Book DescriptionOdessa, the city founded by Catherine the Great in 1794 on the Black Sea, became a thriving international crossroads less than a century after its creation. This virtual "melting pot of Russia"--the gateway to Russia from Constantinople, Athens, Venice, Marseilles, and Genoa, and the third largest metropolis in the country--quickly rose to prominence as a European cultural capital and a vibrant center of Jewish culture. Odessa in its prime shared with St. Petersburg the distinction of being one of the few places in Russia where international ideas and commerce could flourish. In this album of pre-1917 Odessa, Nicolas Iljine has assembled a wealth of old postcards, rare photographs and illustrations from private archives, colorful posters and advertisements, and materials from the Russian National Library that have never before been published, to recapture a lost time in the life of one of the world?s great romantic cities. Historian Patricia Herlihy?s...