Life in Odesa: A Beginner’s Guide

By Matthew Parish

Friday 23 October 2026

There are cities one visits, cities one inhabits and cities that appear to have entered into a private conspiracy against ordinary standards of human behaviour. Odesa belongs emphatically to the third category. She sits upon the Black Sea with the confidence of a woman who knows that everybody is looking at her, while pretending that she has not noticed. She has magnificent nineteenth-century buildings, crumbling nineteenth-century buildings, nineteenth-century buildings undergoing mysterious reconstruction and nineteenth-century buildings containing cocktail bars whose proprietors apparently believe that cocktails were invented in Miami in approximately 2017. She also has the sea, which forgives almost everything.

The first rule for the beginner is therefore not to attempt to understand Odesa. Understanding Odesa is an advanced activity, generally undertaken after several years, three failed romances, a dispute with a landlord and an unexplained friendship with somebody called Sasha who claims to import Italian bathroom fittings but is never observed importing anything. The beginner should concentrate upon observation. Odesa rewards the spectator much more generously than the analyst.

Begin with geography. The centre is built on a bluff above the port, an arrangement that gives the city both grandeur and inconvenience. One walks downhill towards the sea and later discovers that returning home involves walking uphill. This elementary fact comes as a surprise every time. The famous Potemkin Stairs offer one solution, although they are principally useful for reminding visitors that Sergei Eisenstein understood publicity extremely well. The surrounding streets offer others. None prevents the fundamental truth that Odesa is constructed vertically while its inhabitants prefer to live horizontally, preferably upon a terrace with coffee.

Then there is Deribasivska Street. Every city possesses a street that it presents to foreigners as an explanation of itself, although no city can actually be explained by one street. Deribasivska nevertheless makes a spirited attempt. There are cafés, restaurants, trees, tourists, local eccentrics and people conducting business meetings whose precise commercial purpose remains tantalisingly obscure. Sit down, order something and watch. Within half an hour somebody will arrive wearing sunglasses inappropriate to the weather. Within an hour an expensive motor car will perform an unnecessary manoeuvre. Before lunch you may have acquired an invitation to a business venture.

Do not accept the business venture before lunch.

Odesa’s greatest institution is the café. This should not be confused with the restaurant, although the distinction becomes uncertain after sunset. The café is an office, debating chamber, dating agency, psychiatric clinic and intelligence exchange. People meet for coffee and emerge three hours later having changed careers, arranged marriages, sold apartments and discovered that somebody’s cousin can obtain a replacement component for a German motor car at half the authorised dealer’s price.

The beginner must learn patience. Western Europeans have been indoctrinated into the peculiar belief that meetings should begin with their stated purpose. In Odesa this would be considered barbaric. First there is coffee. Then there is discussion of traffic. Then somebody asks where you are from, even though they already know. Ukraine is discussed. The weather is criticised. A mutual acquaintance is discovered and comprehensively analysed. Only then, perhaps forty-five minutes later, does somebody say, ‘Anyway’, and the meeting begins.

Food requires separate preparation. Odesa is a Black Sea city with Ukrainian, Jewish, Greek, Bulgarian, Moldovan, Russian and innumerable other historical influences, and her cuisine consequently behaves as though borders were an administrative misunderstanding. Fish matters. Tomatoes matter. Aubergines matter enormously. Forshmak appears and demands an opinion. Odessa-style dishes acquire family genealogies, and two perfectly respectable people may disagree about the correct preparation of something with an intensity elsewhere reserved for constitutional law.

The prudent beginner praises everybody’s grandmother.

Then there are the women of Odesa, about whom generations of writers have already written far too much and nevertheless failed to exhaust the subject. Odesa has long cultivated a mythology of glamour. In summer this can produce the impression that half the population has accidentally wandered out of a fashion shoot while the other half is attempting to park nearby. High heels encounter paving stones in circumstances that would terrify a structural engineer. Sunglasses expand towards dimensions normally associated with satellite dishes. Beachwear occasionally displays a degree of engineering sophistication exceeding that of small aircraft.

The accompanying teddy bear is optional.

Yet reducing Odesa to glamour would miss the point. The city’s theatricality is democratic. Men participate enthusiastically. A gentleman may arrive at the beach dressed as though expecting simultaneously to conduct a property transaction, captain a yacht and attend a nightclub. Gold chains continue to enjoy constitutional protection. Shirts may contain patterns whose designers should perhaps have been gently restrained. Everybody understands that appearance is communication, and Odesa communicates loudly.

Arcadia deserves its own warning label. By daylight it is a beach district. By evening it begins changing form, and after midnight ordinary principles of economics and acoustics cease to apply. Music emerges from several directions simultaneously. Champagne acquires valuations comparable to minor industrial equipment. Groups of extraordinarily well-prepared people appear from nowhere. Somebody has a table. Somebody knows the manager. Somebody else knows the manager better. The beginner should never inquire how much anything costs after 2 a.m. The answer cannot improve the evening.

