This week’s travel dream: ‘Vibrant, garrulous’ Odessa

I never imagined that I’d miss Odessa, said Anya von Bremzen in Travel + Leisure. Sure, that sunny port on the Black Sea has long been, after St. Petersburg, “the most mythologized place in Russian cultural history.” When my mother dragged me there from Moscow every summer to visit relatives, I was fascinated by the city’s “piratical, operatic” citizenry. But the cramped concrete apartment blocks? The less-than-glamorous beaches? I was happy to put those behind me when we immigrated to the U.S. in 1974. The pull of memory grew over time, though, until I could stay away no longer. To use a locals’ term, “Odessa-Mama” was calling: My mother and I yearned for a return and a second chance to “soak up the outsize lore” of a now “vibrant, garrulous” city of 1 million.

Odessa is today the third-largest city in Ukraine. At first glance, it can seem like any other “freshly dolled-up, semi-globalized, post-Soviet city,” with “the Soviet grime and provincial inferiority” washed away by pastel colors and “the requisite Max Mara boutiques.” But we didn’t have to look far to glimpse the old eclecticism. In crumbling courtyards, laundry flapped in the breeze and wives showered their husbands with loud, clever insults. Looking up, we marveled at a “fantastical trove” of architectural flourishes that reflect the city’s early history as a multicultural magnet to Greeks, Russians, Italians, Armenians, French, and “especially Jews.” Later, young beauties in stilettos and old men in Panama hats paraded by our table at a popular café as we downed a zesty soup and chased it with horseradish-and-honey vodka.

After a day spent touring the famous Privoz Market, we decided we’d better “diet on museums” before our departure. The Odessa Literary Museum proved inspiring, with its extensive displays on Gogol, Chekhov, Pushkin, and other great writers who were born or wrote in Odessa. At Migdal Shorashim, the city’s tiny Jewish museum, a century-old cleaver on display had my 79-year-old mother flashing back to the way her grandmother used to prepare gefilte fish. On the way out, she told me that she had finally fallen in love with the city she was born in. I had too.

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At Odessa’s landmark Hotel Bristol (bristolhotel-odessa.com), doubles start at $344.