You're reading: On the road to Izmayil with Igor

I met Igor while I was hitching around Odessa; he picked me up in his Lada and we got to talking. He had been to the States just last year, visiting relatives, where he met a very famous New York Odessan artist by the name of Mikhail Chemiakin and somehow wound up behind the wheel of some rich New York Odessans' Lincoln Cabriolet on his way to Los Angeles.

That apparently inspired him, when he heard where I was going, to say, 'Hey, why don't you let me drive you in my Lada?' So I took him up on it – after all the trip from Odessa to Izmayil is a 10-hour train ride or a four-hour drive.

Igor is about 60, half-Georgian and half-Bulgarian, born and raised in Mariupol. He has the attitude of an eastern Ukrainian. 'Now they say the Russians are our greatest enemies and the Germans, who destroyed Ukraine, are our friends! This I will never understand.'

He also admires Stalin. 'He was a very intelligent man, everything you see here he built. Before Stalin, Russia was of no account.' What about the millions of Ukrainians he killed? 'And how many Russians did he kill?'

There was a lot good about Soviet Union and nearly nothing good about today's Ukraine, according to Igor. But he doesn't miss the Soviet days.

He worked for the Foreign Trade Ministry, and one time, in the '70s, he says, some Suslov from the Politburo assigned him to drive his mistress around western Europe in a big Mercedes on a week-long shopping spree. He called a friend at the office and griped about the 'prostitute' and apparently was overheard. When he returned he was accused of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to two years in prison.

Then in '89 in Tbilisi he was helping the student demonstration and got hit with nerve gas, Seratin and S.E.S., he says. He said there were lots of nerve-gas victims. He spent a year in the hospital and has permanent damage to his lungs. But he was declared an invalid, for which he gets a monthly pension currently worth $15.

Heading out from Odessa we passed 'the seven kilometer,' possibly the largest open-air market in the former Soviet Union. It's where they sell what gets brought in on the ships, mostly right out of the shipping container to people who run open-air stands throughout Ukraine. Nearly all of it evades customs; none of it evades the racketeers.

Further on we passed formerly German villages, Ukrainian villages, Odessans' summer cottages and finally the Dnister Liman, a big, briny, nearly closed bay at the mouth of the Dnister River.

On the other side of that bay is Bessarabia, and its former northern outpost, Bilhorod. Bilhorod, the oldest town in Ukraine, recently celebrated its 2,500th birthday. Originally a Greek trading post, it passed to the Genoese, the Kyiv Rus princes, the Moldovans, the Ottoman Turks, the Tatars, then bounced back and forth between Moldova and Russia (or between Romania and the USSR) some seven times before finally (knock on wood) landing in Ukraine.

Such is the history of southern Bessarabia, the land between the Dnister and Danube rivers, Moldova and the Black Sea (northern Bessarabia is now southern Moldova). It's lowlands – full of lakes and marshes – that are incredibly fertile.

The sight to see in Bilhorod is a massive medieval stone fortress from the early Moldovan period, which lasted from the 13th to 15th century. At the time the region was controlled by a dynasty of Romanian knights called the Basarabs, hence Bessarabia. The courtyard of the fortress is overgrown with weeds and swarming with buzzing insects. You're allowed to climb all over it, and the local boys do. It sits on a wedge of land right on the bay, has really gorgeous views.

Igor dreamed aloud about having a swimming pool inside the walled area and a restaurant in the fortress proper and even escalators to and fro. I guess I winded the poor guy.

There's a cannonball still stuck in one of the walls, from that pivotal point in Bessarabia's history, in the late 18th century, when the Russian imperial army defeated the Ottomans and swept out their Tatar vassals from Bessarabia.

The mix of ethnicities in Bessarabia radically changed; Ukrainians and Russians came south to settle, and many Bulgarians and Turks fled north to here from the Ottoman-controlled Balkans. Romanians remained the largest ethnic group until World War II, after which most Bessarabian Romanians who were still alive were either in Romania or Siberia. Most of the area's Armenians and Jews also fled or died in the war.

Ukrainians today are the largest ethnic group in southern Bessarabia, but Russian has prevailed as the dominant language and culture, and there's very little sign that that will change.

Before leaving Bilhorod we tried to look up Igor's friend, the chief engineer at the port. He was out when we first stopped by, and had since come back stone drunk and left again. Then we stuffed ourselves at a train workers' canteen for less than $2 and hit the road, 180 kilometers to Izmayil.

Meanwhile, Igor spun a tale from his past, from the late '60s, when he met a hippie devushka while she was in a Georgian coast town for a three-week seminar in the Russian language. She never washed her clothes, Igor says, but give her a bath and she was real hot stuff.

They shacked up in Sochi for another month, where he suspected the reason his money was lasting was that she understood he couldn't bear to live off a woman and was secretly stuffing her rich mom's money into his pockets.

Then one day she said, you have to come with me to Moscow to meet my mom. He was a bit afraid of this dynasty-queen mother, he said, especially when he heard that she was piloting her own plane to Helsinki. A woman of steel, he said, but they got along immediately.

Then after mom left, Igor and the hippie girl went back to Sochi, and hippie girl explained why he had to meet her mom. She was pregnant, and mom wanted to be sure Igor was father material. Genetically, that is. She was leaving and would have the kid by herself, and Igor would never know the child. Igor says he hasn't heard from her or his now 30-year-old son or daughter since.

As Igor dropped me off at the hotel in Izmayil, he tried to give me a big bronze wall hanging as a memento and I had to refuse. He had already given me cufflinks I'll never wear.

By the way, Igor's Georgian grandfather lived to be 119, his mother's father was a Bulgarian knight, Igor's Lada has 1.3 million miles on the original engine, and he has three different girlfriends (two in their teens) whom he rotates through the week.

Of course, it's up to you how much of all this you choose to believe.
Tom Warner is the former editor of Kyiv Post.