Half of Odesa is new. You’d never know it.
Mamalyga: Friday night heat
When Friday night falls, I head to Mamalyga, the Moldovan restaurant on Yevropeiska Street. Until recently, it was called Katerynynska—after Russian Empress Catherine II, with whom at least the younger generation of Odessites wants nothing to do. Decolonization is the word used for renaming streets and removing monuments that recall the imperial past.
Behind tall windows in the large restaurant, which spans two stories and is connected by a circular staircase in the center, the room glows with chandeliers and laughter; every table is filled. Wine bottles clink, a child darts between waiters, and someone orders the dish that gives the place its name, mămăligă, the golden cornmeal porridge of neighboring Moldova.
Odesa has always been Ukraine’s most cosmopolitan city.
Around our long table sits a group of friends—foreigners who have made their lives in Odesa, most with Ukrainian wives or girlfriends. It’s a familiar trope: foreign men settling down, raising bilingual children, speaking several languages simultaneously. The talk circles absurdity and everyday life, Odesa’s economy, how restaurants open and close after just a few months, many run by newcomers from Kherson, Mariupol, and other cities who try to transplant or reinvent the lives they once had. It is not easy.
The mix of voices and accents mirrors the city: conversations move between business and family, Ukrainian and Russian, profound and absurd. The different languages at our table—English, Russian, German, and Ukrainian—flow and ebb like currents of the Black Sea. Odesa has always been Ukraine’s most cosmopolitan city, where “and” mattered more than “or.” But can that survive when so much is changing so fast?
The demographic remix
I am sitting with Yan Shapiro near Shevchenko Park, at a small café selling espresso and ice cream. Shapiro founded Unation, an innovation accelerator linking Ukrainian startups with foreign partners, and he constantly tours the world to promote Ukraine in general—and his beloved hometown, Odesa, specifically—as a potential investment target. Yan’s view of the city’s population shift is startling.
“Many people left—but many also came,” he says. “Maybe half the population changed.”
Half the population. I think back to Mamalyga—the packed tables, the laughter, the child running between waiters. How many of those people weren’t there three years ago?
“People easily find here a mutual language to collaborate.”
When Yan organizes events now—economic forums, student festivals, wine fairs, food fests, and hackathons—the faces are new. “Almost none of the old IT CEOs still live in Odesa. Maybe sixty percent of their teams moved away. But new people arrived from Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Mariupol. They brought energy, even if not always capital.”
And new energy is in constant need, he adds. “People are tired. It’s hard to build when you don’t know when the war ends.”
Still, he insists, the city functions. “Odesa proves that Ukraine never gives up. People still work, still achieve goals. They adapt.”
Yet his optimism has limits. “The human-capital problem is serious,” Yan concedes. “But Odesa has advantages—the sea, the languages, the openness. We just have to use them better.”
Odesa was always multi-international, Yan reminds me, friendly to all nations, welcoming newcomers from everywhere. “People easily find here a mutual language to collaborate.” Perhaps that explains how half a city can turn over without the rhythm breaking.
But demographics alone don’t explain the full picture. The pressure shows in other ways.
Khadjibey: the Sunday calm
Two days later, on Sunday at one o’clock, the mood is entirely different.
At Khadjibey, a Crimean Tatar–style restaurant bathed in pale autumn light, families linger over late lunches. The copper lamps are off, and sunlight glints on patterned carpets and polished brass. My bowl of laghman, a rich noodle soup, steams invitingly.
Across from me sits Ugo Poletti, the Italian founder of The Odesa Journal, the city’s English-language online newspaper. He chose Khadjibey because it stands next to the Catholic church he visits every Sunday. Ugo gestures toward the whole room.
“If you force language through law, you get backlash.”
“Before the war, foreign media called Odesa the criminal capital of Ukraine,” he says. “Now it’s proved it’s truly Ukrainian—generous, proud, unafraid.”
Ugo describes the city’s temperament: “Jewish, Greek, French, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian—it’s all here. What unites Odesa is humor and lightness. Even in hard times, people don’t lose that. That’s the real Mediterranean spirit.”
