Skadovsk began as a working port. From its piers, ships carried wheat, wool, and furs to France, Germany, and other European markets, the produce of the fertile Kherson steppe flowing out to the wider world. But the same shallow, sun-warmed coast that made a decent harbor made an even better beach. Over time the grain trade shared the town with a second identity as a seaside resort, drawing holidaymakers from across Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Poland to its sands. Skadovsk sits on Dzharylhach Bay, looking out across the water to the long sandbar island of the same name, so that vacationers on its public beach gazed at one of the largest islands in the Black Sea shimmering just offshore.

Not every chapter of Skadovsk's story is solemn. In 2009, as Ukraine geared up for a presidential election, the organizers of the Black Sea Games held in Skadovsk made a memorable gift to Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko: a Bengal albino tigress they named Tiger-Yulia in her honor. It was the kind of gesture that belongs to a resort town's sunnier moods, a white tiger cub presented to a politician in a beach town gearing up for a summer of games. Tymoshenko would go on to lose the election, but the strange and cheerful footnote endured, a reminder that Skadovsk was, for a long stretch of its life, a place where the news could still be lighthearted.

That changed sharply in 2022. When Russian forces entered Skadovsk on the ninth of March, the response came within minutes: residents poured into the streets with Ukrainian flags, confronting the troops and demanding they leave. For a brief moment it seemed they had, as the mayor announced the invaders gone, only for the soldiers to return the next day and take up quarters at a children's camp on the town's edge. When the mayor, Oleksandr Yakovlev, was detained that same month, townspeople held a peaceful rally calling for his release. Two years later, partisans struck near a polling station during a Russian election, wounding several soldiers. Through occupation, the quiet harbor that a Tatar fishing village once named has stayed anything but quiet, its people refusing to let their town be taken without protest.