The Crimean Nexus by Constantine Pleshakov

Author:Constantine Pleshakov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

“Good Life”

The origins of the town of Yalta are modest and unclear. It may have started as a Greek fishing village or a tiny Genoese post, but it cannot be found on a map until the mid–nineteenth century, when it was incorporated. At that point, Yalta was a sad little affair: in the words of contemporaries, a “village of some forty white houses, forming a single street,” an “abode of poor fishermen,” surrounded by “extensive woods.” Its industry was a handful of boats harvesting oysters. Half a century later, it was an established resort with all the expected “European” amenities, including snow and ice delivered from the mountains by the Tatars.25

Romanticism revolutionized this inconspicuous coastal town. Before the age of Byron, when natural beauty was worth nothing, settlements were built where they were built because the location was either secure or profitable, preferably both. People started coming to Yalta because that was what the upper classes were doing in Europe—going to small coastal places to relax in style and meet other people who also relaxed in style. Yalta got incorporated because it had potential for the new resort industry.

A visitor in the 1840s wrote: “Nothing can be more charming than the sight of that white Ialta [sic], seated at the head of a bay like a beautiful sultana bathing her feet in the sea, and sheltering her fair forehead from the sun under rocks festooned with verdure. Elegant buildings, handsome hotels, and a comfortable, cheerful population, indicate that opulence and pleasure have taken the town under their patronage; its prosperity, indeed, depends entirely on the travellers who fill its hotels for several months of the year.” A Western writer called it “one of the most charming places in Europe for the invalid.”26

After the Crimean War, not just the tsar but his brothers, uncles, and cousins thought it patriotic to build estates on the Russian Riviera. In 1867, the passengers of the first American cruise ship ever to visit the Black Sea were given a tour of several royal residences and an audience with Emperor Alexander II and his wife. One of the passengers was Mark Twain, who registered the imperial couple’s strong desire to impress the American “innocents” with “handsome” gardens, “grand old groves,” and “Grecian architecture.”27

Another visitor observed in 1874: “For twelve miles after leaving Yalta, there is a succession of highly-cultivated estates, and the palaces attached to them glimmer white upon the mountain side. More delightful abodes it would be impossible for the imagination to picture. One would almost believe that neither sorrow nor sickness could enter their doors; and yet, if it were so, how hard it would be to leave them for the grave!” Among the last generation of the Romanovs, almost every member of the royal family had a residence in Crimea, and in 1919, when the survivors were leaving Yalta on the British battleship Marlborough, the separation was hard indeed.28

The scenery of the South Shore has been variously compared to Amalfi and the Maritime

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