In 1994 the writer Julian Evans went on a 10-day cruise down the Dnipro River. Ukraine had won its independence three years before. The journey took Evans along an ancient route used by the “restless Vikings” who established Kyiv. His ship – the Viktor Glushkov – stopped off at Crimea and Yalta. Its final destination was the glittering Black Sea port of Odesa.
Evans was a veteran traveller. Nonetheless, the city was “unlike any place I had visited”, he writes – a “country beyond the back of a wardrobe” where anything could happen. It had merchants’ houses, acacia trees, a dandyish 19th-century opera and ballet theatre, and wide neoclassical boulevards. It was ostentatious and self-made. There was kolorit: exoticism and flash.
