London - The World in a Small Place

On our second evening in London I met Cigano and Pipoca for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant along Edgware Road. I got to know the two of them three years ago in Tribo Capoeira. I'm ashamed to say that whilst they are still as agile and limber as they were then, I've stopped training entirely for about two years already. Cigano, Gypsy by name and Gypsy by his musical talent, was leaving for home the following day. Pipoca, a scientist, was leaving London for a good while within a fortnight. That day our paths crossed again, if only for a day.

Tribo was like a home away from home for me, and a family like no other. We had  a multinational cast practicing a Brazilian art form - Americans, Chinese, Colombians, Cypriot, French, German, Italians, Namibian, Polish, Portuguese, Malaysians, Singaporeans and British nationals of Bangladeshi, Moroccan and Pakistani descents. This was London's flavour - it gathers cultures together the world over without diluting any of them, yet all the while it has retained, albeit invented and reinvented, its very own Britishness.

We also met up with Wei Shu twice, once at Wong Kei (cheap and decent Chinese food, but I've come under fire for patronizing that restaurant in Chinatown) and the second time in Stratford. We've known each other since Cambridge days. Our friendship (and countless hilarious anecdotes) was forged upon stone and under rain, muddling along Cumbrian and Caledonian ridges, befuddling each other. Wei Shu works in London now, so it was great to be able to see him once more. How the tables have turned. When he first came to London (then for his internship) I had already been here for a year and helped arrange his accommodation for that period. Now Mary and I returned as strangers to the place, and Wei Shu helped with travel tips.

All of us never really left the Empire. Or should I say the Empire hasn't really left us? It is an empire of the mind (to borrow Michael Axworthy's history of Iran), leading us to ready identification with the River Thames, St Paul's, Big Ben, Shakespeare and even One Direction today. We speak English, and we are comfortable with it. We cheer on our favourite English football teams with vigour matching the vehemence with which we jeer their fiercest English rivals. But such parochial loyalties are today globalised.

The world is a very small place. It feels especially contained when you are looking down on it from the firmament, above the clouds, aboard a plane. The azure unknown beyond really feels like a girdle, and you are flying on the edge of an enormous blue ball. We felt like that, on board our Saudi Airlines flight, though the hours passed like centuries. I leave you with what we saw from the air, taken (I estimate) over the Alps.

London - Penny-dropping

A nation of shopkeepers - how Napoleon once famously dismissed England. Although England's glory has long since given up the ghost, Mary is mighty pleased England is still a nation of shopkeepers. Attractions we visited en route between shops. It hardly mattered that the weather was archetypically English - we spent much of our time indoors.

We were happy to be back in London, even if it wasn't for long. For me, there was no longer the need to face what we came to christen Mary's Quandary every morning - to snooze that extra hatful of minutes or to enjoy our bleary-eyed hotel breakfast. No prizes for guessing who was always first out of the blocks on our London leg. Mary also felt particularly empowered by news of an individual baggage allowance of 32 kg instead of the usual budget 20 kg.

On the first of our three days in London, we did a marathon ramble with an unwieldy square box from Camden to Marble Arch via Russell Square, Covent Garden and Piccadilly. I used to run in the Camden and Mornington Crescent vicinity in my time in London from time to time, but it was my first time visiting the Camden Lock Market when we did. For the uninitiated, a lock is a device on a waterway which transports vessels smoothly between two stretches of differing water levels, like a lift for boats.

Below: Amy Winehouse used to hang out at Camden. They tried to make her go for rehab but she said no no no. You can see why. From top to bottom: scooter seats rehashed as benches, lions compare manes, the world famous Camden Market and the Old Curiosity Bus.

The Camden Lock area is an excellent example of urban regeneration. The area fell into disuse and disrepair as the development of more and better roads contributed to the decline of the London canal system. In the 1970s, the place was refurbished as a crafts market by three enterprising young chaps. While the crowd may have become a lot more cosmopolitan, the creativity remains unabated. And the incessant drizzle that day hardly dampened its buzz. We spent close to an hour in a shop selling Turkish lamps, discussing the (im)practicalities of purchasing one. We went against wisdom and ended up buying not one but two (hence the box mentioned in the previous paragraph) which we managed miraculously to fit into our existing suitcases.

