Odesa enters the World Heritage list, in danger

On 25 January 2023 the World Heritage Committee inscribed the historic centre of Odesa on the World Heritage List, and in the same session placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Both were done under the emergency procedure, compressing a process that normally takes years.

Odesa is a nineteenth-century port city built deliberately as a cosmopolitan project — Italian, Greek, French, Jewish, Ukrainian and russian architects and merchants building one place together. Its centre is an ensemble rather than a monument: the opera house, the boulevard, the staircase, and several hundred buildings that only make sense as a group.

What inscription brings

Access to international technical assistance and emergency funding, an obligation on all states party to the convention to refrain from damaging it, formal monitoring, and a documented baseline against which any future damage can be assessed.

I have walked that centre many times over twenty years. Listing does not stop a missile. What it does is make the place a matter of record for everyone, permanently.