DERYBASIVSKA STREET (ДЕРИБАСОВСКАЯ УЛИЦА)

"On Deribasivska opened a brewery...", thus begins a famous odesite song, dedicated to the city's most famous, appreciated and eventful street. Although Odessa is full of elegant streets lined with magnificent palaces, Deribasovskaia Street is "the best street in the world" as Vladimir Jabotinsky described it and since the city's foundation, it has been populated with songs and anecdotes from the rich local folklore. A pedestrian street, it is overflowing with restaurants, cafés, bars and shops of all kinds and above all it is full of life day and night.

Here is the Passage (Пассаж). This elegant shopping mall, built from 1898 to 1899 by architect Lev Vlodek, was inaugurated on 23 January 1900. The building connects Deribasovskaya and Preobrazhenska streets and houses an eponymous hotel and numerous shops. The corridors are covered by a glass vault and the walls are decorated with casts and numerous baroque sculptures. On the roof, framing the entrance to the gallery that overlooks Deribasovskaya Street, one can recognize, despite its dilapidation, the statue of the Greek God Mercury perched on a steam engine and that of Ceres on a boat. On October 31, 1901, the Passage was ravaged by a fire that miraculously did not injure anyone. Architect Lev Vlodek is also the architect of the former Bolshaya Moskovskaya Hotel, also known as the House of Faces because of its façade decorations, and the author of the impressive sculptures of the Atlanteans, which can be found on Gogol Street (Gogolya 5 and Gogolya 7) in Odessa.

The City Garden (Городской сад) is almost in front of the Passage, with its opening. Not far from there, you can see a series of monuments dedicated to the most famous Odessites. There is the monument to Leonid Utesov, a famous jazzman of the 1930s born in Odessa, quietly seated on a bench, and the monument to Sergei Utochkin, one of Russia's first footballers and airmen. We also see a monument that may seem quite unusual, a bronze chair on which Russians and Ukrainians like to be photographed. This is the twelfth chair that the protagonists of the cult novel The Twelve Chairs of the Odesite Writers Il'f and Petrov are looking for so much. This novel, translated into French, draws an ironic picture of the USSR in the late 1920s and illustrates well the odious character so particular.

Finally, at the eastern end of the street stands the monument to Iosif De Ribas, the general of Spanish origin who founded Odessa and its port. The street is precisely in his honour.