Above: a gem of a bookstore.

The next stop of note was the Waterstone's outlet at Gower Street, amidst the erudition of Bloomsbury. The five-storey establishment, Europe's largest academic bookshop, has an outstanding collection of books, not least its remainders section. Mary disappeared into the Education section, while for me an hour's foraging yielded Plokhy's Origins of the Slavic Nations, Pomeranz's The Great Divergence and Tripp's History of Iraq at knockdown prices. Only the baggage allowance prevented further purchases.

The rest of the day was spent amongst rather more prosaic retail outlets - Cath Kidston's amongst them. Mary hung out along Oxford Street while I met some of my capoeira friends for dinner (see next entry). It was also a night for lights. In four years, I've never once spent Christmas, nor the run-up to Yuletide, in London. It was another first for me. There was a decidedly more festive feel than in Ukraine, or the places where I spent Christmas in my years as a student (Syria, Senegal, Cyprus), with the exception of Spain.

Below: top to bottom, Christmas lights along Long Acre, at the Christmas Fair at Leicester Square and along Oxford Street.

Convent Garden became a favourite, and first, port of call. We had a straight bus there from Southwark (pronounced Sou-therk) - RV1 - so we began each day there. From there on the second day we dropped by Harrod's - this time via the Tube. Harrod's needs no introduction. You can buy nearly anything you want inside, short of the moon. In 1967, a elephant was purchased in Harrod's for Ronald Reagan. We soon tired of its gelatinous human flows and labyrinthine interiors, and beat a hasty retreat towards Hyde Park.

Above: top, Covent Garden - some things don't change, but people are amazed nonetheless; bottom, Knightsbridge, where people come to buy elephants.

The lights at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park can be spotted miles away in the dark. We were drawn there like moths, along with every other tourist in London. A decision to cross the road using the underpass near Hyde Park Corner station saw us walk right into another human morass. When we inched out at the exit, we saw it extended all the way to the entrance of Winter Wonderland. It was the Sunday before Christmas.

23 December, our last full day in London, passed in like manner. Lunch was a fancier affair than usual at the Rainforest Cafe along Shaftesbury Avenue. As to be expected, it was a boreal-themed restaurant, complete with a bubbling forest stream, elephants and apes which trumpet and grunt at appointed intervals and leafy surrounds. Children loved it, and many pranced about with abandon. Make your reservations, queues formed even at half past two.

Our last stop in metropolitan London was the new Westfield Mall at Stratford. Here was yet another London phoenix which rose from the ashes of suburban decay, with a wave of urban renewal planned for just before the 2012 Olympics. Stratford is located in the East End of London, for years the Cockney capital of crime and grime. It was the first London stop for National Express coaches between London Victoria and Cambridge. During my undergraduate days, its nondescript industrial surrounds were usually my first sight of London, as I struggled to shake the sleep out of my eyes. It is nondescript no more.

That night we walked, bags in hand, back to the hotel with the winds in our sails. It knocked advertisement stands over, pushed us along the pavement and swirled in our empty pockets. The penny dropped. Every last one.

We waved goodbye to London and welcomed the rest of our lives.

Kyiv Again - Slavic Jerusalem

So it was back to Kyiv, once again, our third stint there on this trip, and our longest one. We saw ourselves heading back into the heat of things (read Euromaidan), though in hindsight our fears were very much exaggerated. The standoff between the government and the protestors seemed to have fizzled out into a stalemate. Victor Yanukovich looks pretty pleased with his newly-obtained Russian financial backing, and unwilling to invite further criticism by forcing out the protestors. The protestors, on the other hand, have no other option but to sit out, tight, the winter. Any escalation on their part plays right into the government's hand. On the Maidan the mood is daily becoming more benign than Bastille. Meanwhile, Yanukovich hopes every passing day will wear down his opponents' patience and resolve.

Correspondent's report aside, we were really in Kyiv to see the Slavic Jerusalem. Kyiv has a hallowed place in East Slavic history. It was the seat of the first major East Slavic polity - the fabled Kyivan Rus. At the height of its powers, it extended from the Dniester to the Volga. Rus has been a hotly contested historiographical heirloom in two ways. The first, the so-called Varangian Controversy, concerned its provenance. Did Varangian (Scandinavian) princes really found Rus or were they just the uppermost elite strata ruling over a largely indigenous political infrastructure? The second concerned its progeny. Which of Ukraine and Russia had a better claim to the mantle of Rus?

