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:

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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:

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Kaffa, or Feodosiya, is still a port, still supplying the descendants of the Scythians in the steppe beyond with goods:

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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:

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