Vanka the Big-Head, or Why Odesans Say "Station"

Picture a summer in the early 1880s. At a small station on Kulikovo Pole, on the edge of Odesa, a strange machine is puffing steam: a tiny locomotive that looks like a box on wheels, pulling a few open carriages. Ladies hold on to their hats, gentlemen in summer suits unfold newspapers, children crowd against the railings. A bell, a whistle, and the train sets off for the sea. Odesans, who have never been at a loss for words, gave it a name at once: "Vanka Golovatyi", or Vanka the Big-Head. That is how it is remembered to this day.

Why did the city need a train to the sea? Because well-off Odesa in the second half of the 19th century lived on a single dream: to spend the summer at a dacha, a country cottage by the water. Before the railway, people reached Fontan by horse, in carriages and cabs, jolting along a dusty road for half a day. The steam line turned a long expedition into an ordinary ride. The 1906 guidebook says that in summer the trains ran every 25 minutes — a timetable some modern routes would envy.

The line was divided into sixteen sections, and each stop was called a "station": it was a proper train, after all, and trains, as everyone knows, have stations. The fare depended on distance: 10 kopecks as far as Station 7, 15 as far as Station 11, and 20 kopecks all the way to the monastery at the end. For a working man that was real money, so the far stations were mostly for the well-to-do: merchants, doctors, lawyers and their families. The fare zones are long gone, but the habit of measuring distance in "stations" has stayed for good.

And why "Golovatyi", big-headed? On this the sources agree: the little locomotive had an enormously wide funnel, shaped like a cauldron, with spark arresters inside to protect the dachas and the steppe from fire. Where the "Vanka" came from, none of them explains. The locomotives were built at the Kolomna works in Russia, the first carriages came by sea from Belgium, and from the mid-1890s carriages were built in Odesa itself. The fuel was briquettes of coal dust, so passengers reportedly arrived at their dachas black with soot. They say that a young Konstantin Paustovsky, the future writer, worked as a conductor on this little train and compared it to a samovar packed into an iron casing.

It was not fast: the ride to the terminus took about forty minutes. They say that Sergei Utochkin, an Odesa sportsman and aviator, took a bet and ran the ten kilometres from Kulikovo Pole to the end of the line — alongside the train, and at the finish he even overtook it. Even so, the line was working at full stretch: by the end of 1896 Odesa had nine locomotives and fifty-three carriages, and in summer up to thirty-six trips a day ran out to Fontan.

The stations had lives of their own. At Station 16, they say, a band greeted the trains and saw them off, and the musicians composed a tune that would later be known as "Sem-Sorok" ("Seven-Forty"), after the time of the last run, 19:40. That is only one of several versions of where the song came from.

The last stations, 13 to 16, lay in Bolshoy Fontan, the Great Fountain: a dacha settlement beside the cape of the same name, older, incidentally, than Odesa itself. So where does "fountain" come from? There were no marble fountains here. Springs of fresh water gushed straight out of the limestone slopes. In the 18th century, developed springs were called "fontals", and over time the word became "fontan". Three dacha settlements grew up around the three biggest springs: Maly (Little), Sredny (Middle) and Bolshoy (Great) Fontan.