Who ruled Odesa?

Odesa is Ukraine's largest port, built on low cliffs above a bay of the north-western Black Sea, between the mouths of the Dniester and the Southern Bug. As a city it is young, founded by imperial decree in 1794, but the site had been a harbour for Greek traders, steppe nomads, Lithuanian grain merchants and Ottoman garrisons long before. Its history is that of a planned free-trading port that drew settlers from all over Europe and became one of the great commercial and cultural cities of the Russian Empire, and then lived through revolution, genocide and war.

Greek colonists had a trading settlement on the bay by the middle of the sixth century BCE, and remains of it have been excavated beneath the city's seaside boulevard. Over the following two thousand years the coast belonged to whichever nomadic power held the steppe: Scythians and Sarmatians, later Pechenegs and Cumans, and from the thirteenth century the Golden Horde. Genoese merchants traded along the coast in the fourteenth century. A harbour called Khadjibey is first recorded in 1415, when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania shipped grain from it to Constantinople. By the early sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire and its vassal, the Crimean Khanate, controlled the shore, and in the eighteenth century the Ottomans rebuilt the fortress there as Yeni Dünya, the "New World".

Russian troops, among them Zaporozhian Cossacks and a Spanish-born officer in Russian service, José de Ribas, stormed Khadjibey in 1789, and the Treaty of Jassy confirmed the coast as Russian in 1792. In 1794 Catherine the Great ordered a naval harbour and trading town to be built there, and it was soon renamed Odessa, after the ancient Greek colony of Odessos. The real builder of the city was the Duc de Richelieu, a French émigré who governed it from 1803 to 1814 and laid out its broad streets, theatre and port. Odesa's ice-free harbour shipped the wheat of the Ukrainian steppe to Europe, and from 1819 to 1858 it enjoyed free-port status.

Greeks, Italians, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Armenians and Germans settled in the new city, and Italian was long a language of commerce. Greek exiles founded the secret society Filiki Eteria here in 1814, which helped launch the Greek War of Independence. Alexander Pushkin spent a year in exile in the city in the 1820s. By 1900 Odesa was the fourth-largest city in the empire and its Jewish community one of the largest in the world, but repeated pogroms, the worst in 1905, drove many to emigrate. In June 1905 the mutinous battleship Potemkin anchored off the port, an episode later made famous by Sergei Eisenstein's film.

During the revolution and civil war the city changed hands repeatedly between Ukrainian, Bolshevik, White and French forces before Soviet rule was secured in 1920. In World War II Romanian and German troops besieged Odesa for 73 days in 1941, and after it fell on 16 October it became the capital of the Romanian-run territory of Transnistria. In the massacres of October 1941 and the deportations that followed, the great majority of Odesa's remaining Jews were murdered, one of the worst single crimes of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Partisans held out in the limestone catacombs beneath the city until the Red Army returned on 10 April 1944.

Rebuilt as a major Soviet port and resort, Odesa became part of independent Ukraine in 1991. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 it has been struck repeatedly by missiles and drones, which have damaged port facilities and historic buildings. In January 2023 UNESCO added its historic centre to the World Heritage List and the List of World Heritage in Danger. Before the war the city had about one million inhabitants, and it remains Ukraine's main gateway for grain exports by sea.