While Moscow took upon itself the more martial title of Third Rome, whose role was to protect Christianity, Kyiv saw itself as a new Jerusalem, the fount of Christianity in Slavdom. The conversion of Rus was ascribed to the Grand Prince Volodymyr (Ukrainized version of the Russian Vladimir). Legend (possibly apocryphal) has it that before settling on Orthodox Christianity Volodymyr also considered Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Islam. Judaism he rejected as the faith of a folk in exile, abandoned by God. Roman Catholicism he rejected as the choice of his ancestors. Islam he considered briefly, for he had eight hundred concubines and it condoned polygamy. But he loved a drink and that Islam forbade. Greek Orthodoxy he was persuaded by a philosopher to see as the truest pursuit of wisdom. A visit to a Constantinople church left him awestruck and eventually convinced him. Thus was Kyiv converted.

Above: from top to bottom, the entrance to the Upper Lavra, the Great Bell Tower, the recently rebuilt Assumption Cathedral (it was originally destroyed by the Nazis or Soviet partisans, depending on whose side you're on, or not on), the sloping road down to the Lower Lavra and the Holodomor Memorial, which commemorates the collectivization-induced famines in the dark 1930s.

A profusion of golden-domed churches also bestowed upon Kyiv another moniker - Constantinople  on the Dnieper. These awed us as much as it must have Volodymyr. First, the Pecherska Lavra (Monastery of the Caves) complex a fifteen minutes' walk south from Sherborne Hotel where we stayed. The Upper Lavra was large enough to be a small town in its own right, and what a splendid one it would be too. The Lower Lavra was where the caves were located. We took a little detour inside - a warren of subterranean candle-lit chambers linked by low narrow tunnels. Inside was interned the sarcophagi of revered monks long gone. Devotees frequented these tunnels, pausing to kiss each icon and sarcophagus at their feet. Mary felt a little spooked. And it would be if it weren't sitting under God's house.

The next day we took a walk around the Old Town - up Andrew's Descent to the historical district of Podil. St Andrew's Cathedral stood at the crown of the hillock which the street climbed. It marks the spot where the apostle St Andrew was said to have gazed on the Dnipro and prophesied that it would be the site of a city blessed by God. Andrew's Descent was home as well to a clutter of souvenir stores, which slowed our progress considerably. On the other side of Podil were the St Michael and St Sophia Cathedrals. We looked on St Michael's from a distance as the protestors made their encampment right before it. The compound of St Sophia was serene enough for us to enter. But dusk and cold hastened our walk around its multiple green domes.

Below: descending, St Andrew's Cathedral, St Sophia's and the venerated Bohdan Khmelnytski, with St Michael's in the background. Bohdan invited the Russians into Ukraine to help oust the Polish. The Russians have never quite left since.

The sumptuous magnificence in Kyiv was a fitting way to end our stint in Ukraine. It crowns the diversity that has infused both its past and present. Alas, it is a diversity not all Ukrainians have come to terms with. The portly Ukrainian elderly who denigrated a Roma bard on the Khotyn-bound marshrutka, the lanky chap clad in his national colours who raised his fist and bared his teeth at me - they were not enough to make us forget the countless instances of hospitality we've received from their other compatriots. Diversity embraces difference. It is an unredeemable shame that difference often does not embrace diversity.

Chufut Kale - Fortress of the Jews

We have a ready picture of those who dwell in caves - crude, grunting, skin-clad, club-wielding folks with sloping foreheads and hunched gaits. Yet it might surprise some that caves have hosted civilisation before. These cave cities, more than mere functional depressions in the rock, are carven and not just hewn.

Below: caves - more than a simple hole in the wall. Here one has been fashioned into a chicken coop.

Fortress of the Jews

Chufut Kale, which in Crimean Tatar translates into 'Fortress of the Jews', was one of these cave cities, and another reason why we visited Bakhchisaray. Built into and atop one of the tufa plateaux which surround the town, it is one of many such cities in the vicinity. Tufa is a type of soft volcanic rock which is easily moulded by wind, water and man. Another better known tufa site of interest in the Black Sea environs, where cave cities abound too, is the spectacular fairy chimneys further south in Cappadocia.

