Photos

In June of 1998 the cruise ship Silver Wind on which I was serving as the cultural enrichment lecturer visited a series of storied Ukrainian ports: Odessa, followed by Sevastopol (the site of the Crimean War of 1854), and finally Yalta.

Yalta had been propelled into historical significance near the end of WWII, when the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union held a summit conference on the Crimean Peninsula. They had convened, in order to discuss the final strategy of vanquishing Hitler's Third Reich, and deciding the fate of Eastern Europe after the expected cessation of hostilities. The meetings took place during a cold week — from February 4, 1945 to February 11, 1945 — when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chairman Joseph Stalin convened in the Grand Livadia Palace, in Yalta.

The Grand Livadia Palace had been built originally in the 1860s as a summer residence for the Royal Family, but in 1909 Czar Nicholas II had a new structure built in the Neo-Renaissance style. The coastal area on the Crimean Peninsula is dotted with palaces of the aristocratic rich that predate the Soviet Revolution, and with dachas of Communist leaders that postdate the Revolution.

The precipice on the grounds of the Grand Livadia Palace where I was standing to shoot the photo dropped off to the Black Sea coast, and, early in the morning when I was visiting the palace, a thick fog allowed limited visibility. My camera at the time was a Nikon-2020, loaded with Kodachrome-200 slide film. I recently scanned the slide for posting at TrekEarth. Except for minor cropping (roughly to the proportion of the golden rectangle, 1:1.618 or 494x800 pixels), no corrections or color enhancements were made to the image.