Koktebel

A yellow marshrutka bus (Feodosia to Biological Station) took me to my paradise. We drove under a banner saying “Welcome to Wine Land” and under a huge rainbow stretching from one end of the peninsula to the other.

It felt natural to drive under a rainbow to enter Koktebel, the hippie paradise on the shore of our Inhospitable Sea, at the feet of Karadag, the Black Mountain, a dead volcano.

The Moon Queen dances there in a circle with her retinue, around the Devil’s Finger under the full moon. At least, that’s what a guy from Zelyonka said, who left, mop-headed and rowdy, on his solo Karadag quest during a full moon night, and came back weeks later, shaved and meek as a lamb, from a mental hospital in nearby Feodosia, the hometown of Aivazovsky, the marine painter.

Zelyonka, or the Greenery, are the green slopes with some trees at the far end of the Koktebel beach where a hippie colony settled in the 70s. They were still there in 2013, lying naked in the sun, eating watermelons and greeting passers-by with “Good morning” and “Happy birthday,” because every day is a birthday, and time is always morning. The naked Comandante of Zelyonka was Romashka. You could find him following a trail of chamomile flowers, or romashkas, painted on Koktebel’s legendary boardwalk. It started where you’d usually find a guy playing a hang drum, locally known as the glukophone. The far end of the chamomile trail was in Kyiv, halfway down the St. Andrew Descent, where Romashka sold the wooden spoons he carved from the Crimean juniper tree. Legend has it that Romashka used to be a housebreaker until he found a Gospel in one of the apartments he broke into, repented, and became a naked hippie.

Voloshin

To hike from Zelyonka to Feodosia, you start by going up the hill to the grave of Max Voloshin, a visionary, artist and poet, the founding father of Koktebel, whose house in the village gave a start to the hippie colony, the nudist colony and the writers’ colony. There was even a paragliders’ colony in the 1920s, thanks to the winds on the nearby plateau. Voloshin and his house miraculously survived under the Bolsheviks. The house was turned into a museum, the writers’ colony into a Soviet Writers Sanatorium where they spent summers writing their socialist realism pulp and drinking 777 (see below), and the hippies and nudists came back in the 70s and descended upon the slopes of Zelyonka. Artists bought dachas, turning the tiny village of Koktebel into the pulsating artistic and cultural heart of Crimea.

If, after greeting Voloshin, you take the azimuth and continue in the same direction through the yellow sunburned steppe of the Cimmerian Triangle, the name coined by Voloshin, sooner or later you’ll end up in the Bosporus kingdom of Mithridates, later Kafa, later Kerch, with its Greek and Armenian churches, the Genovese fortress and the Quarantine. Beyond Kerch lies the strait of Cimmerian Bosporus, and beyond the Bosporus lies the territory currently known as Russia. That’s where the hell came from in March 2014.

But we are in September, which means I came for the jazz festival. Some friends from Kyiv came to play on the festival’s stages and in the local clubs and bars spread out along the boardwalk. We are eating local watermelons and figs, drinking wine from the tap of the local wine factory (bring your own bottle), swimming naked with the dolphins in the inhospitable sea, and camping on the green slopes of Zelyonka, in the bosom of nature, art, literature, music and history.

Zelyonka

This is what your world is like, if you look from Zelyonka.

To the east is Cape Chameleon, which changes color during the day and becomes narrower every year as its slopes collapse inch by inch into the sea. That last summer, the path to the nose of Chameleon was just a few inches wide, and the slopes of Zelyonka were also sliding down. We all thought it was a bad sign. We thought something was looming.

To the west is, of course, the wine factory, then the writers’ park, Voloshin’s house, and, if you walk long enough and no one leads you astray, Karadag, the dead volcano, with Voloshin’s profile clearly visible on its slope. Just at the feet of Karadag is the house of the Baron of Koktebel, the only one in this touristy village boasting a “Not for rent” sign. The Baron is an artist and an alcoholic, but it’s another story. Beyond Karadag is another world.