Language comes up, inevitably. “Before the war, the city was ninety-nine percent Russian-speaking,” he says. “Now I hear Ukrainian everywhere. Putin turned out to be the best marketing manager for the Ukrainian language.”
But Ugo nevertheless worries about overcorrection. He recounts the story of a teenage girl playing football in a local stadium who was given a yellow card for speaking Russian on the field. “If you force language through law, you get backlash,” he says.
The yellow card reveals Odesa’s uncomfortable position: it’s not leading Ukraine’s cultural transformation—it’s catching up. Western Ukraine made these linguistic and identity choices decades ago, but Odesa tried to remain above the fray, to preserve its “and” while others chose “or.” Now the war has forced the choice at the worst possible moment—when missiles fly, and survival feels binary.
“Many of us are foreigners, but we love this country, raise our kids here, and would defend it.”
Poletti draws an Italian comparison. “We fought wars with Austria for our independence, but never banned German or Mozart. Culture is strength, not threat.” He sighs. “If you go against the symbols of the past, you make a more homogeneous country—but you lose some of its beauty.”
Indeed, Odesa is dotted with sculptures and memorial plaques from its Russian past—imperial or Soviet alike. Many have been taken down, yet many remain, telling a tale of the city’s complicated history. If they vanish, it’s unclear how, or by whom, Odesa’s story will be told in the future.
For Ugo, Odesa’s challenge is to practice civic nationalism rather than ethnic nationalism—belonging through personal commitment, not blood or language. “Many of us are foreigners,” he smiles, “but we love this country, raise our kids here, and would defend it.”
Language and identity—the second pressure, alongside the population change. But would these philosophical debates matter if the city couldn’t function economically?
The perception problem
Michael Löffler, a Bavarian who runs a small AI software firm called OCCAM serving German clients, has lived here for twenty years. Twenty years gives perspective.
“The funny thing is how relative everything looks from outside,” Löffler explains.
“From far away, people only see ruins and rockets.”
He tells a story about a friend in Kharkiv who phoned, worried about Odesa’s drone attacks. “She said, ‘My God, things in Odesa must be terrible!’ And I told her, ‘We sit here thinking Kharkiv has it worse.’” When that friend finally visited, she was shocked: people sunbathing while drones flew overhead. They just said, “You only live once.” That’s the Odesa way.
What struck Löffler most was what his friend said afterward: she couldn’t tell who was new to the city and who had been there for decades. The newcomers had already absorbed the local attitude—the shrug, the dark humor, the insistence on normalcy.
Löffler laughs, then turns serious. “From far away, people only see ruins and rockets. But Odesa cleans up fast. It’s not propaganda—it’s a habit.”
He cites the city’s most prestigious hotel, the Bristol, which regularly houses Ukrainian and foreign dignitaries. A missile strike on 31 January 2025 partially destroyed it, yet it had already been rebuilt by October. The Opera Theatre, meanwhile, delivers 270 performances a year—more than the Italian average.
Can a city that thrives on openness survive when half its people leave, and investors see only risk?
“The city hides its scars. That’s what confuses outsiders,” Löffler explains with a smile. Yet perception isn’t just about safety; it shapes business, too. “Foreign investors see only risk,” he says. “Convincing them that Odesa still works—that’s the hardest part.”
Odesa’s real test isn’t military—it’s economic. Can a city that thrives on openness survive when half its people leave, and investors see only risk? The answer matters beyond tourism. If even the ideally located Odesa can’t maintain its commercial character under these pressures, what hope do Kharkiv or Dnipro have? The question isn’t whether the city can survive the war. It’s whether it can survive as itself.
Economic pressure worsens the others. When the world sees only war, when investment dries up, and when populations shift, can cosmopolitan energy survive? Maybe. At least some are finding ways to make it work.
