There are lovely drives in every direction from Yalta, and waterfalls, gorges, highly decorated gardens, dense groves, observation towers, restaurants and all sorts of attractions scattered along the slopes of the mountains, which rise 2,500 or 3,000 feet behind the town. I am told that there is an average of about 7,500 visitors at Yalta daily the year around, for in that climate, like that of Monterey and Santa Barbara, California, one month is as pleasant as another. Hence, people from the north of Russia come in the winter and people from the south of Russia in the summer, and the hotels are always filled.
There is no railway, although they are talking of one to connect with the trunk lines that run between Sevastopol and Moscow. Everybody has to come on the steamers from Sevastopol, Odessa, Nicholaief, Rostov, Batoum, and other ports on the Black Sea. The visitors from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other northern points take a train to Sevastopol and then come around by steamer in four hours, or by carriage over a wonderful mountain road, a ten-hour ride. The steamers are not very comfortable because the state-rooms are all below the water line, so that the port holes cannot be opened, and there is no ventilation; but the voyage between Yalta and Sevastopol is made both ways in the day-time, in order to give passengers an opportunity to enjoy the magnificent mountain scenery along the coast, and they keep well in toward the shore for that purpose. I do not know of any other sea voyage that will equal it for scenery.
There is a roadway around to Sevastopol from Yalta cut out of the side of the cliff, on a level averaging 300 or 400 feet above the water, and often running as high as a thousand feet on the slopes of the precipices, which was built by the late Prince Woronzoff. It is one of the most delightful and picturesque drives you can imagine. You leave Sevastopol at nine o’clock in the morning, lunch at the Gate of Baidar, which is the water shed, spend the night at Aloupka, and drive over to Yalta in time for luncheon the next morning. There is a procession of carriages loaded with tourists going both ways daily.
For nearly the entire distance a wall of rock rises from 1,000 to 4,000 feet almost abruptly from the Black Sea, being broken at intervals by gorges and narrow valleys which run back into the fertile fields in the interior of the Crimea. Wherever there is room for a handful of soil it is cultivated. There are Tartar villages every few miles, and between them orchards, vineyards, gardens, and truck farms, from which fruit and vegetables are shipped to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The tables of the rich people of those cities and other parts of Russia are supplied with early vegetables and fruit from this source.
Below the roadway and between it and the water many beautiful villas are located among the rocks and the trees. Hotels and sanitariums occur every few miles. The hard, smooth roads are kept in perfect order and decorated on both sides with sweetbriar roses, which continue to bloom through the entire summer. There are myriads of wild flowers also, for which the Crimea is famous, and it is said to have a larger variety than any other place in the world.
This coast is much more beautiful than that of Dalmatia, although it lacks the life and colour that is given the latter by the costumes of the women and the men. It is more like the drive from Cork to the Lakes of Killarney than any other place I know. The French Riviera is more finished and polished and complete, the villas are finer; the hotels are more imposing and the architects and landscape gardeners have embellished nature to a greater extent, but there is more natural beauty on the Crimean coast.
You cross the highest point, 2,200 feet, at Baidar Gate which occupies the site of an ancient fortification intended to protect the tax collector and to prevent hostile armies from passing along this coast, and there you eat your luncheon upon a balcony from which you can look down more than 2,000 feet upon the turquoise waters of the Black Sea.
Near by, upon a promontory projecting out from the precipice, a beautiful Byzantine church has been erected as a memorial to a tea merchant of Moscow named Kouzedneff, who had a winter villa on the coast immediately below. The interior of the church is extravagantly decorated and with much taste, and among the paintings is the Christmas scene in the manger at Bethlehem. A beautiful babe lies on a pile of straw in a stable, emitting a halo of light from its entire body, like a block of phosphorus or radium, while a girl and a young man in the costumes of Russian peasants look down in adoration upon their child.
Aloupka is not so fashionable as Yalta, but is more beautiful. The location is more picturesque and the surroundings are more attractive. It is an assortment of hotels, boarding-houses, and sanitariums collected around one of the most unique and fascinating country seats I have ever seen—the palace of the Woronzoff family, built in 1839 by a governor of the Crimea of that name. He was one of the most famous fighters in Russian history and one of the ablest executives, and contributed more to the glory of Catherine the Great than almost any other of her servants. He was viceroy of the Crimea and afterward of the Caucasus, and his grandson, Prince Woronzoff Dashkoff, is governor-general of the Caucasus to-day.
The Woronzoff palace occupies a terrace one hundred and fifty feet or so above the Black Sea, and a stately stairway, fit for any palace, extends from the threshold of the main entrance to the edge of the water, being guarded on both sides by marble lions, some of them asleep, some of them awake, some of them yawning and others in a playful mood. The façade was copied from one of the palaces of the Alhambra, which critics have pronounced very much out of place on a Tudor castle. Four Byzantine towers at the corners of the walls have also been objected to as untasteful intrusions. The rest of the architecture is in harmony and resembles that of an English castle of the period of Henry VIII. It was built by Sir Matthew Blore, an English architect.