--- description: TIME contract photographer Yuri Kozyrev takes us inside the weird, wonderful world of Sochi, which was known in Soviet times as Russia's version of Palm Beach. title: Weird Sochi: Inside Russia's own Palm Beach image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltdcae76eb8dfc48c7/6987e5b58e06019f0945d897/koy6447-1-e13917234354381.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [World](/section/world/) ## World Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [LightBox](/tag/time-section-lightbox/) ## LightBox Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # Weird, Wonderful Sochi: Inside Russia's Own Palm Beach  by [Simon Shuster](/author/simon-shuster/)  ## Simon Shuster Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Senior Correspondent Feb 7, 2014 9:00 AM CUT  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 15, 2014: A patient takes a mineral bath at the Matsesta Sanatorium in Sochi. Starting in the late 1930s, Matsesta was at the center of Josef Stalin's drive to turn Sochi into the premier resort city of the Soviet Union. Sochi, Russia, Jan. 15, 2014: A patient takes a mineral bath at the Matsesta Sanatorium in Sochi. Starting in the late 1930s, Matsesta was at the center of Josef Stalin's drive to turn Sochi into the premier resort city of the Soviet Union.Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  by [Simon Shuster](/author/simon-shuster/)  ## Simon Shuster Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Senior Correspondent Feb 7, 2014 9:00 AM CUT The locals in Sochi still use the old Soviet slang – _dikari,_ which means, “the savages” – to describe the tourists who arrive from colder parts of Russia, rent an apartment near the Black Sea coast and spend a week letting the sun wash their pallor away. The word is a reflection of the privileged status (some would say snobbery) that once set the people of Sochi apart from the rest of the toiling masses of the Soviet Union. Their town was the closest thing in the USSR to Monte Carlo or Palm Beach. The markets were packed with exotic fruit. The summer lasted nine months of the year. And the locals knew they lived in the Soviet version of paradise. To his incalculable luck, Yuri Kozyrev, TIME’s contract photographer, was one of them. His grandparents owned an apartment in the center of Sochi, within view of the sea port’s elegant spire, and he would visit them each year between May and October starting from the age of three. His grandmother Vera was a curator at a local museum. His grandfather Boris repaired watches in a little workshop and, in his abundant leisure time, rode around on his motorbike and wrote books about history and philosophy. Their balcony looked out over pomegranate and persimmon trees, fruits as rare to the average Soviet as a coconut is to an Eskimo. They bloomed all summer long. In the early 1990s, not long before he went to photograph the first war in Chechnya, Kozyrev stopped coming to Sochi. His grandparents had passed away just as the Soviet Union collapsed, and the family lost their apartment. So it was only in the last couple of years that he started returning to Sochi on assignment, photographing the preparations for the Winter Olympic Games, which the city will host from February 7 – 23. What he found on his return was hard to recognize, a provincial town turned into a giant construction site, with hotels, stadiums and highways rising with fantastic speed. “It was all movement and light,” he says. “All of it was new.” On the Black Sea coast, the new Olympic village had been built right over marshlands, its stadiums resembling a convention of alien spaceships gathered from different galaxies. Such spectacles in Kozyrev’s pictures come through with all their luminescent power. But so does his nostalgia for the town that they replaced. In many of the frames, the remnants of the old creep into the present day, but usually in the form of kitsch, while the new overwhelms with its scale and insistence. During the first couple of trips, Kozyrev could not bring himself to visit his grandparents’ old apartment building. “I was too afraid,” he says. “I’d heard it was razed to make way for some Olympic construction and I couldn’t bare to see it.” In fact, the building still stood. Except the fruit trees were gone, and someone had decided to paint it pink. Wherever he could find the remains of the old Sochi– its sanatoriums and its bazaars – Kozyrev sought them out, but they usually seemed anachronistic in the context of the Olympic boom, somehow out of place in their native environment. “The arrival of a new epoch will do that,” he says with a laugh. Only once during his visits did he come across an image of the town as he remembers it. Sitting by the shore, he found an older couple from Siberia getting a spa treatment, their legs submerged in plastic tubs of water so that little fish could nibble on their feet. Grinning as he stopped to talk to them, he had to keep himself from shouting, _dikari!