M My children, who now live in Vienna, often say that there is nothing to do there. They do not know where to go, how they can have fun.
That surprises me every time: How can that be? After all, Vienna is the cultural capital of Europe. It has museums, theaters, concerts. This one city offers many different worlds. Yes, they answer, but here there is no sea.
I cannot argue with that. Because in Odessa everything is different. Whether you are sad or happy — you go to the sea. It is always there. It heals always. And I myself cannot live without the sea. At every opportunity, as soon as I have a free moment, I go to the shore.
Whether you are sad or happy — in Odesa you go to the sea. It is always there.
But this winter it became difficult to reach the sea. After the bombardment of the port of Odessa, sunflower oil leaked from one of the special containers into the sea. Formally it is not considered a toxic substance. But precisely this oil became a deadly trap for birds: when they touch the oil, they lose their ability to fly. That happened. The next morning the residents of Odessa found thousands of dead birds along the coast.
Delicate, Vulnerable, Fairy-tale Creatures
It has already been more than a month, but the sea is still washing their corpses ashore. And then a storm brought another tragedy from the depths of the sea — thousands of seahorses. Delicate, vulnerable, almost fairy-tale creatures. The beaches were strewn with them.
Opinions about the causes of the catastrophe differ. Some believe that a strong storm tore the seahorses from their usual depths and washed them ashore. Others — and that is what most experts say — link it to the recent pollution from sunflower oil. Microorganisms that process oil in the marine environment can be deadly for delicate animals like seahorses. There is another version: the oil sank to the bottom, where the seahorses overwintered, and literally covered them, depriving them of oxygen.
The problem is that this cannot be checked directly. The station in Odessa where such analyses could be conducted has long since burned down. Only the water could be tested — no harmful substances were found there. But the seahorses themselves could not be examined anywhere.
Through donations to the Panter Foundation, independent and critical journalists on-site and in exile are financially supported as part of the project “Diary of War and Peace.”
People Want to Preserve the Dead Seahorses
In my entire life I have never seen so many dead seahorses and crabs along the Odessa coast. People collected them and said they wanted to dry them and at least make souvenirs from them — as a reminder of this strange and terrible winter.
I came to the sea to research there. Quite by chance I met a volunteer, the father of the well-known environmental scientist Galina Teranko. She is currently in France, working in a laboratory, and cannot come because of the war. Therefore she sends her father to the sea: he collects samples, freezes them, and sends them to her in France so that she can conduct a molecular analysis.
The causes are still being sought. And yet all these catastrophes are also a consequence of the war and what it does to our sea. In Odessa we are most of the time without electricity and water. Going to the sea is one of the few pleasures we have. Yet this too is becoming rarer.
Tatjana Milimko is the editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian online news portal USI.online and an alumna of the Panter Stiftung (workshops for journalists from Eastern Europe)
Translated from Russian by Tigran Petrosyan.
