Sveta & Serguei
Black Death - and a Rant
I caught a ride through Feodosiya with a car driven by a burly gentleman, an Afghan war veteran, who took the opportunity to deliver an impassioned and damning invective against one politician after another. A rough precis as follow: "That Preaident Yanukhovich, of course he's mafia - you know he's been in prison twice? And of course Yushenko before him, they're all mafia, every one of them. What kind of country is it where people can’t support their children? Yanukhovich and everyone in government are s**ts because they create a country where people are unable to support themselves. There is no physical way that they can get money to feed their families so they have to live off other states - they have to go abroad to Italy and wipe the s**t off a***s because they can't pay for their children at home. The population has dropped by 10 million over the last twenty years and you know why? Because people are simply dying. How can pensioners live off a pension of 800 grivna? I'm on a pension, but at least I get an extra 140 grivni on top for being a veteran and of course everyone has to work too. But what if you have to actually survive on a pension? People are just dropping dead. A babushka can’t afford to go to chemist and get a test to see what the problem is, let alone treat it. Just to get a blood test, they have to pay first for the syringe and then the needle and then the swab, and if they can’t afford a bit of meat once a month, how are they going to pay for that? They’re ‘just dropping dead’...
“Can you smell that?” “ Smell what?” “The sewage from the streets. That’s the smell of corruption - this town has been here for two and a half thousand years but now the city mayor isn’t able to sort the drains out now. People managed in the past, but now there’s no management of the city.”
Apart from distinguishing itself as an ancient Greek city, Feodosiya also has the distinction of being the spot where, in 1346, the Black Death entered Europe when a besieging Mongol army used their siege catapults to hurl infested corpses over the city walls. The resulting plague would wipe out around half the population of Europe:
Traces of a Faded Soviet Civilisation
The kitsch fake Greek temple columns of Arkadia (previous post) are not so grossly inappropriate as they may seem. Feodosiya used to be an ancient Greek city, the trading port at that time called Kaffa, which the Greeks used as a base to trade with the Scythians (those with the crocks of gold under the kurgany in the Chekhovian landscape a few blog posts back). Here are traces of another past civilisation - the Soviets. The remnants of a Soviet temple of pleasure in Koktebel, where the elite who made the long journey from Moscow managed a brief escape to a more bohemian and permissive style of life. Koktebel was a hippy and clothing-optional get away from it all lifestyle destination within the Soviet Union for those in the know:
Kaffa, or Feodosiya, is still a port, still supplying the descendants of the Scythians in the steppe beyond with goods:
Et in Arkadia (sic) ego
More films scanned. Two views of Arcadia - Arcadia and Arkadia. The first is Koktebel, a place which I already recently blogged about whose name conjures up an association with utopia, partly because of Boris Khlebnikov's film Koktebel, where a young boy is trying to make it to the seemingly unattainable place. The second - Arkadia - is a spectacular night club in the form of a fake greek temple in the very centre of Feodosiya. Here is a young lad called Ruslan, who was passing by with his sister on the way to a music lesson, and paused to be recorded. He's a bit older than the hero of Koktebel, but also seemed fiercely independent and self-confident:
A bit more on the nature of happiness: a lucky magpie
As I took my journey around the Crimea and decided to try out a daily online diary for the first time, I was wondering whether it was a good idea or not. That's because I was really there, as a method of working, to take pictures on medium format film, and if at the same time I took a moment out to take a quick, inevitably slightly different, digital version of the same scene and posted it in the road diary, that might undermine in some way the final image. I guess it's the age old nervousness of opening up your ideas sketchbook before you show the final version - it might affect the way people saw the final. That's especially true because I had a wide angle lens for the medium format film that let me take pictures I couldn't with the (single fixed lens) digi camera. Yesterday's picture of the Kurgan in the Chekhov landscape is an example - in the road diary I had to post a 'cropped' version because of the lack of wide angle lens on the digi camera - which was fine for the sake of keeping the diary going, but in this image I much prefer the wider landscape shown in the medium format film.
Anyway, here are four of the film versions from some images I posted in the daily diary, some of them are close to the digital version - but the film version will blow up large nicer and has a somewhat different tonality - sometimes they are just different. In the case of the steps image, the magpie is only there in the film version.
I had first framed the steps simply because I liked the scene, and saw a kind of symbolism in the steps, but then the magpie landed on the wire above, and I immediately started thinking about 'luck', finding happiness or treasure - and so forth. I took a few pictures, and prayed he would flutter down and land on the steps. Amazingly, he did what I asked. Only for a moment before he hopped off down the steps, but long enough for me to take a frame on the medium format camera. Not long enough to take the same image for the 'road diary' on digital, but that was fine - I had had enough luck already, and I was happy.
All of this of course just happens to tie in rather nicely with Chekhov and yesterday's kurgan image, which is rather lucky!
So here are four images in their 'proper' film versions. First, the guide to the underground caves of Adzhimushkay (here is the original post that talks about the extraordinary story of the place). Then the magpie, followed by Koktebel (aka 'the promised land'), and then, Kerch.
BTW, in the Koktebel image of the roofs and the sea, there is just the tiniest hint of Crimea's Tartar past, a merest suggestion of the romantic, in the spike between the two roofs:
