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The transitional-economy high street: a homestyle diner's dying neon, GSM shops, the Valentina department store wearing billboards — and the new economy announcing itself in looping pink script.

Wall studies: poster layers going back years, curved balconies, rust streaks like pinstripes, and stencils by artists who never signed twice the same way.

Residents: working cats on every wall, a library dumped in a park, and children's drawings pinned to a lattice — the city keeps its own archives.

The graffiti layer — every surface negotiable, every underpass a gallery with poor lighting.

And the beautiful ruins — flooded ballrooms, staircases to nothing, a squat with the kettle still out. Nothing here is demolished; it is simply left to think about what it did.

The Pantheon of the fallen: the mother rising out of the trees, the ceremonial axis, soldiers at her feet.

White marble reliefs, a niche kept in fresh flowers — and Yuri Gagarin's little memorial stone, carnations renewed by someone who still remembers 12 April 1961.

The observatory quarter — planetarium concrete folded like a launch shroud, a figure saluting from a dome, and every sculpture pointing up. The message was never subtle: the future is vertical, comrades.

The Naval Museum keeps the torpedo boat Drazki — 'the Daring', which sank an Ottoman cruiser in 1912 — and a rocket for later arguments.

The garden's daily congregation: sailors in whites, pensioners holding the benches, a red bicycle on its rounds, and the mineral fountains where the city queues with bottles — the water is warm, sulphurous, and sworn by.