Boomtown

Odessa has always seemed to profit at the misfortune of other nations.  Sitting in the north of the Black Sea, it was a valuable shipping port for ships from the Ottoman empire and the mediterranean, and was closer to any other western European city than Moscow or St. Petersburg.  When places closest to those cities ran out of supplies, Odessa was the natural place to go.

De Ribas had envisioned in Odessa a newer, better version of his original home, Naples.  The man from the Italian coast's dream would come true quicker than he realized, because a man from off the Italian coast was making waves in the rest of Europe.

Napoleon Bonaparte was making his way across Europe and taking everything in his path.  Knowing that the more eastward he went, people had access to more food thanks to arable farmland, he made the decision to stop Hungary from exporting any more grain to the lands of his enemies.  And Odessa, just south of the most fertile land in the Russian empire, stood to gain immensely from it.

Even better, soon the Ottoman Empire caved under the pressure from other nations and allowed ships from the rest of Europe free entry into the Black Sea, a privilege it had only granted to Russia until the 1780s.  Ships were now free to make port in Odessa and leave with all of the grain they could hold, exchanging it for exotic foreign money and goods that first made the port a cosmopolitan hub.

Robert Stevens, after a visit to the port, wrote that the Black sea "became the common domain of the nations of Europe, and Odessa the centre of vast speculations... the very circumstances, that paralysed commerce elsewhere... acted upon Odessa in an inverse ratio" (Stevens, Account of Odessa, 5., From Source book listed at the bottom of the entry).

(Odessa harbor in the mid-late 19th century, still booming)

King, Charles. Odessa: Genius And Death In A City Of Dreams. New York: W.W. 

     Norton & Company, Inc., 2011. N. pag. Amazon Kindle. Web. 4 Apr. 2012. 

Photo from :http://www.odessos.com/pics.htm