An evening’s walk in Odesa

By Matthew Parish

Monday 14 September 2026

There is something peculiarly indecent about an air-raid siren sounding over a beautiful city at night. Odesa was built for evening promenades, for illuminated façades, restaurants spilling their tables onto pavements, arguments over wine and the slow walk home through streets that still carry the architectural confidence of an age in which cities were intended to be admired. Yet now one walks through Odesa after dark beneath another sound: the rising and falling mechanical lament of the air-raid siren, so familiar that people scarcely look upwards when it begins.

I was walking back to my hotel through the city when the sirens started again, although perhaps they had never really stopped. In wartime Ukraine one gradually loses the distinction between individual air-raid alerts. There is the telephone warning, the municipal siren, the distant rumble, the message telling you that drones are approaching from the Black Sea, another saying that missiles may have been launched and another reporting aircraft taking off somewhere far away. The alerts overlap until they cease to describe discrete events and become instead the background music of existence. Then there are the explosions, somewhere in the distance, sometimes faint enough to make you wonder whether you heard them at all and sometimes sufficiently substantial to make the windows and the air seem to tremble.

It is remarkably difficult for an inexperienced person to judge the distance of an explosion in a city. Buildings reflect sound, streets channel it and the noise rolls between stone façades before returning from unexpected directions. An explosion that seems close may be kilometres away, while something dangerously near may produce a strangely muffled concussion. You listen instinctively for what comes afterwards: another detonation, the crackle and thump of air defence or the deeper sound of something substantial striking the ground. Then, after a few seconds, you discover that you are still standing there and the temptation is simply to keep walking.

This is one of the peculiar psychological transformations produced by prolonged war. Human beings cannot remain permanently terrified because fear is exhausting and therefore the mind domesticates danger. The first air-raid siren one hears in Ukraine may cause an immediate search for a shelter. After hundreds, one looks at one’s telephone, considers the estimated trajectory of the threat and continues whatever one was doing. People finish their meals, taxi drivers continue driving, couples continue conversations and somebody complains that the supermarket is closing early. This is not exactly courage, nor is it necessarily recklessness. It is adaptation, which is one of the most extraordinary and disturbing qualities of the human mind.

Yet walking through Odesa that night, there were reminders that the danger was not theoretical. People had moved beneath the heavy concrete structures available along the street. They stood or crouched there, waiting, having identified the strongest nearby mass of reinforced concrete and placed it between themselves and whatever might be travelling invisibly through the darkness. There is something profoundly primitive about this calculation. Modern warfare may involve satellites, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare, radar systems and autonomous navigation, but for the civilian on the ground the essential question can be reduced to something our ancestors would have understood immediately: where is the thickest piece of stone, and can I get behind it before whatever is coming arrives?

A person hiding beneath concrete during an air raid does not participate in the geopolitical theories surrounding the war. He is not, at that moment, thinking about NATO, sanctions, territorial negotiations, the Kremlin’s strategic calculations or the architecture of European security. He is thinking about whether the concrete above his head is thick enough and whether the next explosion will be closer than the last one. Wars are discussed internationally in abstractions: front lines advance by kilometres, governments announce packages worth billions, analysts calculate artillery production and mobilisation rates, maps display coloured territories and arrows and diplomats debate security guarantees. Somewhere within all these abstractions there is supposed to be a human being standing beneath a concrete overhang in Odesa listening to explosions and wondering whether the next one will be his.

The distance between those two perspectives is enormous, and it is one of the reasons why war becomes so difficult to describe honestly from afar. On television, war is compressed into dramatic images: a missile launch, a burning building, a soldier running across a field, a politician speaking at a podium. For the civilian experiencing it, however, war consists to a remarkable degree of uncertain intervals between events. One waits to discover whether the noise is approaching or receding, whether the electricity will disappear, whether the telephone network will remain functional and whether the person who has not answered a message is merely asleep. The drama of war lies as much in these periods of ignorance as it does in the explosions themselves.

I continued towards the hotel. The streets had acquired that peculiar wartime emptiness that does not resemble ordinary nocturnal quiet. A peaceful city at night sleeps; a city under bombardment waits. Windows are dark for different reasons, cars move with a different urgency and every unusually loud sound becomes momentarily ambiguous. The architecture itself appears to change character. A handsome nineteenth-century building ceases for a moment to be an aesthetic object and becomes a calculation about masonry, glass, blast pressure and the location of its strongest internal walls. You find yourself looking at buildings not as an architect or tourist might see them, but according to the elementary geometry of survival.

Eventually the hotel appeared, promising the artificial normality that hotels specialise in producing. There was still a reception desk, together with carpets, lights, keys, luggage and the elaborate rituals by which hospitality establishments insist that everything is proceeding according to plan. Yet the sirens continued outside and inside people had gathered beneath the concrete stairwells. A concrete staircase is not ordinarily something one notices. It is part of the invisible engineering of a building, designed merely to transport people between floors. In wartime it acquires another purpose because reinforced concrete stairwells are often among the more substantial internal structures available when a proper shelter cannot immediately be reached. Guests who in another country might have been sitting in a bar or sleeping upstairs were therefore crouched beneath stairs, listening.