The Cappadocian cave cities belonged in an ancient time, inhabited as they were by the Hittites and Phrygians. Chufut Kale is of more recent vintage. Although the Crimean cave cities predate the arrival of the Tatars, they were themselves newer than their Cappadocian counterparts. Chufut Kale's origins, however, are disputed. One of its earliest inhabitants, sometime from the sixth century, were Christianized Alans (the ancestors of the modern-day Ossetians) allied to the Byzantine Empire.

The occupation of Chufut Kale by the Karaites, which gave rise to its present name, adds yet another element to the Ukrainian cultural potpourri. These Karaites were adherents of a religion related to Judaism (hence their being classified as "Jews") which only adhered to the Torah (the Mosaic scripture), as opposed to orthodox Judaism which derived authority from rabbinic sources as well. Karaites, however, were of Turkic origins, and their settlement of the area generally followed the Tatar takeover of Crimea. In a time and age when ethnicity, faith and nationality are indelibly linked in most perceptions, a people professing a Jewish faith, speaking a Turkic tongue and living under Muslim rule must defy easy categorisation.

In fact, one Tatar Khan, Haji Girai chose to base himself in Chufut Kale, the already formidable location of which he fortified further. It was only with the definitive political atrophy of the Mongol Golden Horde (his overlord that dominated the Pontic steppes north of Crimea) that he moved out of this natural fortress and into the valley where Bakhchisaray was located.

The gates were shut

Two buses, naturally numbered 1 and 2, ply the route between either ends of Bakhchisaray. One of these ferried us to the eastern end of the Old Town where we began our hike. But for icy paths, it would have been a gentle climb which would pass the Orthodox Uspensky Cathedral and its adjourning monastery. We carried on up the valley, passing the monastery, strolling monks in their flowing black robes who seem to glide on the ice and toiling builders to reach the southern gates of Chufut Kale.

Below: in descending order, the Uspensky Cathedral and Monastery.

The gates were shut. We encountered instead a cheerful Russian trio, a couple and their elderly father, from Sevastopol. They greeted us from one of the hollows beneath the walls which they managed to clamber up to. The lady even introduced a plump well-groomed cat which she held aloft atop the rocky ledge like Rafiki and Simba on Pride Rock. A gift from Ukraine, she declared. We thought she couldn't leave her pet behind. Turned out she couldn't keep her hands off a stray tabby.

When she eventually released the cat, she climbed down and purposes to help us breach Chufut Kale's stubborn defences. Stooping to pick up a large pebble nearby, she strode forward and hammered on the iron gate with it, calling out in Russian, Ukrainian and English for it to be opened. There was no answer, they left (the cat behind, too), and we contented ourselves with the views from the hollow beneath the walls.

The mostly downhill return journey was a lot easier. We had our afternoon meal (not sure what to call it since it was neither lunch nor dinner) and made it back to our guesthouse before dark. Max the house cat awaited our return, confined to the second level where our room was by this particular member of staff because she didn't like cats.

Below: Poor Max, before his unfortunate eviction.

Thing was, Mary didn't like cats too, which this member of staff knew very well. So Max was banished as soon as we got back. It seems between two women's ire is the last place to be, whether you're man or cat.

Bakhchisaray - Tatar Source

While leaving genteel Yalta we met possibly one of the most ungentle person in town. Having bought our bus tickets for Simferopol the evening before, we thought we only had to turn up the following morning. The trouble started when we had to board. It wasn't a bus, but a marshrutka with limited storage facilities. The inconvenience would be minimized with an accommodating driver. He turned out to be a chain-smoking boar.

Above: marshrutkas line up at the Yalta bus station.

When we approached him to have baggage stowed behind, he brusquely showed us what passed for the boot (turned out to be the narrow space beneath the rearmost passenger seats) and snarled something to the tune of I don't know, the space is already filled and you have two big suitcases (ya nye znayu, ya nye znayu, blah blah blah in Russian with pointed fingers alternating between luggage and boot). We weren't the only ones with stuff to stuff. Mary felt that some creative rearrangement would have freed up a little more space and made life easier for everybody. But our driver only stood by and continued his splenetic outbursts.

