A sober and unavoidable warning: Ukraine has been at war since 2022 and is not a safe tourist destination today. Odesa is even less so, because it is a major Black Sea port and a frequent target of long-range strikes that have damaged even its UNESCO-protected historic centre. This guide is informative and cultural: it is meant to help you learn about and appreciate Odesa and its extraordinary heritage, not to encourage travel in the current context.
With that said, Odesa deserves to have its story told. It is a unique city, unlike any other in Ukraine. Founded at the end of the 18th century on the Black Sea coast, it grew as a free port and the empire's cosmopolitan window on the world, with a population made up of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Greeks, Italians, French and many others. That is where its elegant 19th-century architecture, its humour, its music, its literature and the Mediterranean, mercantile and bohemian character that made it famous come from. Its historic centre was inscribed by UNESCO in 2023, in the middle of the war, both as recognition and as a gesture of protection.
This guide covers the Odesa worth getting to know: the Potemkin Stairs and Prymorsky Boulevard, the Opera House (one of the most beautiful in Europe), Deribasivska Street, the historic centre and its palaces, the catacombs and the beaches. It also has the practical information you need to understand the city, such as currency, Ukrzaliznytsia trains and how the city is laid out. Throughout, it soberly keeps in mind that any real plan depends on the security situation allowing it and on the city no longer being a target.
By European standards Odesa is a young city. It was officially founded in 1794 by order of Empress Catherine the Great, on the site of an earlier settlement, as the Russian Empire's great Black Sea port. It owed its growth to administrators such as the Duke de Richelieu and Count Vorontsov, and to its status as a free port. That status made it a rich, cosmopolitan and multicultural city, with a huge Jewish community and Greek, Italian and many other communities. In the 19th century its neoclassical architecture and cultural life flourished. The Potemkin Stairs became world-famous through Eisenstein's film 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925). Odesa went through the revolution, both world wars, occupation and the Holocaust, and the Soviet era. After independence in 1991 it remained Ukraine's great port. Its historic centre has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2023, inscribed in the middle of the war. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Black Sea Ukraine: Odesa, the port city founded by Catherine the Great, cosmopolitan and rebellious, cradle of a great Jewish culture and setting of the battleship Potemkin and its famous stairs.
Read the history of The south (Odesa) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Odesa is a young city, and that youth explains much of its character. Where the city stands today there were earlier settlements and, shortly before its founding, a small Ottoman fortress called Hacibey (Hocabey), on the northwestern coast of the Black Sea. After the Russo-Turkish wars of the 18th century, the Russian Empire took this strip of coast, known as New Russia, and decided to build a great port there that would give it access to the Black Sea and to world trade.
The official founding of Odesa is dated to 1794, by order of Empress Catherine the Great. Notable figures took part in the project, such as José de Ribas, a military man of Spanish and Neapolitan origin (who gives his name to Deribasivska Street), and the engineer Franz de Volland, who designed the grid of wide streets that still defines the historic centre. According to tradition, the name 'Odesa' was inspired by the ancient Greek colony of Odessos, a nod to the classical world very typical of the period.
From the start, Odesa was conceived as a modern, planned city, open to the sea and to trade. Its growth was dizzying: in just a few decades it went from a handful of houses to one of the most important cities in the empire, drawing merchants and settlers from all over Europe and the Mediterranean.
The 19th century was Odesa's great era. Two administrators shaped its rise: the Duc de Richelieu, a French émigré nobleman who was its first governor and to whom the famous statue at the top of the stairs is dedicated, and later Count Mikhail Vorontsov. But the decisive factor was economic: in 1819 Odesa was granted free-port status, which exempted trade from customs duties and turned the city into a magnet for merchants from all over the world.
Through its port flowed the wheat of Ukraine's fertile steppes (the 'breadbasket of Europe') to the whole Mediterranean and beyond, while goods, ideas and people came in. Odesa filled with Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, Greek, Italian, French, German, Armenian and many other merchants. That mix gave the city a cosmopolitan, multilingual and distinctive character, with a huge, thriving Jewish community that would become one of the largest in Europe and one of the most influential in culture, commerce and intellectual life.
