Any Odesan will tell you where the Golden Shore is: at Station 16, by the tram 18 stop. But try asking where exactly it begins and where it ends, and you will hear as many versions as you have people to ask. The place has no clear boundaries. There is only a feeling: right here Fontanska Road ends and the sea begins.
Look at the panorama from the early 1960s: the shore is still narrow, a strip of sand squeezed between the cliff and the water, a wooden pier on piles runs out into the sea, and up at the edge of the slope stand buildings. There are no terraces or breakwaters yet; all of that is still to come.
Where does the name come from? The romantics say that the fishermen who hauled their boats up onto the shore noticed that at sunset the sand glows a warm gold. Old Fontan residents add, half in jest, that the night visitors from the boats sometimes dropped real gold here. Historians give a more prosaic reason. When the steam tram came to Fontan at the end of the 19th century and land for dachas rose in price, the property agents of the day began giving the plots attractive names. That is how "New Switzerland" and "Golden Shore" appeared. The plots were built over long ago, but the advertising name has outlived them all.
Nearby stood one more Fontan mystery: the tower at the Kovalevsky dacha. In fact it was never a lighthouse. The Taganrog merchant Timofei Kovalevsky set about building Odesa's water supply in 1849: he laid out an underground gallery to collect water from the Fontan spring, installed pumps driven by steam engines and raised a brick water tower 45 metres high, and a twelve-kilometre pipe carried the water to the city. Konstantin Paustovsky retold a different story: a lonely rich man bought a dry steppe, built a house and a round tower that looked like a lighthouse, and then threw himself off it. Local historians call that tale far from the truth, but the tower really did become a landmark: according to Paustovsky, sailors entered it in their pilot charts, and it was forbidden to pull it down. The tower was demolished only in the 1930s. Today on the site of the dacha stands 111 Dacha Kovalevskogo Street, formerly a writers' creative retreat. The local historian Sergei Matveev suggests that remains of the tower may be hidden in the thickets by its back gate, but there is no confirmation of this.
Close by, near the monastery, a funicular down to the sea was built in the 1950s for Patriarch Alexy I of Moscow and All Russia. For several decades it carried the monastery's distinguished guests down to the water. It did not survive to our day: now you can reach the sea only by the steps or by going around. In the photograph you can clearly see the rails running down the cliff and a bathing pavilion on piles at the water's edge.
And now the most surprising part. The broad sandy beach we call the Golden Shore today is, to a large extent, made by human hands. Work began in the 1960s and went on for about twenty years: the slopes were terraced, breakwaters and groynes were built out into the sea, and the sand was pumped up from the seabed by dredgers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Fontan beaches enjoyed their heyday. Today the beaches of Bolshoy Fontan stretch from Station 12 to Station 16, about three kilometres of warm sand. But sand needs looking after: every year the beach loses up to five per cent of what was pumped on. To feel the difference, just compare the panorama at the start of this story with this shot from the height of the season: where a narrow strip once lay, there is now a wide beach full of swimmers.
So the golden sand really is here, it just arrived later than the name. It happens sometimes: first a dream, and then someone patiently makes it real.
