Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 79, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1916 — RUSSIA'S BLACK SEA PORT [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

RUSSIA'S BLACK SEA PORT

ODESSA, Russia’s first naval base on the Black sea and the starting point for over-the-wa-, ter attacks on Bulgaria, European Turkey and Asia Minor, is the. most imposing milestone on the Muscovite’s shortening road to Constantinople and the warm waters of the Mediterranean, says a bulletin of the National Geographic society. The great and flourishing port is one of the youngest cities of the East, for it was founded by Catherine II after her war of conquest against the Turk had ended in the treaty of Jassy in 1791, and its foundation was largely due to the desire to have a strong city just as near to Constantinople as possible, as a well-equipped point of departure for Slav armies of future generations. It is said that the Russian is the dreamiest and the longest-memorled of all the races of Europe, and it has been on its way toward the world-city on the Bosporus, where its national faith was cradled, ever since Arab invaders broke the communication between Santa Sophia and the Russian church in the ninth century. The only un-American thing about Odessa, Mark Twain said, are the cut of its droshkies and the stupendous girth of their drivers. The city is modern, new, and more European or American than any other city in the czar’s empire, with the exception of Petrograd.

Becomes Great City in a Century. Odessa has only recently passed its one hundredth year, yet, at the outbreak of the war, it was ranked by but three other cities in the empire for size and commercial Importance—Petrograd, Moscow and Warsaw. A few huts of mud and reeds and a Turkish fort were all that marked the site, when Catherine the Great commanded % cltfr here. In 1802, eight years after its foundation, it numbered 9,000 Greeks, Italians, Russians and Albanians. It enjoyed, however, unusual imperial patronage for strategical reasons; even the Emperor Paul, who delighted to make vain all that owed its title to hl> mother, continued to favor the young town. A statue of Catherine, reprdhented trampling the Turkish flag under-foot, stands on one of the finest squares. Today the city,

wealthy, and Important among world ports, houses more than half a million people. The city lies on a semicircular bay, about midway between the mouths of the great Russian rivers, Dniester and Dnieper. It is 1,017 miles south-south-west from Moscow by rail and 010 miles south from Kief. Varna, the nearest Bulgarian port, and one recently bombarded by the Russians, lies 290 miles across the Black sea to the southwest. ——— - Has Six Fine Harbors. Odessa is builded in the midst of a dreary steppe. It is regularly laid out in broad streets, faced with substantial modern buildings, and wears its commercial prosperity patent to the most casual visitor. Its port la equipped with six good harbors—-the quarantine harbor, coal harbor, petroleum harbor, new harbor, "practical” harbor, and the harbor of the Russian Company for Navigation and Commerce, the principal shipping company of the port. The freezing of the harbors and the bay interrupts navigation for an average of 16 days each year. Novprossia, or New Russia, which includes the governments of Bessarabia and Kherson, has its intellectual and commercial capital at Odessa. The social capital is also there, and the life of thd metropolis has been described as much more gay than the life of Paris or Vienna. The nights in the Odessa of pre-war days were, giddy and irresponsible, the avenues filled with people and ablaze with cases until early morning hours. The merrymaking of Odessa did not really begin in the cases chantants until midnight, and its gayeties lasted until between three and five in the morning. There was a dark side to the picture, the usual one to contrast with the bright in every great city. A miserable army of poor, whose ranks were largely filled by the tides of transient labor that washed the greatest trading city of southern Russia, lived from hand to mouth on stray fcrumbs of the place's prosperity. The number of the very poor was estimated at 35,000, and many of them lived in the extensive catacombs beneath the ci£y, which were formed by the quarrying of sandstone for building.

Looking over the Harbor or Odessa

THE HANDSOME, OPERA HOUSE