The wealth took shape in splendid architecture: the neoclassical and eclectic palaces and buildings of the centre, Prymorsky Boulevard, the monumental stairway down to the port (completed around 1841) and the Opera Theatre. Odesa also became a major cultural centre: writers such as Pushkin (exiled there for a time) passed through or lived in the city, and later a whole host of authors, musicians and humorists created the unmistakable 'Odesa spirit': ironic, full of life and mixed.
The turbulent 20th century hit Odesa hard. In 1905, during the revolution that shook the Russian Empire, the city was the scene of a famous uprising: the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied and sought refuge in the port of Odesa, and the crackdown that followed left many dead. Two decades later, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein immortalised those events in his film 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925). Its famous stairway scene, a massacre of civilians filmed with real genius, made Odesa's stairs world-famous, so much so that today they are known as the Potemkin Stairs.
After the 1917 Revolution and the civil war, Odesa became part of Soviet Ukraine. But the greatest tragedy came with the Second World War. In 1941, after a long and hard defence, the city was occupied by Axis forces and placed under Romanian administration (Romania was allied with Nazi Germany) in the region known as Transnistria. The Holocaust was unleashed during the occupation: Odesa's huge and very old Jewish community, one of the most important in Europe, suffered massacres, deportations and extermination. Tens of thousands of Jews from Odesa and the region were murdered. This is a memory that must be named precisely and without euphemisms: in those years the city lost an essential part of its population and of its cosmopolitan soul.
Odesa was liberated in 1944 and, for the resistance of its people and its partisans (some of whom fought from the catacombs), it received the Soviet title of 'Hero City'. But post-war Odesa would never again be the dazzling multicultural city it had been before the catastrophe.
In the post-war decades, Odesa remained the great port of the Soviet south and an important industrial, naval, scientific and cultural centre, as well as a Black Sea summer destination. It kept its reputation as a witty, bohemian city, home to humorists, musicians and writers, and, despite everything, kept alive part of its multilingual, mixed identity. The beaches of Arcadia, the atmosphere of the old centre and Odesa humour were part of the imagination of the whole Soviet Union.
With Ukraine's independence in 1991, Odesa became the new state's main seaport and one of its largest cities. Its role as a major grain export port kept it at the heart of the Ukrainian economy and of world food trade. The city kept cultivating its own character, its 19th-century heritage and its cultural life, and worked on restoring its historic centre.
This recognition peaked in January 2023, when UNESCO inscribed the historic centre of Odesa on the World Heritage List, and at the same time on the List of World Heritage in Danger, an exceptional step taken in the middle of a war to recognise its universal value and strengthen its protection.
Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 put Odesa at the centre of the war. As the main Black Sea port and the outlet for Ukrainian grain to the world, the city and its region took on huge strategic value, both military and economic. Odesa prepared for a possible offensive by sea and land that in the end never reached the city, but it remained permanently exposed to long-range attacks.
Since then, Odesa has been hit again and again by missile and drone attacks aimed mainly at its port and energy infrastructure, as part of the struggle over grain exports and the blockade and reopening of the Black Sea. Some of these attacks have caused casualties and damaged buildings in the UNESCO-protected historic centre, including the area around the Transfiguration Cathedral, one of the city's landmark churches, which was hit in 2023. The destruction of heritage in a World Heritage city drew international condemnation.
Despite everything, Odesa has stayed alive and kept resisting. The Opera Theatre reopened in June 2022 as a symbol of cultural continuity; the people of Odesa protected their monuments with sandbags and structures, and the city kept its rhythm going as far as possible. Today Odesa lives this double reality: a great historic, cosmopolitan Black Sea city, and a wartime target living with air-raid alerts, curfews and attacks. That is why, put plainly, it is not a tourist destination today: it is a city at war whose admirable heritage is waiting for peace to show itself to the world again.