_ --- **_Yuri Kozyrev_** _is a contract photographer for TIME and was named the 2011_ [_Photographer of the Year_](http://www.poyi.org/69/41/ "undefined") _in the Pictures of the Year International competition._ **_Simon Shuster_** _is TIME’s Moscow correspondent. Follow him on Twitter @shustry._ ---  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 15, 2014: A patient takes a mineral bath at the Matsesta Sanatorium in Sochi. Starting in the late 1930s, Matsesta was at the center of Josef Stalin's drive to turn Sochi into the premier resort city of the Soviet Union. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 17, 2014: Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort was constructed to help Russia win its bid for the Sochi Games. At a cost of more than $50 billion, these Olympics will be the most expensive ever. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 17, 2014: Workers wait for clients at the borsht bar erected in the center of Roza Khutor, the skiing village that will serve as a key venue for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi. Dressed in traditional Cossack uniforms and serving up carafes of stiff Russian moonshine, the eatery injects a touch of local culture and kitsch into the otherwise staid and sleek atmosphere of Roza Khutor. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 14, 2014: Cossack officers watch students perform a traditional Russian dance at School No. 10 in the city of Sochi. The dance classes are part of the Cossack curriculum recently implemented at the school under its director, Vladimir Davydov (pictured center). Davydov, a member of the Sochi city council, is an active member of the local Cossack community. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 17, 2014: The "Coastal Cluster" building on Sochi's Black Sea waterfront will host the opening and closing ceremonies, skating, and ice hockey Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Matsesta, Sochi, Russia, Jan. 15, 2014: Starting in the late 1930s, Matsesta was at the center of Josef Stalin's drive to turn Sochi into the premier resort city of the Soviet Union. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 15, 2014: Father Flavian, the abbot of the Cathedral of the Holy Face of Christ the Savior, poses on its altar. The ornate cathedral, which stands inside the Olympic village in Sochi, was built in one year. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 18, 2014: A Russian tourist walks beside a waterfall near the Russian village of Kichmay, one of the few settlements left near the city of Sochi that is still populated mostly by ethnic Circassians. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, January 2014: A carnival cutout shows traditional Circassian dress at a tourist destination in the Russian village of Kichmay. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 17, 2014: A welder assembles the frame for the winners' podium of the Winter Olympic Games. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 17, 2014\. Armed and uniformed Cossacks patrol the railway station in Krasnaya Polyana, the mountain venue for many of the Olympic events to be held as part of the Winter Games in Sochi. Security concerns and threats of terrorism have urged the Russian government to deploy some 40,000 police officers and security personnel in and around Sochi during the Games, a show of force unprecedented in modern Olympic history. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 18, 2014: Villages of the Kichmay valley, populated mostly by ethnic Circassians, are seen from atop a monument to the Circassian warriors who died while resisting the Russian invasion of this part of the Caucasus Mountains in the 19th Century. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Adler, Russia, Jan. 15, 2014: The market at Adler. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 17, 2014: Russian President Vladimir Putin poses with a group of Olympic volunteers who will help coordinate the Winter Games in Sochi. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 18, 2014: Members of an ethnic Circassian dance troupe perform for tourists at a restaurant in the Russian village of Kichmay, one of the few settlements left near the city of Sochi that is still populated mostly by Circassians. Native to the Caucasus Mountains, this ancient civilization of highlanders fiercely resisted the conquering armies of the Russian Empire during the Caucasian War from 1763 to 1864. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, Jan. 16, 2014: People on the beach in Sochi. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, January 2014: Downtown Sochi. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, January 14 2014: The "Coastal Cluster" building on Sochi's Black Sea waterfront will host the opening and closing ceremonies, skating, and ice hockey. Yuri Kozyrev—NOOR for TIME  Sochi, Russia, January 2014: A man takes photos of a boy in front of the Olympic Rings. 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