With the clock ticking, we did what the other passengers did and placed our two suitcases in the aisle. There were only two seats left on board - Mary took the more accessible one right at the front, while I clambered over myriad obstacles to parachute into mine all the way at the back. Our fellow passengers were good-humoured and it made the journey easier to know our driver managed to antagonize everybody else too.

Our destination this time, via yet another transit in Simferopol, was Bakhchisaray, the one-time capital of Crimean Khanate, nestled in a valley amongst low tufa plateaus. Crimean Tatar roots are mixed, emerging first in the thirteenth century out of an amalgamation between inhabitants of the Turkish steppe north and the more cosmopolitan coastal south.

The Khanate first established itself under Haji Giray in the geopolitical vacuum left behind by Timur's (that's Tamerlane to those of you who've read Marlowe) destruction of the Golden Horde, some time in the middle of the fifteenth century. The Golden Horde was one of the successor khanates to Chinggis Khan's sprawling empire. In fact, Haji Giray claimed to be a scion of Batu Khan, the founder of the Golden Horde.

Crimea would remain under Turkic domination for the better part of the following three hundred years. The Crimean Tatars conducted frequent raids on their Slavic neighbours, sometimes as far north as Muscovy (Moscow), and sold their captives on the thriving Black Sea slave market. Even when Tatar power waned, it persisted under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty. In a reversal of historical precedents, they became Slavic subjects when the Russians took over in the late eighteenth century.

Two factors acted as catalysts in the later crystallization of the notion of a Crimean Tatar nationality - the modernizing movement of the Crimean Tatar intellectual Ismail Gasprinski, which came to be known as Jadidism, and the harrowing events of the Sürgünlik ('exile' in Tatar). Strictly speaking, Gasprinski was not a Crimean Tatar nationalist. But his active promotion of modernization amongst the Turkic-speaking peoples, particularly in education, laid the ground for the subsequent formation of an identity linked not to Islam but to ethnicity, language and territory. The Sürgünlik involved the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia during the Second World War, on allegations of wartime collaboration with the Nazis. The post-Stalin campaigning for the right of return, which was denied until the days of glasnost and perestroika, provided another focal point around which national identity coalesced.

We checked into the Meraba Guesthouse upon arrival. Snow and negative temperatures conspired to produce a glacial landscape and a town full of ginger waddlers. It didn't help that the route to our accommodation involved negotiating two tiny sloping glaciers.

Below: the local glaciation process.

Our first stop in town was the Khan's Palace, which gave Bakhchisaray (palace in a garden in Crimean Tatar) its name. We shared its pleasant grounds with a slew of other Russian visitors. The palace - domes, minarets, towers, all - was built around a central courtyard. All the usual winter accoutrements were present - bare boughs, snowscape and silence. No doubt there would have been more cheer and comfort in bygone days, even if Christmas wasn't celebrated before in these parts.

Below: our Khan's Palace ramble, in descending order, 

Below: a statue of Alexander Pushkin in the centre of Bakhchisaray's Old Town. Pushkin's poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray told the tragic love story of how Haji Giray's love for a Polish concubine incurred the jealous wrath of his queen, who eventually had the concubine murdered. It captured perfectly the Russian fascination with the Oriental exoticism offered in Crimea. In fact, the muezzin's frequent calls which echo even today reminded me more of the Middle East than a country which today clamours to be a part of Europe. Not that Islam and Europe are mutually exclusive, of course.

Heading back to the guesthouse in the dark proved to be a comedy. Street lighting being almost non-existent, Mary and I deliberated whether we should get a cab for the absurdly short distance or brave the passage. We settled for the former, and the streets being empty too, went to the nearby Alie Cafe to ask if they could help us get a taxi. Moving hospitality accompanied mutual unintelligibility, as in the end two of their waitresses decided to walk us back, literally shining the way forward.

How we would manage the following evening was the question on our minds when we got back. It made us look terribly primitive, but the answer? Flashlight apps, which worked perfectly.

Swallow's Nest and Flying Water

Sounds like some unwieldy translation of a Hollywood-funded Chinese martial arts flick? No, the above were the actual names, translated of course, of the day trips we took from Yalta.