The world beyond Karadag consists of KyrPyr, translated from the Soviet newspeak as the sanatorium village, and Lyska, the Fox Bay, a 5 km stretch of beach inhabited year-round by naked hippies, punks, yogis, Buddhists, Krishnaites and Shaivites. The list is not exhaustive, but we almost never went there, our universe was on our side of Karadag. Somewhere beyond Lyska lies Cape Meganom, with a colony of hippies and Shaivites living in caves and giving birth in the waters of the bay, with a Shiva temple that looks like piles of stones. That’s, again, another universe.

My place was Koktebel, namely, Zelyonka. I checked into the vacant tent of a guy who went to KyrPyr and forgot the way back. In the tent, I found Roza Mira, “The Rose of the World,” a thick and weird book dealing with uitsraors and egregors, written in the Gulag. “When a nation’s uitsraor gets old, the nation loses a war, gets consumed by another nation, making their uitsraor stronger.”

Xeres I met on the boardwalk. I bought him “3 Axes,” the Soviet port wine with 777 on its label, and we went to sit on the pier and watch the sunset over our inhospitable sea. Xeres, currently from Kyiv, is a native of Eski Qirim, the nearby old capital of Crimea. He spent his summers drinking in Koktebel and winters drinking in Kyiv. A poet, an artist, a sculptor, and a philosopher, the quintessence of his philosophy is not giving a f*ck, or “pohuy-nahuy.” He introduced me to his pohuyism school of thought, which I happily adopted. We went to sit on a pier and watch the sunset. He drank from his 777 bottle and read poetry to me, which happened to be in French, which I happened to understand.

“Can you imagine?” he said. “This is only possible in Koktebel.” This was on the first day we met. The next day we met Sven, a Viking born and raised in Africa, now a gardener in England, in a line at a draft beer stand. We collected one more guy and marched to Surp Hach, up the hill along the old postal road leading to Eski Qirim.

(… to be continued…)

Transadaptation Volume 5 – Of Flowing Vicissitudes

January: The Night the Stars Stopped Shining – Sarah-Leah Pimentel (South Africa)

February: Three Sides to Every Story – Krisztina Janosi (Hungary)

March: Rain Trap – Adriana Uribe (Columbia)

April: Priorities – Narantsogt Baatarkhuu (Mongolia)

May: The Night in Heaven – Armine Asryan (Armenia)

June: Witches Don’t Burn – Alejandra Baccino (Uruguay)

July: A Regular Flat – Mateusz Tymoszewski (Poland)

August: Many Happy Returns – Svetlana Molchanova (Russia)

September: And Now, It Will All Go Downhill – Jonay Quintero Hernandez (Spain)

October: Planet Qirim – Anastasiia Leonova (Ukraine)

November: You Are Her, Aren’t You? – Seyit Ali Dastan (Turkey)

December: Culture Shock – Veronika Groke (Austria)

Background – Context

Transadaptation Volume 4: Material Dissent – Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2023)

Transadaptation Volume 3: Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2022)

Transadaptation Volume 2: Conceived – Childhood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2021)

Transadaptation Volume 1: In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2020)

Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)

La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)

The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)

L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)

From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)

Emblems and stories on the international community

Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world

Credits

Left column (top to bottom): 1. Balaklava, Crimea – In the evening – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Feodosia, Crimea – On the bike – Francisco Rioseco (Unsplash); Evpatoria, Crimea – Swimming – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock)

Middle column (top to bottom): 1. Yalta, Crimea – View from above – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Simferopol, Crimea – Feeding pigeons – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Evpatoria, Crimea – Chaplin visiting Crimea – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock)

Right column (top to bottom): 1. Sevastopol, Crimea – A scenic view – Konstantin Dyadyun (Unsplash); Bakhchisarai, Crimea – Road to Cave City – Alexey Pavlishak (Shutterstock); Crimea – At the port – Angelika Agibalova (Unsplash)

Source: The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed