Editor's note: The following story published April 18, 2004, in the Times Union's Travel section, along with the photos in this gallery.
A sign in Cyrillic on top of the airport terminal came into view as our jet taxied in. Eleven armed men eyed me as I arrived at the visa checkpoint. The line of travelers inched toward one of the security enclosures, where a uniformed woman addressed another traveler in Ukrainian, flashing a set of metal-plated teeth. I shuffled into another line, hoping for a more amiable encounter. The decor of the airport looked as if it hadn't changed since Brezhnev, and I began to feel as if I were in an episode of that Cold War staple, "The Twilight Zone."
I had arrived at Borispol Airport in Kiev, Ukraine. My destination: the Crimean Peninsula.
Even during the high season of summer, the Crimea is not among the most popular destinations for Westerners who pass through the remnants of the Iron Curtain. The most likely travelers are family members and vacationers from the former Soviet Republics. There currently are no direct intercontinental flights servicing Simferopol Airport, located in the center of the peninsula. My best available route was to take a two-hour commuter flight from Borispol. But in order to get a sense of the landscape, I had decided to take the 16-hour train trip.
It was an unlikely sort of vacation I was undertaking, a journey that emerged from my teenage years. My attraction to the Soviet Republics began at my high school, which was part of the Kentucky Mountain Holiness Association. This missions-minded group, which still ministers, attempts to serve the millions denied religious freedom.
The prayer meetings were intended for people whose faces I could not see veiled by the ideological separation of communism. One visiting missionary had directed our student body to sing a hymn in a whisper — the better to identify with Christians in the U.S.S.R., who worshipped underground.
Although customs officials were courteous to me, the bus ride from the airport to Kiev's train station was as daunting as the arrival at the airport had been. Every 150 yards on either side of the road, armed guards scanned the traffic. This arrangement continued for at least three miles. (At first, I thought they were monuments.) On the speaker system, the Beatles and '70s disco mixed with Slavic tunes. On the road, Audis, Volkswagens and Volvos mixed with Russian-made Ladas and Volgas.
A guest in Saki
The view by train would essentially be the same five minutes' worth of landscape endlessly repeated: a patchwork of dilapidated housing breaking up farmland that had been leached of all color by winter.
Arriving in Simferopol, I took a 30-mile trip by taxi to Saki, a resort town with a population of 65,000 — about the size of Schenectady — on the steppe of the southwestern Crimean coast. To the east and south, the Crimean Mountains rise sharply to define the coastal cities of Yalta and Sevastopol (actually pronounced ser-ah-STO-pol).
At the peak of its tourist boom, Saki was famous for its mineral-rich mud baths, prescribed to treat ailments ranging from arthritis to impotence. Legend holds that in the Middle Ages, a Ukrainian hero named Chumak got stuck in Saki's mud overnight while escaping from the Tatar.
The mud is said to have rejuvenated the Cossack, and even cured his impotence. Even today, Saki's spas and sanatoriums cater to visitors from the former Soviet republics.
Through a complex web of friends and connections, I had made contact with the Pavlenko family, who have lived in Saki since the 1970s. I would be staying with them, and their 19-year-old son, Vanya — who had studied English for nine years — would serve as my principal translator throughout the trip. His mother, Tatiana, was a well-connected lawyer in the region. With the help of two taxi drivers, Sasha and Igor, I was ready to explore.
Passers-by in the Pavlenkos' part of Saki reflected the contrasts of generations. Babushkas shuffled along wearing long tweed coats and head scarves, while teenage girls wore fashions similar to those seen at my daughter's middle school in Delmar. Because cars still are a luxury, many walk or take the bus.
While Saki's health care services and its Central Park reflected a mix of modern design and traditional elegance, it was typical of the Crimean cities I would see that were blighted by austere concrete apartment buildings. The Soviet vision for middle-class living didn't allow much room for aesthetics beyond the stripped look of the Bauhaus school. But the interiors of these complexes demonstrated how families turned the official design inside out with furnishings and decoration, including ornate stenciling and rugs.
A troubled history
On the Crimean Peninsula, people don't have many fond memories of Nikita Khrushchev.
It was, after all, Khrushchev who handed the Crimea off to Ukraine in 1954, 171 years after Catherine the Great annexed the region and populated it with Russians. The official version of the story insists that Khrushchev was uniting Russians and Ukrainians to honor a 17th-century treaty.
So when Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, Crimea went with it.
As in almost everycorner of the former Soviet Union, economic opportunity commingles with hardship. A typical monthly salary is $100, but clothing and imported goods have retail prices comparable to those in United States. A local judge presented me a wallet that I learned later had cost about half her monthly salary.
Funding for maintenance of the memorial to Saki's World War II dead has been cut; when I passed by, a squirrel sat on the extinguished burner of the eternal flame, working on a nut.
By midweek, my fascination with the culture turned increasingly journalistic. In Saki, I saw no news reporting, much less the newspaper mailboxes that dot American cities and towns.
At dusk, the streetlights in the neighborhood stayed off. Main roads are maintained by federal funds; some secondary roads are filled with potholes. Igor, my driver, said taxi drivers memorize where the holes are.
Family-owned roadside produce stands are a common sight between Crimean towns — areminder of this region's economic heritage. In Saki, I met Vladimir Tzibro, a former police officer who last fall opened a well-stocked electronics and appliances store called Kiev. By my midday visit, he had sold one refrigerator, two cellphone packages and one computer system. "This is a good day," he said.
Vodka, another reality of the culture, derailed my much-awaited trip to Sevastopol, home of Russia's Black Sea fleet and the Crimean War site that inspired Alfred Lord Tennyson's fateful narrative poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Our guide drank too much beforehand and canceled the trip.
A land of change
Even as the free market takes root in the Crimea, statues of Lenin are everywhere. But slowly, the image of the father of the revolution is being overtaken by those of the Eastern Orthodox saints such as St. George, St. John and St. Nicolai, who appear in icons mounted in taxis, buses and homes.
The cultural and spiritual revival of the Eastern Orthodox church was readily apparent in Crimean towns, where churches have emerged as community centers attended by young and old.
In the same way, discussions of politics and religion — studded with grievances long suppressed by communism — cropped up in almost every community I visited. As a gift, one man presented me a ring with a Cyrillic inscription: "God save and protect me.'' He said if I wore it, I would remember to pray for his family often — a benediction that sent me straight back to my high school days.
My host family traveled with me to the town of Bakhchisaray, where the 15th-century Uspenski Orthodox Monastery is embedded in the side of the Crimean Mountains. My translator, Vanya, had last visited it as small child on a school field trip before the Soviet breakup. "It was simply ruins of another era," he remarked as we surveyed its brilliant restoration.
Our guide had informed the abbot that an American had arrived to visit the temple. From a centuries-old parsonage, the bearded man emerged wearing a black Nike jacket. A monk walked briskly past us carrying his black Adidas sport bag.
Nearby, the 16th-century architectural wonder of the Khan's Palace adds to the religious mosaic that has defined Crimea for centuries. The sprawling palace shows the integration of Ottoman and European artistic influences.
A taste of the West
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin turned the city of Yalta into a history-test question when they met here in 1945 to sketch out the future of postwar Europe. This southern Crimean city on the coast of the Black Sea was a favorite Soviet tourist destination, a place where children could be warehoused in numerous nearby sanatoriums while their parents vacationed. Today, the tourist economy makes it the most-Western European resort on the peninsula. My American Express traveler's checks were declined at a fine restaurant; Visa worked.
The familiar golden arches were easy to spot in Yalta, and the sign seemed taller and brighter than Lenin's statue. I tried out my Russian: "Ya Amyereekanyets." In broken English, the cashier replied with a smile, "Big Mac ... fries? Large? Small?" The taste of the meal: exactly like McDonald's on Wolf Road.
I flew back to Kiev at the end of my week with Vanya. I had received so many gifts that I was concerned with exceeding my passenger weight limit; even more precious were the connections I had made with the people I had met.
With apprehension, I entered Borispol Airport again, and endured seven passport and visa checkpoints. As I stepped on the escalator on the way to my gate, I watched a group of young Lubavitch men as they locked arms and stepped around a tight circle, singing a celebratory song. (Several of them ended up on my flight to New York City; they were finishing several months of mission and community work in the Kiev area.)
I watched as passengers, baggage checkers and security officials paused to watch the men as they sang in a voice that filled the terminal. I thought back to the American missionary who had journeyed so far and returned to a Kentucky high school to sing in a whisper.
I didn't know what the men were singing about, but to me it sounded like an answered prayer.