In Europe

swimming around it all.
    In Istanbul, as we pushed off from the Golden Horn, we heard the call to prayer from dozens of minarets, but on the street one saw fewer women in head scarves than in a working-class neighbourhood in Rotterdam. And in Odessa everything was European again: the houses, the opera, the writers, the museums and, last but not least, the young people. For who else would one find parading here hand in hand along the boulevards but the great-great-grandchildren of Italian traders, Greek sailors, Russian civil servants, Jewish and Armenian craftsmen and Ukrainian farmers?
    Europe's clearest border is the great historical divide sketched by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor, in his – incidentally, controversial –
The Clash of Civilisations
. It is the line that runs between the Christian peoples of the West and the Eastern Orthodox and Islamic cultures, a rift that goes back to AD 395, when the Holy Roman Empire was split in two. Both empires went their own way after that, and all those differing historical experiences caused traditions and cultures to grow asunder.
    Huntington's fault line has been in more or less the same place for almost 500 years. It runs roughly north to south, from the border between Finland and Russia, along the edge of the Baltic States, straight through White Russia, the Ukraine, Rumania and Serbia, and ends in the Adriatic between Croatia and Bosnia.
    On the western side of that line people drink espresso or filtered coffee, they observe Christmas on 25 December, they are influenced – usually without knowing it – by scholasticism and humanism, they have been through the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and they have experienced democracy and a rule of constitutional law – although in some countries this is still quite fresh and new. On the eastern side of it people drink coffee with grounds in the bottom of the cup, they celebrate Christmas by the Orthodox calendar or don't celebrate it at all, and most of them have lived for centuries under the yoke of the Byzantine Empire and other more or less absolutist regimes.
    Huntington's view is shared – sometimes openly, more often tacitly – by most Western Europeans and their leaders. Yet there are also other voices to be heard. One can wonder, after all, whether there is any sense at all to the discussion concerning ‘European identity’, whether it is not in fact diametrically opposed to the entire history of the ‘European concept’. For if anything serves as the true hallmark of European civilisation it is diversity, and not a single identity.
    And if there is one city where this European variegation is in full bloom, it is Odessa. Only a few years after this half French, half-Italian city was raised up from the steppe by pioneers around 1800, Czar Alexander I wrote to Governor Vorontsov that Odessa was becoming ‘too European’: soldiers walked around with their uniforms unbuttoned, and Odessa was the only city in Russia where one was allowed to smoke or sing on the street. A ‘native language’ census held in 1897 showed that a third of the city's population spoke Yiddish, and barely half spoke Russian. Only one out of every twenty inhabitants spoke Ukrainian; almost an equal number had Polish as their native tongue. Many Russians hated Odessa. For Russian nationalists, the city served as a litmus test: anyone who liked Odessa was European. Anyone who did not like Odessa was faithful to Mother Russia. And Odessa today still has its own brand of civic pride that makes people say, not ‘I come from the Ukraine’ or ‘I am Russian’, but ‘I am from Odessa.’
    As Pushkin put it:
    Where all breathes Europe to the senses,
And sparkling Southern sun dispenses
A lively, varied atmosphere.
Along the merry streets you'll hear
Italian voices ringing loudly
You'll meet the haughty Slav, the Greek,
Armenian, Spaniard, Frenchman sleek,
The stout Moldavian prancing proudly.
And Egypt's son as well you'll see …
    There is a Frisian folktale about a young man whose father sent him into the world with an oar over his shoulder, and who was only allowed to stop roaming when he came to a land where people would ask him:‘What is that strange stick you've got there?’ During my travels, I applied the same methodology with regard to the question of where Europe stops. I soon noticed that, in day-to-day life, the problem is not all that complicated: people decide for themselves where they belong,