural aesthetic has been changing due to numerous new buildings, such as the luxury shopping centre Sady pobedy ( Gardens of Victory) on 10 April Square, which are being erected without regard for the established cityscape.

The city is of far-reaching significance, particularly for Russian and Jewish literature. It is often virtually impossible – and arguably not even meaningful – to distinguish between the two, insofar as Jewish authors wrote in Russian. The world-famous literary duo of Ilya Arnoldovich Il’f (Ilya Ilf, 1897–1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (a pseudonym for Yevgeny Petrovich Kataev – Yevgeny Petrov, 1903–1942) ( works include *The Twelve Chairs* and *The Golden Calf*). Il’f (whose real name was Iechiel Leib Fainsilberg) was Jewish and Petrov was Russian, and it has not yet been possible to determine which parts of their joint works were written by which author.

The origins, development and culture of Odessa are closely linked to Russia. After a quarter of a century as part of Ukraine, Odessa remains a Russian-speaking city, even though Ukrainian has gained some ground in recent years and ethnic (Russian-speaking) Ukrainians now form the majority. Nevertheless, Odessa is not a Russian city, and a stronger sense of belonging to Ukraine has developed here than in the east of the country or in Crimea. Consequently, the balance of power between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces in Odessa is more evenly distributed than in western oreastern Ukraine or the capital, Kyiv, which creates a dangerous potential for conflict. In the wake of the political crisis in Ukraine in 2013–2014, the city initially remained calm for a long time. It seemed as though the urban identity of the ‘Cheerful Capital on the Black Sea’ overshadowed the Russian-Ukrainian divide. On 2 May 2014, however, according to official reports, around 50 people lost their lives in clashes between the two sides, most of them in the fire at the Trade Union House on Schnepfenfeld, not far from the main railway station. The exact circumstances of this disaster, as well as the causes of death of many of the victims, have not yet been clarified.^[18] Currently, the Russian side is exploiting the city’s former affiliation with New Russia to call into question Odessa’s continued existence within Ukraine.

• Dorotei Atlas: *Staraja Odessa: ee druz’ja i nedrugi* [Old Odessa: Its Friends and Enemies]. Odessa 1911 [Reprinted Odessa 1992].
• Boris A. Edel’man: Prošloe i nastojaščee Odessy [The Past and Present of Odessa]. Odessa 2012.
• Viktor Rafailovich Fajtel’berg-Blank, Tat’jana Nikolaevna Kolesničenko: Serebrjanyj vek južnoj palmiry [The Silver Age of the Palmyra of the South]. 2 vols. Odessa 2007.
• Viktor Rafailovich Fajtel’berg-Blank, Tat’jana Nikolaevna Kolesničenko: Odessa in the Era of the Leninist and Stalinist Dictatorships. Odessa 2008.
• Viktor Rafailovich Fajtel’berg-Blank, Boris Nikolaevich Razumnyj: Odessa during the Great Patriotic War [Odessa during the Great Patriotic War (= the Second World War)]. Odessa 2009.
• Oleg Gubar’: Essays on the Early History of the Jews of Odessa. Odessa 2013.
• Guido Hausmann: The University and Urban Society in Odessa, 1865–1917: Social and National Self-Organisation on the Periphery of the Tsarist Empire. Stuttgart 1995 (Sources and Studies on the History of Eastern Europe 49).
• Patricia Herlihy: *Odessa. A History, 1794–1914*. Cambridge, Massachusetts 1986.
• Vera Kalmykova, Vadim [Gerševič] Perel’muter: Odessa – Moscow – Odessa. A south-westerly wind in Russian literature. Moscow 2014.
• Ė[l’vira] G[ermanovna] Plesskaja-Zebol’d: The Germans of Odessa: 1803–1920. Odessa 1999.
• Aleksandr Rapoport (ed.). Odessa in Russian Poetry. Moscow 2012.
• Aleksandr de-Ribas: Staraja Odessa – istoričeskie očerki i vospominanija [Old Odessa – Historical Sketches and Memoirs]. Odessa 1990 [reprint of the first edition of 1913].
• Ė[l’vira] Plesskaja-Zebol’d: Kak ostat’sja verujuščim v period peremen [On Remaining a Believer in Times of Change]. In: Klaus-Jürgen Röpke (ed.): St Paul’s Church, Odessa. Church, Congregation, Faith, Partners. Lindenberg 2010, pp. 72–95.

