Actually, the album has not been made until the medium of YT allowed me and encouraged to do this now, in digital format. The photos stay with me at present, after 40 years of travels, hiding places and other ill-usages: sacks, suitcases, envelopes, drawers. They endured times of revolution, home-wars, escapes, political aggression and occupation. Plus fifty years of peace, which apparently meant for them - oblivion and further deterioration .
The story is written on the worn out and faded surface of images which my grandparents once wanted to make vivid and eternal.
They had decided to live in Yalta, Crimea in times of 'wine and roses' and in place of 'milk and honey' which subsequently, during only one season, changed into a place of mud and blood with corps floating over the water of Yalta Bay, of those who had died of hunger or had been shot. My grandfather escaped to France "just in time".
There was a time, however, that they were witnessing arrival of Alfonso XIII, King of Spain on a ship to Yalta to visit Great Emperor of Russia and, only a few years later, were watching the extremely sad moment of evacuation and rescue of the Russian Imperial family (1919), from the same place.
Three years later -- in the middle of the most severe famine - my Grandma was struggling herself with representatives of a new communist authority for permission of return to her home, Warsaw. The travel, with three children, lasted three months and three weeks...-
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"The Empress, a little lone figure, stood sadly and apart from the others near the ensign staff, flying, of course, the White Ensign, while the voices of the Imperial Guard singing the Russian Imperial Anthem drifted across the water to her in last salute. None other than that beautiful old tune, rendered in such a manner, could have poignantly reflected the sadness of that moment. The memory of those deep Russian voices, unaccompanied, but in the perfect harmony which few but Russians can achieve, has surely never faded from the minds of those who were privileged to witness this touching scene. Until long after the sloop had passed there was silence. No one approached the Empress, while she remained standing, gazing sadly after those who, leaving her to pass into exile, were bound for what seemed likely to be a forlorn mission. Few are known to have survived the next period of fighting outside Sevastopol.
This proved to be the last occasion on which the Russian Imperial Anthem was rendered to a member of the Imperial family within Russian territory. (...)
In the afternoon the ship, unheralded and without escort, moved silently from the anchorage off Yalta and headed into the mist of the Black Sea. Our passengers stood for long on deck gazing astern with full hearts as the beautiful coast line of the Crimea faded from their view. We did not know it at the time, but with our departure all members of the Imperial Romanov family then alive had left Russia forever, and the dynasty, which came into power in 1613, was ended."
More:
http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/marlborough.html
P.I. Tchaikovsky, Eugene Onegin
Leonid Sobinov, Tenor, 1910.
Tags: Old Russia Yalta Crimea Romanovs Tchaikovsky Czajkowski Onegin Kuda Sobinov Bolsheviks Revolution 1917 1910's 78rpm
