So there in the steps, statue and dissolute Deribasovskaya are the three extraordinary men who founded this unique French-Jewish city on the Black Sea. On 14 September 1789, Prince Potemkin captured the Turkish fortress of Hadjibey and ordered that a port and city be built there, but he died two years later before anything could be completed. His successor, Richelieu, continued the Prince's policy of attracting settlers. Grain made Odessa rich. The Richelieu Steps were built in 1841 to commemorate the Frenchman, who returned after Waterloo to be prime minister of France.
Today there are bars, even an electrical shop called Potemkin.
The Potemkin Steps of course entered our cultural vernacular in Eisenstein's movie Battleship Potemkin, which feature that massacre scene that has been reused so often, most recently in The Untouchables. After I have worked in the Odessa State Local History Museum's archives, I am fortunate enough to be lent a car and driver-bodyguard, armed with mobile phone and Makarov pistol, by a friendly shipping tycoon, and set off for Sevastopol on my Potemkin Tour. After Ochakov, the Turkish fortress he took in 1788, we stop at Kherson, the first city Potemkin founded in 1778, soon after the end of his passionate love affair with Catherine when she had finally released him to become the statesman he was so qualified to be. I visit his marble grave at St Catherine's Church. Sure enough, on the quay, there is an ugly Soviet monument, not unlike our own Blue Peter insignia.