Airport

A blogger with his in-laws.

It was my hero, Michael Palin, who said in Around the World in Eighty Days that air travel is a great way to see airports. Real travel is something you read about while you are sitting in seat 33D. Well, yes, I would more or less agree with a lot of that. Airports are pretty dull places, about as sexy as Brexit. I do, however, want to write a few lines about one particular airport that I found quite interesting. There, I have said it. An interesting airport. Is that an oxymoron? 

Very surprising and beautiful - and it's an airport.

Simferopol airport has only recently opened and, considered as a piece of architecture, it really is interesting. The shape of the building is supposed to resemble a wave and the effect really is quite startling. There is also a huge wall along one side of the departures area, with thousands of plants growing on it. This green wall acts as a sort of lung, freshening the air and introducing a touch of Nature in what would otherwise be a sterile building. 

There is, however, one little problem with this new airport: the planes. There aren’t any. Well, there are plenty of planes flying in and out all the time from the rest of Russia, but there are no international flights at all. This is because the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge that the Crimea is part of Russia again and so there is a ban on all international flights into the region. 

That does not mean, of course, that you cannot fly into Simferopol. It just means that you have to fly first to Moscow and then you can fly there. From Sofia, it means two quite long flights plus an hour in a taxi, whereas before it was a short hop to Istanbul with Turkish Airlines and then another short one across the Black Sea. In other words, the EU and American-led ban has not stopped anyone from flying to the Crimea. It just takes longer, uses a lot more jet fuel (that's good news for global warming, isn't it?) and helps to keep the Russian airlines in business. 

I have my boarding card, so I am off to Moscow.

The ban on international flights into Simferopol is in some ways counterproductive. It has not stopped air travel in the region and it has not had the effect it was designed to have. In Russia, Putin is even more popular than ever and it does not look as though the Russian troops will pull out of the Crimea sometime soon. As for Putin’s ban on the import of EU foodstuffs, this did have a sudden and dramatic effect. In most shops in Simferopol, you cannot buy any Czech beer or Dutch cheese. Did this mean that the supermarket shelves empty all over the Crimea? No, I did not see any empty shelves. Russian food producers have stepped in to fill the gaps and there was plenty of food available, both in the shops and in the markets. (There were plenty of empty shelves when I first came to Simferopol, back in the dark days of perestroika, when the Crimea was part of the Ukraine. That, of course, is something that America and the EU conveniently forget all about.) Now you cannot buy French wine in the Crimea, so you buy Russian wine instead. On the whole, I would say that Putin's robust replies to international sanctions and outside pressure actually help him to look strong and tough. The Russian people do not want a leader who can be easily pushed around.    

Simferopol’s swanky new airport is therefore a symbol (and a victim) of the dysfunctional relationship between Russia and the West. We will never understand where the Russians are going if we do not understand where they have come from. 

This brings me to the Bulgarian plan to start a new car ferry service, linking Varna, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea, and Yalta in the Crimea. Rumour has it that this is going to start next year. No, it will not be not quite the same as flying into Simferopol’s new airport, but it is a start, a step in the right direction. Hooray! Someone in the West has done something sensible, for once. Well done, Bulgaria! 

  

Goodbye, Papulichka.