Wartime has of course changed all this. Odesa is not merely the comic, cosmopolitan Black Sea metropolis of legend. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the city and its port infrastructure have repeatedly faced attack. Air-raid alarms interrupt dinners. Curfew and security considerations impose their own rhythm. Generators, shelters and the practical vocabulary of war have become part of ordinary urban existence. Behind the city’s exuberance lies the knowledge that missiles and drones are not abstractions.

This produces one of contemporary Odesa’s most striking contrasts. A restaurant may be full, music may be playing and young people may be dressed for an evening that looks entirely removed from war. Then an alert sounds. Phones illuminate. People consult applications, exchange information and make decisions that would have seemed grotesquely abnormal a few years earlier. Afterwards the evening may continue.

Foreigners sometimes misunderstand this as frivolity. It is closer to defiance. Human beings cannot spend years behaving as though each day were an emergency, even when emergencies occur with dreadful regularity. People fall in love during wars. They go swimming, drink cocktails, complain about service, buy absurd shoes and celebrate birthdays. The insistence upon ordinary pleasures is not evidence that the war has disappeared. It demonstrates precisely how thoroughly the war has been incorporated into life.

The sea remains Odesa’s principal therapist. Walk towards it in the morning, before the clubs have remembered themselves and before the traffic becomes argumentative. The Black Sea can appear almost impossibly calm. People swim. Elderly men conduct exercises of mysterious Soviet provenance. Runners demonstrate superior virtue. Couples occupy benches. Fishermen stare into the water with the philosophical resignation of people who understand that fish have their own schedules.

Here the beginner begins to understand the city. Odesa’s famous humour is not merely a collection of jokes. It is a method of surviving absurdity. The city has been governed by empires, occupied, revolutionised, terrorised, bombed, commercialised, romanticised and repeatedly informed by outsiders what she supposedly is. Odesa’s response has generally been to raise an eyebrow and continue lunch.

Language reflects the same complexity. Ukrainian is the state language and increasingly prominent in public life, while Russian remains widely understood and historically common in everyday conversation, alongside the linguistic inheritances of the city’s many communities. The sensible visitor approaches this subject with courtesy rather than ideological theatrics. Wartime questions of language and identity can be intensely personal. Listen to how people describe themselves rather than arriving with a theory explaining them.

The same applies to history. Odesa contains enough history to furnish several mutually incompatible cities. Imperial architecture coexists with Ukrainian national identity. Jewish history is everywhere and sometimes nowhere until one knows where to look. Soviet layers remain visible beneath contemporary commerce. The port faces outward towards the Mediterranean world while the railway ties the city to the Ukrainian interior. Odesa has always lived between categories, which is perhaps why attempts to place her neatly inside one usually fail.

A beginner should therefore adopt several habits. Walk rather than merely drive. Drink coffee slowly. Go to the markets. Look upwards at the buildings rather than only into shop windows. Visit the sea in bad weather. Talk to people older than the fashionable districts and younger than the monuments. Do not assume that the loudest person understands the most. Never underestimate a grandmother carrying shopping bags.

Above all, acquire a sense of humour. Without one, Odesa will exhaust you. With one, she may become addictive. Things will go wrong. Addresses will prove approximate. Plans will mutate. A person expected at three will arrive at four with another person nobody mentioned, and the unexpected person may turn out to be the person you actually needed to meet. The restaurant you intended to visit will be closed, but the place next door will be better. The taxi driver will possess strong geopolitical opinions.

Eventually the beginner makes the decisive transition. One morning the absurdities cease to seem absurd. You know which coffee shop opens early. You know where to walk by the sea. You have stopped asking why somebody is wearing stilettos on terrain plainly designed for military boots. You have acquired acquaintances whose occupations remain slightly mysterious and friends whose generosity embarrasses you. An air-raid alarm sounds and, without thinking, you check the relevant information before deciding what to do.

At this point you are in danger. You have begun to belong.

Odesa is beautiful, vain, battered, funny, infuriating and extraordinarily alive. She has endured too much history to take solemnity entirely seriously, yet she is living through a period in which seriousness is unavoidable. That contradiction explains much of her character. The beginner comes expecting beaches, architecture and nightlife. What one discovers is a city practising the ancient Black Sea art of continuing to live while history behaves badly around it.

So bring sensible shoes, even if nobody else does. Learn where the shelters are. Never decline good food without an excellent reason. Treat apparently simple commercial propositions with appropriate curiosity. Accept that the teddy bear may be larger than anticipated.

And when Odesa becomes incomprehensible, go down to the sea.

It has been listening to this nonsense for centuries.