Another peculiarity is that everybody wears an overcoat of the same weight, summer and winter. No matter how hot it is the men wear long, thick, heavy overcoats over their regular suits. This is especially true of army officers, and it is odd to see a gallant captain in winter apparel walking in the promenade with a graceful young woman in the lightest of embroidered white batiste.
The principal business section of Odessa is noted for its architecture. The public buildings and the hotels are unusually good. The cathedral of the orthodox Greek church, which is placed in the centre of a wide square, where it can be seen to the best advantage, is a splendid example of Byzantine architecture, and the interior furnishings fine examples of gilt carving. There are several highly revered relics—the arms and fingers and teeth of saints.
The municipality erected and owns the opera house, one of the finest in Europe and modeled after that of Paris. A subsidized opera company gives performances twice a week for six months of the year. Around the opera house is a group of interesting buildings. Several of the most important streets of the city focus there. It is the centre of the banking community and exporting business. The city hall is a large building of classic design overlooking the bay, and contains a well-proportioned chamber for the use of the provincial duma or legislature.
Municipal Opera House, Odessa
Beginning at the city hall and extending for a quarter of a mile or more along a bluff that overlooks the bay is a wide promenade, heavily shaded, that is cool even at noon in the heat of midsummer. There thousands of people gather every evening and spend the twilight walking to and fro, flirting and gossiping and having a good time. On a shelf in the bluff a little below is a large and well-arranged playground for children, maintained by the city, where grown people, except nurses and mothers, are not admitted. Adjoining it is an open-air gymnasium for men, equipped with ample facilities, and that is well patronized also.
Leading from the esplanade to the docks below is a wide stairway of stone, which was built seventy-five years ago, and a continual stream of human beings is surging up and down throughout the day and the night. There are restaurants and cafés on each side, and at the foot several public bathing-houses before you reach the docks.
The principal hotels and cafés front on the promenade, and during the afternoon and evening the music never ceases and the gay crowds never grow less.
Among the other public buildings around the opera house is the Imperial Museum, where a small but remarkable collection of Scythian and Greek antiquities from the Crimea and the coast of the Black Sea have been arranged in excellent taste. It is unique in several respects and the most important collection consists of twenty thousand coins, dating back to the beginning of civilization—Greek, Persian, Scythian, Cimmerian, Taurian, Gothic, Avar, Genoese, Turkish, etc. I am told there are coins in this collection that cannot be found anywhere else, and what makes it the more interesting is that every one of them was dug out of the ground in the Crimea or along the northern shore of the Black Sea. How so many coins of different denominations and different periods of time came to be buried in the earth is a mystery. Perhaps it was due to the carelessness of people who went around with holes in their pockets, scattering silver and gold and copper over the earth as they walked; perhaps they were so much afraid of burglars that they buried their money, or maybe they were overtaken by the wrath of the Almighty, like Mrs. Lot, and the money they carried refused to turn into salt. But it is the actual fact that not only these twenty thousand specimens, mostly prehistoric, were found in the soil at different places but similar money is being dug up every few months.
Opposite the museum is an attractive looking building called the English clubhouse by a sort of official Irish bull. Notwithstanding the name, there isn’t a single Englishman or American in the list of members and no newspaper, magazine, or other publication in the English language can be found in its reading room. This anomaly is due to the opposition of the Russian government to all social organizations among its subjects, for fear of conspiracies and co-operation in resisting the tyranny of laws and the police. When this club was proposed a permit was asked for a social organization on the plan of an English club, and, after due consideration, it was granted for “an English club,” that is, a club similar to those of England. Hence the significance of the name.