Building under pressure
The office is small but tidy, with a desk, a few chairs, and framed photos of German cities. A German language school operated here before the war, but now it’s the headquarters of Jörg Maus, director of Biosol, a timber and construction company that designs and builds wooden houses. On one wall hang the plans for a refugee village: neat rows of cabins, each line drawn by hand.
“Overnight, everything became black and white.”
Maus, who moved from Germany to Odesa in 2008, stayed when the invasion began.
“The war brought problems I never imagined,” he says. “Inside the company, we discovered some workers had family in Russia—parents, grandparents. Suddenly, people didn’t want to work together anymore. Overnight, everything became black and white.”
He pauses, looking at the plans.
“But in the end, people realized we still had to build houses. Together.”
That pragmatism—the recognition that work must continue regardless of personal grievances—kept the company going through power outages and bombardments that shut production more than once. “There were days when I thought, this doesn’t work anymore,” Maus admits. “But then somehow it continued.”
They chose the sirens and the blackouts and the uncertainty—because waiting felt worse than working.
When the invasion began, Maus did something few businessmen would: he drove refugees to the German border himself—women and children, traveling at night when it was safer. He found them housing in Germany, arranged paperwork, helped them settle into what should have been a safer life.
Then something unexpected happened.
“All of them came back,” he says. “Everyone. They said, ‘We can’t wait at the end of the month for our money. We want to work.’ They’re all here now, back at their jobs.”
People who had escaped to safety. Who could have stayed in Germany with its functioning infrastructure and distance from the war. They chose Odesa. They chose the sirens and the blackouts and the uncertainty—because waiting felt worse than working. Because, perhaps, they had already become Odesan enough that anywhere else felt like exile.
That “somehow”—the quiet mechanics of adaptation—connects the abstract debates about identity and language to concrete everyday action.
A fragile weave
October sun glints on cobblestones, and people enjoying the weather walk the streets under golden-leaved trees. The city looks relaxed, intact, peaceful, but I know this harmony can be broken at a moment’s notice by the air raid siren. Nothing like that happens. I keep walking toward the railway station, enjoying the warm autumn weather. But the peace is deceptive in a different way, as I know now that underneath it all, Odesa’s social fabric has been rewoven thread by thread.
The seams show if you look closely.
I think of Jörg Maus’s workers arguing about their grandparents’ loyalties, yet hammering boards side by side. Of his refugees who fled to Germany and came back because they couldn’t stand the waiting.
Of Michael Löffler’s friend in Kharkiv worrying about Odesa, while Odesans worry about Kharkiv—and of her discovery that she couldn’t tell the newcomers from the natives.
Of Yan Shapiro’s estimate that half the city has changed hands, like tenants changing apartments but keeping the lights on.
Of Ugo Poletti preaching civic pride over national purity.
These people disagree on many things, yet all describe the same phenomenon: a city that continues—not untouched, not unchanged, but multiplied, its identities overlapping like layers of paint on its façades.
The city that absorbed Jews, Greeks, Italians, and French across centuries is doing what it always did—just faster. The seams show if you look closely: a yellow card for speaking Russian, workers arguing about their grandparents before picking up hammers together, restaurants opening and closing within months. But the dominant rhythm holds.
Western Ukraine answered these questions about identity and language decades ago.
Odesa’s strength, it turns out, isn’t unity. It’s absorption—a stubborn insistence that newcomers will become Odesan whether they planned to or not. The refugees arrived from Kherson and Mariupol. They’re already sunbathing during drone attacks, shrugging at sirens, blackouts, and the lack of heating, opening restaurants that may or may not last. The city is absorbing them faster than they’re changing it.
Whether that’s enough, nobody knows. Western Ukraine answered these questions about identity and language decades ago. Eastern Ukraine may never get the chance. Odesa, caught between, must answer them at wartime speed—while half its population is new and missiles fall, and the world looks away.
But for now, the city holds—not despite the change, but through it.
This is Chapter II of a two-part series exploring how Odesa’s business community navigates Europe’s largest war since World War II. The first part examined how foreign businesses survive in a city under attack.
