Here There Be Dragons is a podcast by Jess Myers, an architecture professor at Syracuse University. The podcast is about cities, and the people who live in them. Past seasons have delved into the social lives of New York, Paris, and Stockholm. Now in its fourth season, this latest version is about Odesa, Ukraine, and can be accessed on Soundcloud. AN spoke to Myers about the podcast, and what it was like making it during wartime. The Architects Newspaper: You werent able to visit Odesa due to the full-scale invasion, which makes this season different from others. How many hours of content did you gather? Who did you talk to?Jess Myers (JM): I spoke to fifty current and former Odesa residents over the course of two years. That alone is at least 50 hours of interviews. This is a little technical, but when youre doing a remote interview with a translator, a one-hour interview could mean three hours of tape.This wasnt the case for every interview. There were people who were really interested in being interviewed in English, and then others were a mix of Ukrainian and Russian speakers. There were people who were learning Ukrainian, and wanted to use Ukrainian in the podcast.Jess Myers Odes[s]a: Center []AN: How did you find people to talk to? Was it word of mouth?JM: Some of it was word of mouth. We reached out to this really fantastic music label early on called system thats led by Ivan Samoukhurtin, a producer. We started out by interviewing independent musicians about the kind of sounds war makes, and about the way the war shifted their relationships to sound, so we interviewed Ivan at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The interview with Ivan was fantastic; he then joined the project as a sound consultant for the show. Through him, we were able to meet a lot of other musicians.Many musicians we spoke to are also field recordists who go out into the city and send tapes back to us. There was a lot of excitement from people who wanted to show and explain different aspects of the city to me. So even after our interview was over, people sent videos, field recordings, voice notes on WhatsApp. I even had someone call me on WhatsApp Video; she stuck her phone out the window while she was driving so I could see what she was seeing. It was so cool.Odesa is famous for its Potemkin Steps. (Julian Nya/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)AN: Who are some more people you spoke to? Whats morale like right now?JM: I think, in terms of how the war moved through the interviews, one notable thing was how attitudes towards the war, and the perception of the way the war was going, changed a lot. We saw this in my team, namely people who I collaborated with as consultants. These are people who had been displaced over the course of time and experienced tragedy. One of our interpreters for instance joined a volunteer unit that helped translate for doctors on the front line. There were times when she was calling in to interpret for us from a stabilization point a few miles off the front line. So it was not the way the war moved through the interviews themselves; it was also the way the war shaped how we were able to work.AN: Ilya Kaminsky is an important figure in this story.JM: Ilya Kaminskys poetry delves into everyday life in Odesa in the face of extreme violence, something we saw play out in real time during production. Kaminsky writes about how everyday life bursts through, and can overcome these moments of violence. On the one hand, a bombardment is happening and, on the other, you have to cook dinner for your kids, right? Today, Ilya runs a workshop for children from Odesa who are refugees of war. He writes a lot about memory. Another person we spoke to was Oksana Dovgopolova, who researches public memory, especially in relation to Odesa. Oksana thinks about reframing public history, and the way we understand history. AN: Can you talk more about how you engaged with memory? I can speak on behalf of my own family that Odesa has an outsized place in the Jewish diasporic collective imagination, even though so many of us have never actually been there.JM: A common narrative about Odesa is that its a deeply multicultural city, right? Its this port city that brings together lots of cultures, like Marseilles. I think in light of the invasion, theres an interest in pulling away from the Russian narrative, that imperial Russia conquered this territory from the Ottoman Empire. The modern Russian narrative is that there was nothing there before us, right? This narrative tells us Odesa sprung up like a mushroom overnight.But today, there are residents who are looking to the ancient histories of Odesa to bolster its multiculturalism. Odesa is at the crossroads of many cultures. This is especially true for Jewish history. Obviously you have a long history of Tartar, Turkish, and Greek influence in the area as well. Even further back, you have Vikings and Scythian communities. People today are interested in a more contemporary understanding of multiculturalism.AN: Can you expand on that?JM: There once was an Ottoman fort city where Odesa is now called Khadjibey. Fragments of Khadjibey are still in the city today. Odesa became, you could argue, the most progressive or liberal city within the Pale of Settlement during the Russian Empire. You had a lot of Jewish communities coming to Odesa to participate in cultural, social, and political life in a way they couldnt in other parts of the Russian Empire. There were musicians, theatrical practices, printing presses; all of these different threads of Jewish thought, philosophy, and debate. This also means you had folks like Zeev Jabotinsky, a zionist from the region. Especially after the pogroms of 1905, the response to this very public violence was a form of entrenched isolationism that eventually built itself into zionism.AN: Odesa also played an important role in the Jewish Labor Bund movement, which steadfastly opposed zionism. In fact Odesa was the center of the Bundist movement. For a while, places like Odesa and Kharkiv were havens of international Jewish life, instead of Israel, which is what Jabotinsky advocated for.JM: In the mid 19th and early 20th centuries, one-third of Odesa was Jewish, but the Jewish community was devastated by the end of World War II. We spoke to Marina Sapritsky-Nahum about this. Marina is a London-based researcher who looks at Jewish cultural identity in Odesa. We were also looking at different diasporic waves, and the many people who emigrated in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s that lobbied to move to the U.S. during the Cold War. There were many Jewish-Americans who were pushing to have asylum opportunities for Soviet Union Jews.AN: We cant have this discussion without talking about Brighton Beach.JM: (*A light chuckle*) I have to say, Brighton Beach does not play a large role in this season, because we were speaking to contemporary residents of Odesa. Many people do have relatives there, but it didnt necessarily factor into the relationships that people have with the city. That being said, there is a connection between Brighton Beach and the Odesa neighborhood of Moldavanka. Theres this caricature that exists of the Jewish gangster from Moldavanka that became really popular in Brighton Beach. This character featured in vaudeville circuits, and then got re-exported back to [Odesa]. We can point to the work of Isaac Babel as someone who wrote short stories about the legendary mafiosos from Odesa. Babel was born in Moldavanka.The cover of Odessa Stories, a 1931 book by Isaac Babel. ( /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)AN: Sean Bakers new film, Anora, is about a sex worker from Brighton Beach. Its been met with praise, but I personally know Ukrainians who detest that movie because it makes Brighton Beach out to be this sort of Russian enclave, when in reality Brighton Beach has been called Little Odesa for so long. Its interesting to think about how these narrative reclamations spill over to other places.JM: Yeah, totally. Another person we spoke to was Marina Sonovic, whose work speaks to trends in pop and folk music which hint at different ambitions towards sovereignty, and how different regions of Ukraine reach towards sovereignty. Another person I enjoyed speaking to was Sophie Pinkham, whose research is more broadly about the post-Soviet context. Her book, Black Square, was also important for my research.AN: Your work in centering Ukrainian voices is especially important right now, given the Trump Administrations recent wafering in regard to who is responsible for the war.JM: The reason why I insist on this methodology, that of starting from and really sticking to adhering to resident perspectives, is because its very easy to get lost in large, zoomed out, flattened, geopolitical narratives about a city without ever spending time with it, and the complexity of its residents. I try to bring that resolution in times of war, when theres urgency and lots of sweeping narratives. These sorts of flattening narratives give no detail or knowledge of the fundamental way people live and act.