Catherine’s Greek Plan renamed a Black Sea port Odessa
Odesa (also Odessa) is Ukraine’s third-largest city and a warm-water Black Sea transport hub, seat of oblast and raion government. Classical Greeks settled nearby by the mid-sixth century BCE; Slavic Kotsiubijiv later appears in chronicles under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Odesa sits on the northwestern rim of the Black Sea in Ukraine's south-west, ranks third among Ukrainian cities by population, and serves as the seat of both Odesa Raion and Odesa Oblast. A January 2021 estimate put residents at about 1,010,537. Locals and admirers call it the Pearl by the Sea, the Southern Capital, Southern Palmyra or simply Odesa-mama.
Settlement here reaches back to a sizeable Greek town founded no later than the mid-6th century BC, which scholars have investigated as a candidate for ancient Histria. A Slavic harbour named Kotsiubijiv, belonging to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, enters the chronicles in 1415, when a vessel sailed from it to Constantinople. Ottoman rule began in 1529 under the name Hacibey and lasted until the Ottomans lost the Russo-Turkish War in 1792. Two years later Catherine II decreed a naval harbour and trading post at Khadjibey.
The Odessa name arrived in 1795 as part of Catherine's Greek Plan; her Secretary of State Adrian Gribovsky later wrote that he had proposed it, a boast some doubted while others cited his honest reputation. The name is a Slavic feminine form of Odessos, a Greek colony founded around the turn of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, distinct from an older Odessos at modern Varna dating to about 610 BC. Researchers have tried to place the lost site roughly 40 km northeast, near Koshary by the Tylihul Estuary. Odesa was a free port from 1819 to 1858, stood fourth among Russian imperial cities in the 19th century, and later served the Soviets as a trading port and naval base.
Today the ice-free harbour includes the Port of Odesa and the suburban oil terminal Port Pivdennyi, with Chornomorsk in the same oblast to the south-west; together they feed the railways, and pipelines tie local oil and chemical plants to European networks. In 2000 the Quarantine Pier received free-port and free-economic-zone status for 25 years. On 25 January 2023 UNESCO listed the historic centre as a World Heritage Site in Danger, honouring its multicultural character and 19th-century planning after Russian bombing damaged buildings across the city.
Source: Odesa