Yalta was ringed the main range of the Crimean Mountains, which run roughly parallel to the southern Crimea coast from east to west. Together with the Carpathians in western Ukraine, the Crimean Range is a topographical exception to the largely flat relief in Ukraine. These are part of the larger Alpine fold system, extending from the Pyrenees on the shores of the Atlantic, through the Alps, the Balkan ranges, through the aforementioned Carpathian and Crimean heights and then on to the lofty Caucasus Range on the Caspian shore. The wild beauty of these ranges was created by the collision of the Eurasian Plate and the African and Arabian Plates, a geological rendezvous which still renders the intervening zone susceptible to earthquakes (Turkey) and volcanic activity (Santorini, Vesuvius).

Approaching the Crimean Mountains from the north (as we did from Simferopol which is almost right smack in the centre of Crimea) the slopes rise gradually before falling dramatically towards the Black Sea shoreline. It makes for the arresting natural setting where Yalta finds itself, and provide enough day-trips to last a week. (We opted only for a three-day stay.)

But once out of town nearly all tourist facilities cease to function at this time of the year. Our initial plan was to get a marshrutka to Miskhor, from where a cable-car, on paper daily, ferries visitors to the top of Ay Petri (Saint Peter in Greek). When we got to the station, it looked apocalyptically empty. Our footfalls only disturbed the dead leaves on the ground and caught the attention of four cats which emerged from their hiding places and crept tentatively towards us.

We then re-routed to visit Swallow's Nest, a diminutive cliff-edged castle built in 1911 by a Baltic German oil baron pining for the knightly castles in his homeland. The Italian restaurant which occupies its premises today was closed, as was half the souvenir stalls which lined the path to the structure. There was a trickle of tourists, but by and large we had as usual the whole place to ourselves, barring, yet again, another bevy of rather well looked after cats.

Below: Swallow's Nest and its attendant feline guards.

There was another way up to Ay Petri - by marshrutka from the bus station. And that was precisely what we had in mind the following day. Dawn broke with the peaks obscured behind clouds. Ay Petri would be hidden from us for the rest of the day. We went ahead in its direction in any case, but only as far as Uchan-su Waterfall. Marshrutka 30 ran the distance between Yalta and Ay Petri, but unlike the frequent services which ply the coastline, this particular marshrutka only ran six times a day. Not wanting to wait an hour and a half for the next service, we opted for a taxi instead. There, back and 30 minutes' waiting for a hundred hrvynias.

Uchan-su translates from Tatar as flying water. 95 metres high, it tumbles down one of Ay Petri's craggy haunches. On a frigid winter's day, we saw only frozen water. It was a special sight nonetheless, almost like a cathedral of ice, Gothic in stature, Gaudi-esque in detail. At first were concerned a half-hour offered us wouldn't be sufficient (our driver said plainly a half-hour extension would cost us 20 hrvynias - make of that what you will). Turned out it was, though we'd have liked to take our time. The falls were only a five minutes' walk from the car park. Saturday brought with it its customary weekend crowd, which rather congested the already narrow viewing area. There was to be no off-season bonus of solitude this time round.

Below: pretty gushed at frozen flying water.

In our three years together thus far, Mary has been (indefatigably, I must add) chasing all sorts of waterfalls with me. We've seen wide ones, narrow ones, tall ones, short ones, melodious ones, raucous ones, even dry ones. (You can ask her about that dry one, the relish grows with every subsequent retelling.) Uchan-su adds to the collection - liquid ones, solid ones.

Yalta - the Ukrainian Riviera

When I first heard of the name Yalta I was convinced it was a misspelling of Malta. Such imperious ignorance. In terms of appeal they aren't all that different. Both attract tourists by the droves to their sunny climes and their beaches. There is one key distinction though. In December many still head to Malta to escape falling temperatures further north. In December Yalta and its touristy surrounds pretty much shut down.

To be fair Yalta is warmer than many places in its primary tourist catchment area - Russian and Ukrainian tourists make up the bulk of its visitors. Restrictions on foreign travel for many Soviet citizens meant then that the Crimean coast became a popular destination for many. It has led to the luxuriant growth of high-rise concrete thickets all along the Yalta seafront, and on the adjourning slopes of the Crimean Mountains.

