Odesa, Which Began with the Greeks
The “Odesa Calendar” launches a new series, “Multicultural City,” dedicated to the peoples who have shaped and continue to shape Odesa. The first edition explores the history of the Greek community — from the ancient settlement of Isthrian Harbour and the city’s Greek heritage to prominent Odesites, architecture, education, and contemporary cultural life.
About the event
In 2003, the Odesa Calendar began to be published, with its year counted not from January 1, but from September 2 — the official Day of our city. Since then, twenty editions have been published, each devoted to the history of one of Odesa’s historic streets: Deribasivska, Rishelievska, Lanzheronivska, Marazliivska, Pushkinska, Katerynynska, Primorsky Boulevard, and others. This year, we are launching a new series of Odesa Calendars — “The Multicultural City.”
Each year of the series is dedicated to one of the peoples who created and continue to create Odesa. The first edition is about the Greeks, and this is no coincidence. The Greek layer of the city’s history is the oldest of all. Beneath Primorsky Boulevard, the ancient settlement of the Harbour of Histrians still lies to this day.
While we were preparing this calendar, something else remarkable happened. During the 2025 and 2026 seasons, an expedition led by Andrii Krasnozhon discovered a tower of the Khadjibey Castle two blocks away from that very excavation site. It turned out that the Ottoman fortress had been built from stones taken from an ancient Greek city that stood here two thousand years before it. Odesa literally grew out of ancient stones, and we managed to tell this story in the latest edition.
The calendar and the accompanying monograph contain twelve sections, one for each month. They cover Filiki Eteria, the secret society founded in Odesa in 1814 that prepared the liberation of Greece from Ottoman rule. They tell the story of the six Greek mayors of Odesa, including Hryhorii Marazli, who governed the city for seventeen consecutive years. They feature Demetrius Vikelas, who grew up in Odesa and later became the first President of the International Olympic Committee. They include more than fifteen churches built by the Greek community. They trace two hundred and twenty-seven years of continuous teaching of the Greek language in Odesa, interrupted only during the Soviet era. And they tell the story of the living community today — the NGO “Greeks of Odesa,” which continues a tradition begun by the “Hellas” club back in 1988.
The edition is curated by Yelyzaveta Kuzmynska, head of the NGO “Greeks of Odesa” and author of the study “Famous Greeks of Odesa.” The academic consultant for the ancient history section is Andrii Krasnozhon. Archival materials were provided by the Odesa National Scientific Library, its Director General Iryna Biriukova and Yevheniia Berezhok, Head of the Odesika Local History Department. The project’s patron is Kostiantyn Sobol, Odesa’s Ambassador in Athens and head of the Worldwide Club of Odesites branch in Greece.
The presentation will take place on September 1, 2026, at 3:00 PM in the Golden Hall of the Odesa Literary Museum. The calendar and monograph will be available for purchase at the presentation and later on the website of the Worldwide Club of Odesites. Write to us, and we will tell you how to get your own copy for your collection or as a gift.
Odesa is not one city, but several cities that have grown into one another, which is why on the cover of each edition we deliberately show all its ages at once: two thousand five hundred and seventy-six years of Greek history, seven hundred and fifteen years of Italian Ginesta, six hundred and eleven years since Kotsiubeyiv, later known as Khadjibey, and two hundred and thirty-two years of modern Ukrainian Odesa. This calendar is about the Greeks in Odesa, about every period of their presence here, from antiquity to the present day, from the Harbour of Histrians to the living community that continues to work, celebrate and remember.