• www.beit-grand.odessa.ua/ (Beit Grand Jewish Cultural Centre – information on Jewish life in Odessa, theatre, nursery, youth club, language courses. Information in Russian)
• www.migdal.ru/ (‘Migdal’ Jewish Community Centre – theatre, museum, activities for children and young people, guided tours of Jewish Odessa. Information in Russian and English)
• opera.odessa.ua/ (Odessa State Opera. Information in Ukrainian, Russian and English)
• www.bayernhaus.com.ua/ (Bavarian House Odessa – language courses and language services, cultural events. Information in Russian and German)
• diakonia.od.ua/ (Diaconal Centre of St Paul’s Church in Odessa. Information in Russian. German version in preparation.)

[1] Eduard Edin: Assedo. Literaturnyj Pejzaž [Literary Landscape]. In: Slovo/Word 47 (2005). URL: magazines.gorky.media/slovo/2005/47/assedo.html (accessed 16 August 2021).

[2] Shirley Brooks et al.: Southern Russia and the Turkish Danube Countries in Travel Accounts. Leipzig 1854, p. 97.

[3] Jan Paul Hinrichs: De mythe van Odessa [The Myth of Odessa]. Amsterdam 2011.

[4] Tanya Richardson: *Kaleidoscopic Odessa. History and place in contemporary Ukraine*. Toronto et al. 2012, p. 17.

[5] Klaus-Jürgen Röpke: Ne bojsja, maloe stado [Fear Not, Little Flock]. In: Ibid. (ed.): Cerkov Sv. Pavla Odessa. Cerkov, Obščina, Vera, Partnery [St Paul’s Church in Odessa. Church, Congregation, Faith, Partners]. Lindenberg 2010, pp. 50–71, here pp. 50f.

[6] Herlihy: Odessa, p. 242.

[7] Herlihy: Odessa, p. 234.

[8] Herlihy: Odessa, p. 242.

[9] Evgenij Mikolajovič Stepanov: Rosijs’ke Movlennja Odesi [The Russian Language of Odessa]. Odessa 2004, p. 61.

[10] Johann Georg Kohl: Travels in Southern Russia. Dresden and Leipzig 1841, p. 56.

[11] Lev Zybatov: The Language of Odessa and of ‘Little Odessa’ (New York, Brighton Beach). In: Ibid. (ed.): Language Change in Slavic. The Slavic Languages on the Threshold of the 21st Century. An International Handbook, Part 1. Frankfurt am Main 2000 (Linguistics International 4), pp. 941–958, here p. 941.

[12] Zybatov: The Language of Odessa (note 10), p. 953.

[13] Herlihy: Odessa, p. 251.

[14] Kohl: Travels (note 9), p. 51.

[15] Herlihy: Odessa, p. 251.

[16] Foundation ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’. Memorials portal on places of remembrance in Europe: Odessa. URL: www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/820/J%C3%BCdisches-Museum-Odessa-%C2%BBMigdal-Schoraschim%C2%AB (accessed 16 August 2021).

[17] Vladimir Žabotinski: Pjatero [The Five]. Kharkiv 2011. German edition: Vladimir Jabotinsky: The Five. Novel. Translated from the Russian by Ganna-Maria Braungardt and Jekatherina Lebedewa. Berlin 2012 (Die andere Bibliothek 336).

[18] Dumskaya.net: Pričiny smerti bol’še poloviny pogibšich v Dome profsojusov do sich por neizvestny [The cause of death of more than half of the victims in the Trade Union House remains unclear], 22 May 2014. URL: dumskaya.net/news/prichiny-smerti-bolshe-poloviny-pogibshih-v-dome-035963/ (accessed: 7 June 2014).

Kai Witzlack-Makarevich: Odessa/Odesa. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2014. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32498 (accessed 10 October 2022).