Quote:In 1893, Maximilian Voloshin's mother bought a plot of land in a little Crimean village called Koktebel. The Kiev-born Voloshin, a poet and philosopher, built a house on the waterfront and would invite his friends, poets, artists, writers, from Moscow and St Petersburg, to stay for months at a time during the first three decades of the 20th Century.

The poet Marina Tsvetaeva met her husband Sergei Efron on the beach at Koktebel when they were teenagers. Poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam both spent time with Voloshin. Away from the city, in a tiny backwater, the artists could be bohemian - wear their hair long, or cut it short and shock the locals. Koktebel became, and to a degree remained, an artists' colony.

Part of the appeal of Crimea for Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva was its exotic, Muslim atmosphere. Mandelstam's poem Feodosia is an ode to the Tatar town of Kaffa.