The development hasn't ceased today, nor has Yalta's charm been irrevocably marred. And it's easy to see why. Yalta's enviably beautiful location between mountain and sea has been drawing visitors, and mostly distinguished ones at that, since the nineteenth century. The numerous dachas and palaces that are today overshadowed by the cookie-cutter hotels and resorts attest to a more polished past. The honours roll include the acclaimed playwright Anton Chekhov, the Tsarist subduer of the Caucasus Mikhail Vorontsov (who built a palace west of Yalta in Alupka) and the Romanovs themselves. One of these palaces (at Livadia) hosted that epochic summit between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in May 1945 which saw them partition post-war Europe.

The proletarian break with this rather un-Marxist past came with Lenin's 1920 decree On the Use of Crimea for the Medical Treatment of the Working People. Aristocratic assets like estates, spas and the like were seized by the government, and their gates flung open to the workers. But privilege, even if barely acknowledged, never went away. Yalta was repopulated by the CPSU neo-aristocracy. Stalin spent his summers in Massandra Palace. Khrushchev loved his summer bobs on a rubber float in the tepid Crimean waters, surrounded by three diver bodyguards. Gorbachev found himself stuck in his dacha near Foros as the hardliners bungled their coup back in Moscow. All were in the Yalta's vicinity.

Above: Lenin in Crimea. No decapitation, this is Yalta!

Today, it has become fashionable once again to embrace privilege. Ukrainian families still arrived in their marshrutkas to enjoy their Black Sea holidays. Yet these were now openly upstaged by the modern nouveau riche seeking to reacquaint themselves with the pleasure world of the ancien regime. Hoteliers and restaurateurs pounced by charging over the odds. (It also meant hotels were well beyond our budget. We eventually got a cosy little apartment right next to the beach from Black Sea Crimea for US$60 a night.) History is coming full circle, as it frequently does, with mordant irony.

Below: Compare and contrast, nineteenth century versus twenty-first century.

Things were inevitably livelier than Sudak. We spent our evenings after our day-trips strolling along the promenade and Lenin's Embankment, two boulevard beloved of the Yalta folks. There seemed on the whole a joie de vivre about the place which we haven't observed elsewhere. Joggers huffed and puffed the length of the promenade, families pushed their perambulators unhurriedly and skateboarder teens strutted their stuff. All were unbothered by the cold, snow and ice which stalk the lands further north.

Below: life on Yalta's favourite streets. Spot the rainbow.

One particular evening, we wandered into the Tourist Information Centre, the one tourist facility which has not gone into self-declared hibernation. It was manned by a helpful young man, Slava, who spoke English and Spanish as well as his native Ukrainian and adopted Russian. We chatted briefly after he helped find out the timings for our onward bus journey.

Slava's parents, both teachers, hailed from central Ukraine and met in Soviet Yalta. And here he was born. He has one degree in Business Management and is studying for his second one in Law. He bemoaned the scarcity of jobs in the country, and expressed his desire to develop his career overseas, possibly in Dubai. I pointed out that his proficiency in four languages opened doors for him. The number of competently multi-lingual Europeans I've met on my travels this side of the world has always impressed me. The extent to which linguistic diversity is recognized in Europe is a product of its long-entrenched political pluralism. Here was an embrace, in some places unanimous and in others uneasy, paid for dearly by the cataclysmic upheavals of two world wars in the previous century.

The same pluralism, albeit here more cultural than political, can be observed in Crimea itself, towards which my conversation with Slava drifted. Russian is the lingua franca here, recognized as the first language by more than 90% of the population. This includes the majority Russian and a smaller, insignificant number of Russified Ukrainians.

Politically, Crimea seems to be in a state of stasis. Russian until 1954, Khrushchev gifted the peninsula to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to mark the 300 years of friendship between the two nations since the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav. Under the overall Soviet federal straitjacket back then it didn't matter. But the 1991 unravelling of the Soviet Union led many Crimean Russians to feel stranded. The subsequent recognition by Kyiv of Crimea as an Autonomous Republic and the granting of extensive political autonomy eased matters somewhat, and an uneasy truce ensued.

The one bonus for the traveller was the complete absence of any of the Euromaidan hullabaloo in Crimea. Nobody talks about it, Slava says. Nobody wants to be branded a traitor. And Kyiv is far away.