I visited Crimea in September 2018, when I flew from Murmansk to Simferopol, the de facto capital of Crimea, and caught a bus at the airport to Sevastopol, the largest city on the Crimean Peninsula and a major Black Sea port. Like many cities in the former Soviet Union, Sevastopol is stocked with war memorials, monuments and statues, yet empty of international tourists deterred by its political status and sanctions imposed by Western governments in response to the annexation of Crimea by Russia. I had to bring a stack of Russian rubles because my ATM and credit cards were useless.  I stayed at the Sevastopol Hotel, opened in 1959 and the city's oldest hotel. I took a local bus from the bus stop nearby the hotel to Chersonesus, an ancient Greek colony founded 2,500 years ago on the Black Sea, now located in the outskirts of Sevastopol. The site, nicknamed the Ukrainian Pompeii, was successively controlled by the Greek, Roman and Byzantine Empires, and is the only World Heritage Site on the Crimean Peninsula.  

I took a bus from Sevastopol to Yalta, on the southern coast of Crimea.  There are frequent boats to the Swallow's Nest, designed to look like a medieval knight's castle, but really an architectural folly built primarily for decorative purposes. The small castle supposedly earned its name because it sits like a swallow’s nest on steep cliffs overlooking the Black Sea.  I also took a local bus to Livadia Palace just outside Yalta, which hosted the Yalta Conference in 1945 among President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin to shape a post-war peace and to discuss the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe following WWII. I stayed at the Bristol Hotel, the oldest hotel in Yalta.