The success of his play The Seagull enabled Anton Chekhov to build his house overlooking the sea in the hills above Yalta, not far from where he was born, by the Sea of Azov. He moved in in 1899 and stayed until 1904, when he left to spend his final days in Germany.

The view of the seafront from his first-floor study inspired the story The Lady with the Dog, and the garden, where Chekhov planted mulberry, almond and peach trees, cypress and birch, as well as cherry trees, became the inspiration for The Cherry Orchard.

Despite a stream of visitors, including Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Maxim Gorky and Isaak Levitan, whose paintings hang in the dark study, the consumptive Chekhov felt depressed and isolated at the White Dacha.

The house has a ground-floor veranda and a covered balcony on the first floor. A contemporary photograph shows that the trees he planted had not yet obscured the view in 1901. The garden, which he laid out himself, is made for pacing, with long winding paths edged with box.

For more on Chekhov in Crimea on cornucopia.net, see Victoria Khroundina’s blog article Chekhov’s Summer of Love

Two handsome seaside cities make ideal bases from which to explore Crimea’s historically diverse west coast and the battlefields of the Crimean War. Sevastopol, in the south, was built to rule the waves; Yevpatoria, in the north, existed to enjoy them.

Sevastopol is a solid working city but with the look of a tiered wedding cake: a northern Neoclassicist’s version of a Mediterranean city, with sudden flourishes of Soviet heroism. Despite its formidable defences, visible here in Bossoli’s 1840s view of the port, it was twice flattened by European bombardment – French and British in 1856, German in 1942. After each horrific siege, it rose again, but in the 1950s, as thousands of labourers from all over the Soviet Union finished rebuilding it to Stalin’s taste, it vanished for almost five decades into a Cold War fog, a “closed city” seen only by the Soviet navy (and no doubt spies) until 1997. It is still home to the Black Sea fleets of Ukraine and Russia.

All this gives an edge as you contemplate Art (Artillery) Bay over a bowl of porridge from the elegant colonnade of Best Western’s Sevastopol Hotel. Yevpatoria grew fat on a more life-enhancing perennial than war: salt, gathered from the less-than-scenic salt pans around the city. Money and hedonism met in Gözleve (its Ottoman name), urbanising even nomadic Scythians. It is now a deliciously unfashionable resort with miles of fine golden sand and avenues of Art Nouveau dachas.