Photo of the Week
This week's photo, "Hotel Odesa," shows the marine station and Hotel Odesa in summer 2013. The latter was destroyed by a Russian rocket in 2024.
About the Project
With so much at stake — and so much in flux — in the Black Sea region, we thought it would be valuable to build a shared visual archive. In February 2025 we asked the Davis Center community of students, scholars, alums, and supporters to send us original photographs taken during their travels to, or residence in, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova. We are excited to share the images — and the stories they tell — with all of you.
Each week from March through May 2025 we will add a photograph that tells a compelling story about life in and around the Black Sea. Check in to watch the gallery grow, and stay tuned for a podcast conversation with our community photographers in May. The images are available via a CC BY-SA-NC 4.0 license. You are free to use and share them for non-commercial purposes so long as you credit the photographer(s).
To open the gallery map in its own window, click here. (We have included a photo carousel below as well.)
Meet the Photographers
Week 5, "Hotel Odesa": Anastasia Pereverten is an A.M. Candidate in Regional Studies - REECA at Harvard University. A native of Kyiv, she earned her B.A. at the University of Wyoming and came to Cambridge to study U.S. foreign policy toward Eastern Europe as well as Ukrainian diplomacy. Read more about her.
Week 4, "Veleka River Delta at Sunset": Irina Todorova is a health psychologist. She is Clinical Professor at the Department of Applied Psychology at Northeastern University. Read more about her here. Learn about the Veleka River.
Week 3, "Trouty Fingers": Evan Woodnorth has worked and lived in Azerbaijan and Turkey.
Week 2, "Stairway to Nowhere": Taylor Zajicek is a historian of environmental change in modern Eurasia and the Middle East. He earned his PhD at Princeton and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia in 2024-2025. Read about his current book project, an environmental history of the Black Sea in the 20th century, or his piece on the environmental impact of Russia's war against Ukraine.
Week 1, "On Duty": Isabelle DeSisto is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. She earned both her B.A. in government (summa cum laude) and her M.A. in regional studies (Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia) from Harvard. She took this photo Read more about her here.