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...speaking with local residents is informed by a "large family" form of sociality, and a notion of Odessa as courtyard where space is conceived as communal. In walking the city, participants subvert and recreate aspects of Soviet and post-Soviet urban space and generate a sense of their city as distinct from a national space. (Space and place, sensing history, postsocialist transformation)
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Every Sunday in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa, between 20 and 30 residents, mainly elderly, gather on a street in "old Odessa," (1) the area built prior to the October Revolution of 1917. With their guide, Valerii Netrebskii, they ramble for two or three hours down a chosen street, stopping frequently to be transported to past epochs by Valerii's layered account of the history of a particular building, empty lot, or courtyard. They discover hidden parts of streets, such as an overgrown block of Champagne Lane. They enter courtyards and speak with residents, as on Cable Street where walkers, some of them Jews, debated with a Jewish resident the pros and cons of emigrating. They ponder the connection of certain places with well-known landmarks, as when Valerii explained how the fish fountains on the Pushkin Monument were made in the Jewish Labor Association's technical college on the corner of Bazaar and Cable Streets. They use motifs from Odessan authors' works in describing their environment, as Inna did in noting how a new metal balcony reminded her of Bezenchyk's coffin in the novel Twelve Chairs. Walkers express wonder when discovering new places, outrage at the poor upkeep of architectural landmarks, irritation when previously accessible buildings are fenced off, and amusement at participants' jokes and interjections.
The walks of the My Odessa club, which I joined from August to November 2002, are about sensing Odessa as place. (2) Sensing Odessa as place as these walkers do is intricately related to sensing history and the experience of sociability. Although the group is relatively small and not overtly political, in that it does not lobby the local administration, through these walks a sense of the urban landscape is transmitted in which Odessa is conceived as Russian, cosmopolitan, cultured, distinct from Ukraine, and more connected with Russia and the outside world. The group's practices are influenced not only by Soviet Odessan concepts of urban space and the formation of a post-Soviet public sphere in which informal groups can organize, but also by the prerevolutionary architecture and geography of the city.
Odessa was founded in 1794 by Catherine II to stabilize, settle, and develop trade in the lands north of the Black Sea that the Russian Empire had acquired from the Ottoman Empire (Herlihy 1986). The city was established a few decades after the remaining vestiges of autonomous Ukrainian political formations east of the Dnipro River had been dismantled; indeed, Ukraine did not attain full political sovereignty until 1991, with the exception of brief periods in 1918-1919. Throughout the nineteenth century, Odessa was one of the most rapidly developing cities in Europe, and by the mid- 1800s was the third-most prominent city in the Russian Empire in size, economy, and cultural importance. Inhabited by Greeks, Italians, French, Poles, Jews, Bulgarians, Germans, Moldovans, Russians, and Ukrainians, among others, the city was cosmopolitan from the outset. It emerged from Catherine's policy of attracting foreign merchants, administrators, and colonists from western Europe and the Ottoman Empire to develop Novorossia (New Russia). By the early twentieth century the city was linguistically and culturally more Russian than a century previously. A large Jewish community made up at least a third of its population. With the outbreak of World War I, the city was hard hit by the dislocation of industry and the decline of the Black Sea trade. By 1923, it had lost nearly half its population due to external and internal migration (Guthier 1981:175).
After its incorporation into Soviet Ukraine, Odessa was eclipsed economically, politically, and culturally by other cities, even though it remained an important port in the Soviet Union and home to a shipping fleet. During the Second World War, Odessa was occupied by the Romanians from October 1941 until April 1944. Although the Romanian administration was less brutal than the German administration in other Ukrainian territories, it was nonetheless responsible for the murder of approximately 200,000 Jews in Transnistria (Dallin 1998; Ofer 1993). Today, Odessa has about one million residents, of which approximately 60 per cent are ethnic Ukrainians, 30 per cent are Russians, and the rest comprise Jews, Poles, Bulgarians, Greeks, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, and others. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Odessans have been subject to the state's Ukrainization policies, which have been pursued in the areas of language and culture and attempts to imprint a Ukrainian understanding of history on urban landscapes (Wanner 1998). Local cultural and political actors have countered Ukrainization by drawing on the Odessan Myth to elaborate an ideology of distinctiveness that asserts that Odessa is "not Ukrainian" but rather connected with Russia and elsewhere beyond the nation. Previously hidden histories of certain ethnic groups such as Jews and Greeks are being revived and reconnected to the city.
