Odessa Letter:At the top of the Potemkin Steps, a Frenchman surveys a vista immortalised by a Latvian-born Soviet filmmaker in what is now a Ukrainian city, which communities of Jews, Turks, Poles and Greeks, among others, have for centuries called home, writes Daniel McLaughlin
Odesa, as Ukrainians have it - Odessa for the city's many Russians - never succumbed easily to tidy definition, always revelled in transgression.
From 1794, when Catherine the Great ordered the city built on the ruins of an Ottoman fortress, extending Russia to the Black Sea and opening a window on the Mediterranean, it has been the deepest, spiciest melting pot of Europe's far east.
Duc de Richelieu fled the French Revolution to become the celebrated first governor of Odessa, and now his statue gazes out past a shimmering monolith of a hotel and Ukraine's biggest port towards Crimea, the open sea and Turkey far beyond.
Richelieu arrived in Odessa having served in the Russian army following his flight from France, where one of his last acts was reputedly disguising himself as a commoner and making his way through the chaos of revolutionary Paris to give warning to Marie Antoinette, something that is credited with saving her life, albeit temporarily.
The French nobleman revelled in the creation of a city, and in his governance of a surrounding region named Novorossiya, or "New Russia", and Poles, Italians, Germans, Jews and Greeks soon settled there, along with Russian and Ukrainian peasants who escaped serfdom by helping populate this exotic outer reach of the empire.
By the time Richelieu returned to France in 1814, Odessa had 35,000 residents, a stock exchange and a cathedral and was about to undergo a huge economic boom and influx of people - including many fugitives, crooks and con-artists among the peasants and entrepreneurs - when it was declared a free port to encourage international trade.
By the 1880s, Odessa was Russia's second largest port, mostly due to the flow of grain from Ukraine and Poland, much of which was under Tsarist control after 1795, when the Third Partition divided the country between Prussia, Austria and Russia.
Polish revolutionaries were exiled to Odessa, including the young Adam Mickiewicz, whom Poles revere as their national bard, but whose dalliances with various women in permissive Odessa they often like to forget.
Mickiewicz arrived in Odessa a year after another reckless literary tyro - Alexander Pushkin - had been expelled from the city for having an affair with the governor-general's wife, at the same time as starting his great novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.
Suspended between Russia and the world, Europe and Asia, drawing the daring and the desperate to the sea, luring the sailor and his cargo towards land, Odessa has always been an edgy, irreverent city, alive with whispers of fortune and ruin, whose people meet both with a sharp wit best captured by a son of the city, Isaac Babel, in his Odessa Tales.
In 1905, it was here that a crew of the Tsarist navy refused to eat maggot-riddled meat and mutinied against their officers, as depicted in Sergei Eisenstein's classic 1925 Soviet film, Battleship Potemkin.
Eisenstein, a Jew born in Riga when it was also part of the Russian empire, immortalised the Potemkin Steps in a scene showing protesters gunned down by Tsarist Cossack troops and a pram bouncing down the long flight of stairs towards the sea.
The 140m-long flight is unremarkable from the top - save for the fact that only the 10 broad landings that break the descent, not the steps themselves, can be seen.
From the bottom, however, the sight is extraordinary: the stairs narrow towards the top, so they appear far higher and steeper than they really are, and only the 192 risers - and none of the flat landings - are visible. At the top, Richelieu seems to float over the scene, resplendent in a Roman toga.
Behind his statue, a grid of shady tree-lined streets spreads inland, notable among them Derybasivska, a parade of bars and cafes named after one José de Ribas, a Spanish general who oversaw the construction of Odessa following the death of his superior Grigory Potemkin, one of Catherine the Great's many lovers.
Now more than 200 years old, the story of Odessa does not get any simpler.
Many of its residents still feel more Russian than Ukrainian, and voted for the pro-Moscow candidate in last month's general election; and this week, Ukrainian nationalists and Cossacks clashed with police over a new statue of Catherine the Great, whom they call an imperialist tyrant.
Oleg Gubar, a local historian, said the row was typical Odessa.
"Cossacks swore allegiance to Catherine the Great, Polish kings and Turkish sultans," he sighed. "This was simply the nature of their work."