Odessa w fotografii. Oczami architekta

Abstract

The essay presents Odessa shown through the eyes of a Polish architect, who draws attention primarily to its architecture, especially the images of the city captured in old photographs and in contemporary photo albums. Odessa of today shows through its architecture its recent wealth, dazzling pomp and splendour. But at the same time it reveals terrible wounds and scars after a long period of lack of care, negligence, or even devastation of the city. It is enough to look at the backyards of buildings renovated from the front, to leap aside just in time to escape plaster falling off from historical buildings, to drown one's shoes in holes in the asphalt of once prestigious boulevards. The revolutionary dislike to the capitalist, bourgeois, Jewish and multinational Odessa has survived the years of World War I and II, which were tragic for the city. The old Odessa will not come back, but it is like a palimpsest that allows reading the text of the great and heroic past under the surface of the difficult and painful present.