Place is "experienced most robustly" when it becomes an object of reflection and awareness (Basso 1996:54). In phenomenological terms, places as centers of activity, human significance, and emotional attachment are considered ontologically prior to space (Casey 1996). Anthropological studies of place are often situated in small communities (Feld and Basso 1996; Stewart 1996; Mueggler 2001), perhaps because the practices and understandings of place are more easily captured when considered on this scale. It may therefore seem surprising to claim that Odessans sense their city as a whole place, given its size, complexity, differing urban milieux, and the association of "wholeness" with the vision of planners. Like London's enthusiasts (Reed 2001), when My Odessa members walk Odessa's streets, they sense and make their city as place. How the cityscape unfolds for the walkers, enabling them to sense Odessa as place may be understood, following Hirsch (1995:4), by viewing the landscape as a cultural process created through the articulation of movements between poles of foreground and background, place and space, inside and outside, and image and representation. However, in contrast to Londoners who walk the city alone, the Odessans enjoy walking as a group, listening to Valerii's accounts, sharing stories with each other, and interacting with local residents. Thus, this article illustrates how sociability and dialogue are central to experiencing and making place similar to, but distinct from, the tourists described by Harrison (2003).
The club's practice of sensing place is inextricable from a process of sensing history. Anthropologists have explored how narratives of memory and history relate to the formation of identities. See, for example, Ballinger (2003) on the exiled Istrian Italians, and Brown (2003) for Krusevo residents in Macedonia. Yoneyama (1999) unraveled the politics of historical knowledge about Hiroshima in urban planning debates and survivors' testimonies. Cole (2001) focused on the absence of talk about colonialism among the Betsimisaraka of Madagascar, and Heatherington (1999) addressed the way elderly women and young men laid claims to spaces and history through cultural tactics appealing to the senses in Orgosolo, Sardinia. Other anthropologists have turned their attention to the way people sense history, pasts they have not themselves experienced, through dreams (Stewart 2003), and spirit possession (Lambek 2002). In a similar vein, walking is a means of sensing history. During walks, history is encountered in buildings, objects, ruins, monuments, stories, or other traces of the past in the urban landscape. At these moments, history is a diffuse feeling that may evoke or mingle with memories rather than the fixed form of a narrative. It is also a dialogic process in which, during discussions, the past is experienced as concrete and intangible, known and unknown.
Some anthropologists have related movement and the creation of spaces, places, and landscapes (Meyers 1991; Munn 1990; Pandya 1990), but a discussion of the meanings and forms of movements that make place is often only implicit (e.g., Reed 2002). However, Mueggler (2001) has analyzed walking in the context of ritual practice among the Zhizou, while Stewart (1996) has described Appalachians' encounter with history through roaming the hills. The experience of the city as place can occur through movement, for to walk is to "lack a place" (de Certeau 1988:103), meaning a point in a grid, rather than the existential, meaningful experience Casey (1996) describes, while space is "practical place" (de Certeau 1988:117). Although de Certeau and Casey appear to have contradictory understandings of place and space, they actually point to different aspects of the experience of place: it can be located and created through movement; it can be existential and social.
Walking as a place-making practice in Odessa raises the issue of emergent social forms in the postsocialist context. Analytical insights for this context are suggested by Mbembe's (2001) reflections on the African postcolony. He writes that positing a "before" and "after" colonialism fails to take into account that "every age is a combination of several temporalities," that "every age has contradictory significations to different actors," and that the present "is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering and maintaining the previous ones" (Mbembe 2001:15-16). Mbembe's observations can be used to illuminate how different temporalities and historicities are present in and constitute walking as a place-making practice in Odessa. This article examines the spatial concepts underlying walking, and the ways history is implicitly and explicitly entangled with the making of Odessa as place.
THE MY ODESSA CLUB
The My Odessa club was formed in 1995 by residents who participated in a local television program called "Where's That Street, Where's That Building?" This program was sponsored by a successful local real estate firm and aired at the time of the celebrations of Odessa's 200th anniversary in 1994. After seeing the shows, the head of the Association of Youth Clubs invited Valerii Netrebskii, the winner of the final game, to form a club under this umbrella...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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