Yalta

Yalta stands on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Yalita, said to have been founded by settlers looking for a safe shore to land on. In the 14th century it joined the network of Genoese trading colonies along the Crimean coast as Etalita, or Galita. Its Greek Christians were moved to the Azov coast near Mariupol in 1778, and in 1783 Yalta passed to the Russian Empire with the rest of Crimea.

In the 19th century the town became a fashionable resort for the Russian aristocracy. Leo Tolstoy spent summers here, and Anton Chekhov bought a house, the White Dacha, in 1898, and lived there until 1902; he set "The Lady with the Dog" in Yalta and wrote Three Sisters here. The Massandra Palace was bought for Alexander III in 1889 and finished in 1900, and Nicholas II built the Livadia Palace in 1911.

After the revolution a 1920 decree of Lenin turned the Crimean coast over to the "medical treatment of the working people", and Yalta became the principal holiday resort of the Soviet Union; Stalin used Massandra as his summer residence. In 1945 the town came to worldwide attention when the "Big Three" powers — the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom — met at the Livadia Palace for the Yalta Conference, one of the Allied wartime conferences of the Second World War. After 1991 many wealthier visitors went abroad instead. In 2014 Russia seized and annexed Crimea, and the town has been under Russian control since.

Yalta's cultural identity rests on its resort history and on the writers and rulers who came here. Chekhov's White Dacha, a museum since 1921, is its best-known literary site, and the palaces of Livadia, Massandra and Alupka recall the imperial summers. The Yalta Conference made the town's name a byword for the post-war division of Europe.

The town is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking: at the 2001 census about two-thirds of residents were Russians and over a quarter Ukrainians, with small Belarusian and Crimean Tatar communities. The Crimean Tatars, the peninsula's indigenous Muslim people, were deported by Stalin in 1944 and began returning in 1989; after the 2014 annexation the Russian authorities declared their representative body, the Mejlis, extremist and banned it in 2016.

The rhythm of the town follows the sea. The waterfront promenade, with its cafés, amusements and statue of Lenin at the eastern end, is the place to stroll on summer evenings, and the Massandra cellars made Crimean wine part of the town's image. At Gurzuf, at the eastern end of Greater Yalta, a small monument to Pushkin stands on Cape Suuksu beside a medieval cemetery and tower.

About 77,000 people lived in the city at the 2014 census, and around 140,000 in the wider area of Greater Yalta, which runs along the coast from Foros in the west to Gurzuf in the east and takes in a string of resort settlements. In the 20th century Yalta was the principal holiday resort of the Soviet Union, and the town's life still revolves around its resorts, palaces and the Massandra winery.

Life follows the resort calendar: in summer the beaches, promenade and boats fill with holidaymakers, while in the cooler months the town is quieter. The trolleybus line to the railway station in Simferopol, almost 90 km long and the longest in Europe, links the coast with the rest of the peninsula, and buses and minibuses run along the shore between Livadia, the centre, Massandra and the botanical garden.

Since 2014 residents have lived under Russian administration and laws, with Russian passports, currency and schooling imposed, and pro-Ukrainian expression risks arrest. Ownership of the Massandra winery passed from the Ukrainian government to Russia after the annexation, a transfer the winery's own history records as illegal.

Crimean Tatar cooking is the peninsula's signature. Chebureks — çiberek in Crimean Tatar — are fried turnovers filled with minced meat, and yantıq is a close relative; laghman noodles and dolma are among the other best-known dishes. Crimean Karaite pies with meat, and the dishes of Crimea's Greeks, belong to the same mixed tradition.

The common Ukrainian table is here as well: red borscht of beets, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes and dill; varenyky dumplings; and holubtsi, cabbage rolls stuffed with rice or millet. Rice was first grown on a large scale in Crimea and the south in the Soviet era. The town's markets sell produce from the coast and the hills, with small cafés around the central market.

Wine has been made in Crimea for some two thousand years. The Massandra winery, founded by Prince Lev Golitsyn in 1894, has cellars holding one of the largest collections of wine in the world, and its tours end with a tasting.