Odesa

The site was a fortress called Khadjibey, first mentioned in 1415, when a grain ship sailed from it to Constantinople, and under Ottoman control from the 16th century. Russian forces under Suvorov and Gudovich took it in 1789, and in 1794 Catherine II ordered a naval harbour and trading place built there. The town was renamed Odessa in 1795 after an ancient Greek colony believed to have stood nearby. The Spaniard José de Ribas, head of its military and civil administration, directed the building of the town; the Duc de Richelieu, governor from 1803 to 1814, planned much of the city, and his successor Count Langeron made it a free port.

The new port drew Greeks, Italians, Jews, Albanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Germans and many others, and by 1897 Jews made up about 37 per cent of the population. Italian architects such as Francesco Boffo and Giovanni Torricelli designed buildings of the central district, and the Greek patriotic society Filiki Eteria was founded here in 1814. In 1905 the city rose in a workers' uprising supported by the crew of the battleship Potemkin, later immortalised by Eisenstein. In 1941 Romanian and German troops besieged Odesa for 73 days; under the Romanian occupation that followed, about 25,000 Odesans were murdered in the 1941 Odessa massacre and over 35,000 deported, while partisans fought on in the catacombs until the Red Army retook the city on 10 April 1944.

In independent Ukraine Odesa remained the country's main port. Since 2022 it has been under repeated Russian missile and drone attack aimed at its port, energy system and residential districts. In January 2023 UNESCO added the historic centre to the World Heritage List and to its list of sites in danger, and in October 2025 President Zelensky placed the city under a military administration after the mayor's Ukrainian citizenship was revoked.

Odesa sees itself as a city apart: cosmopolitan, irreverent and fond of jokes. Its Russian has a distinctive accent, and by the 1970s it had become known as the "capital of Soviet humour". Isaac Babel's Odessa Tales made the gangsters and traders of Moldavanka famous, and the city produced many other writers and musicians; between the 1970s and the 1990s most of Odesa's Jews emigrated, many ending up in Brighton Beach in New York, nicknamed "Little Odesa".

The opera house of 1887 is the city's pride, and Odesa also has a philharmonic hall modelled on the Doge's Palace and a cluster of museums of fine art, archaeology and Western and Eastern art. April Fools' Day, on 1 April, is one of the most celebrated days of the year, and since 2010 the Odesa International Film Festival has been held each July, with open-air screenings on the Potemkin Stairs in peacetime; during the war parts have moved abroad and to Chernivtsi.

The city has many religious traditions — Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish and others — reflected in its churches and synagogues. Language is changing fast: in a 2023 survey most residents still spoke Russian at home, while across Odesa Oblast the share speaking Ukrainian at home rose from about a quarter in 2021 to 42 per cent in 2023.

About 1,010,000 people lived in Odesa at the start of 2022, making it the third-largest city in Ukraine. Since 2000 much of the city has been a free economic zone, and its life is bound up with the sea: the port and the nearby terminals handle grain and other cargo, the Seventh-Kilometer Market on the outskirts is one of the largest market complexes in Eastern Europe, and Derybasivska Street is the main shopping street.

Most people live in apartment blocks spread out from the old centre, in districts such as Moldavanka and along the coast towards Arcadia. In summer the beaches, which line most of the waterfront outside the port, have long been the centre of local life.

The war has reshaped the routine. Air-raid alerts, nights of drone and missile attacks, and outages of power, water and heating after strikes on the grid are part of life, and attacks on ships carrying grain and other cargo have killed seamen and port workers. The city is governed by a military administration created in October 2025.

Odesa has a culinary tradition of its own, shaped by the sea and by the many peoples who settled the port. Gobies, small Black Sea fish, are the city's typical dish, eaten dried or fried in a batter. Forshmak, chopped herring served with boiled potatoes, onions and eggs, comes from the Jewish kitchen and is popular in Odesa and Dnipro, and nearby Kherson is known for aubergines fried in oil with paprika and apple vinegar and for aubergine "caviar", or ikra.

The common Ukrainian table is here too: red borscht of beets, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onions, garlic and dill; varenyky dumplings filled with potato and fried onion, quark or cherries; and holubtsi, cabbage rolls stuffed with rice or millet and often meat. Rice became an everyday food in the south in the Soviet era, when it was first grown on a large scale in the Odesa, Kherson and Crimean regions.

The Pryvoz market, trading since 1827, is where the city shops for fish, meat and produce. Ukrainian wine, horilka spirit and kvass are the traditional drinks.