There is an intimacy to such moments because social distinctions suddenly become ridiculous. The businessman, receptionist, cleaner, foreign visitor, student and pensioner are all reduced to approximately the same dimensions beneath a staircase. Everyone understands why everyone else is there and there is little need for explanation. Some people look at their telephones, some talk quietly and some attempt humour, while others sit silently. Ukrainians have developed an extraordinary capacity to conduct ordinary life within these interludes of potential death. Messages are answered, cigarettes are discussed, somebody asks whether the kitchen is still open and somebody else checks a Telegram channel to discover what sort of object may presently be flying towards the city.

This apparent casualness should never be mistaken for indifference. People are afraid; they have merely learned how to carry fear without permitting it to occupy every corner of their minds. That may be one of the defining psychological experiences of contemporary Ukraine. The country does not live continuously in terror because no society could function that way. Instead terror has been incorporated into routine. Air-raid applications sit beside banking applications on telephones, shelters become part of one’s mental map of a neighbourhood and the question of where the strongest wall is becomes unconscious knowledge. People learn which part of an apartment has two walls between it and the outside, while children learn rules that children should never have needed to learn.

There is also a peculiar collective etiquette surrounding these moments. Nobody wants to be the person who panics, yet nobody wishes to be the fool who ignores an obvious danger. Ukrainians have therefore developed countless informal judgments about different categories of threat. A distant MiG take-off may be treated differently from an incoming ballistic missile warning; a Shahed alert may provoke one calculation in one district and another somewhere else. None of this is perfectly rational because civilians seldom possess complete information, but human beings living under recurrent bombardment inevitably construct their own systems for making uncertainty tolerable. They learn to distinguish noises, interpret messages and estimate risks that in peaceful societies would be considered wholly unacceptable.

Eventually the alert ends. The siren changes, telephones announce that the danger has passed and people emerge from beneath the concrete staircase. Someone returns to reception, someone goes upstairs and someone orders a drink. The city resumes its interrupted existence until the next warning arrives. This may be the strangest feature of all: the extraordinary speed with which the abnormal becomes ordinary again. Ten minutes after crouching beneath reinforced concrete because an explosive machine may be approaching your neighbourhood, you may find yourself brushing your teeth or answering an email.

Odesa makes this cycle particularly poignant because it is a city so emphatically devoted to life. Its historical identity is maritime, mercantile, cosmopolitan and irreverent. It has always possessed something theatrical about it. Its grand staircases descend towards the sea, its courtyards conceal generations of stories and its humour has survived empires, revolutions, occupations and political systems. The city seems almost constitutionally incapable of solemnity for very long. Perhaps that is why the sirens feel like such an intrusion. They are not merely warnings of physical destruction but attempts to impose a different rhythm upon the city: the rhythm of threat, interruption and fear.

Yet they have not succeeded. The people beneath the concrete structures eventually emerge and those beneath the hotel staircase stand up. Restaurants reopen after alerts, coffee is served in the morning, trams move, dogs must still be walked, lovers quarrel, children complain and bills must be paid. Somebody inevitably tells a joke. This is sometimes described as resilience, although the word has become so frequently applied to Ukraine that it risks losing its meaning. What it really describes is something more mundane and therefore more impressive: the refusal to surrender ordinary life merely because somebody else has decided that ordinary life should become impossible.

Walking through Odesa beneath endless sirens, hearing explosions somewhere beyond the visible streets and passing people sheltering beneath concrete, one begins to understand that war is not composed principally of the dramatic moments shown on television. For civilians, war consists overwhelmingly of waiting: waiting beneath stairs, waiting for the all-clear, waiting to learn where the missile landed, waiting for electricity to return, waiting for somebody to answer a telephone and waiting for morning. Then, when morning comes, there is breakfast to prepare, work to be done, washing to be hung out and all the other unremarkable activities through which human beings insist upon remaining human.

That mundane persistence may ultimately be more important than the grand language in which wars are conventionally described. A society survives not merely because its soldiers hold defensive lines but because millions of civilians continue performing the innumerable ordinary actions from which a country is constructed. They go to work, repair windows, teach children, open shops, fall in love, care for elderly relatives and walk back to their hotels. The continuation of ordinary life is not separate from resistance to war. In a conflict intended in part to exhaust and demoralise a society, ordinary existence itself becomes a form of defiance.

Nevertheless, the explosions remain somewhere in the distance and one knows that for somebody they are not distant at all. Somewhere a building may have been struck, firefighters may already be moving and an ambulance may be accelerating through darkened streets. Somewhere somebody may be telephoning a relative who does not answer. The geographical lottery of aerial warfare has selected another street, another building or another family. This is the uncomfortable thought accompanying the relief of discovering that the explosion was far away: distance has protected you only because it has placed somebody else closer.

For the moment, however, I had reached the hotel and joined the others beneath reinforced concrete. Above us was the staircase and beyond it the city. Beyond the city lay the Black Sea, invisible in the darkness. Somewhere overhead machines were searching for targets while other machines were searching for them. Enormous technological systems had converged upon this ancient port city, carrying with them the calculations of governments and generals hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. Yet underneath all that technology sat a small collection of human beings beneath a staircase, waiting to discover what those calculations would mean for them.

Eventually the sirens would stop and everyone would stand up again. People would return to their rooms, the receptionist would return to the desk and Odesa would continue through the night as it has continued through so many nights of war. Nobody beneath that staircase could know where the next drone or missile would fall, or whether tomorrow’s alert would be more dangerous than tonight’s. They knew only the ritual that this war has imposed upon them: listen, wait, shelter, emerge and continue living. The sirens would sound again, but so too, in the morning, would the ordinary noises of a city that stubbornly refuses to disappear.