BACK TO SOVIET TIMES IN CRIMEAN RESORTS

Crimea is one of the most popular summer destinations for Russians, Ukrainians and other travelers. Beautiful nature, cultural sights ... Crimea has it all ... including Soviet era services.

 

Over the last 20 years, many tourism resorts in former communist countries managed to change quite substantially their Soviet era heritage to a comparative advantage. Travelers visit the resorts enjoying the luxury of modern day without even noticing the remains of the not so long gone reality of the USSR. Nevertheless, in many “eastern” resorts the time has stopped.

For example, Crimea, the peninsula in Ukraine famed for beautiful nature, is a tourism destination for millions of visitors every year. The region has been always popular with vacationers – at first the Russian aristocracy and later on the Soviet workers and peasants.

Even today in some of its resorts and hotels you can still receive a truly “Soviet-style” service. There are many new private hotels in the area but the accommodation sector is still dominated by resorts from the times of the USSR.

Among them is for example the tourist resort Krym on the southern coast of Crimea, which was originally built as a resort for miners from eastern Ukraine. There are wooden summer houses with very thin walls that are actually so thin that you can hear your neighbors. It costs Hr 1,680 (€134) per week for two people or you can hire a “luxury” room with its own bathroom and shower for Hr 3,010 (€240) per week for two people.

The rooms are equipped with a bucket and a basin for doing laundry and with a mop so that you can keep the room clean. You can even come across signs that prohibit e.g. washing hair or feet in the sink or others which inform that visitors in swimsuits or without shirts are not allowed in the canteen. What more, outside the resort you may have hard time to get your tea in something else than in the multipurpose plastic mugs.

Today, Crimea is mostly popular with lower income tourists from the Ukraine. Ukrainians actually make up some 75 per cent of all visitors coming to the peninsula. Nevertheless, there was some 11 per cent decline in the number of tourists in 2009 compared to the previous year.

 

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