The lighthouse rises 27.2 meters, painted in the bold red and white bands that make it easy to pick out against sea and sky. Its heart is a signal light of extraordinary power, rated at a million watts and visible up to twelve nautical miles out, some twenty-two kilometers across the water. The choice of flash is no accident. Rather than a generic pattern, the beam sends the Morse letter O, three long dashes, claiming the port for Odesa in a language sailors have understood for well over a century. When storms roll in or fog swallows the coast, a foghorn joins the light, so that even ships that cannot see the beacon can still hear it calling them home.

The tower that stands today is not the first to hold this post. It is the third lighthouse to occupy the same spot, part of a lineage that reaches back to 1862, when the original was raised in wood. That first beacon belonged to the era of the Russian Empire and the bustling grain trade that made Odesa rich, and as the port grew and technology advanced, the wooden light gave way to sturdier successors. Built with iron tubing sealed by lead gaskets, the modern lighthouse carries forward a duty that has never lapsed across more than a century and a half: to mark the safe way in, night after night, for the ships that are the lifeblood of the city.

The lighthouse does not stand alone but as the tip of a great work of maritime engineering. A long stone causeway and jetty reach out from the shoreline to carry it, and together with huge concrete breakwaters raised on rock along the eastern side, they shield the harbor from the heavy seas that sweep up from the south. To reach the tower is to walk out along that jetty, the city receding behind you and the open water stretching ahead, until you stand at the very threshold between Odesa and the Black Sea. It is one of the most striking vantage points in the whole city, the place where land finally surrenders to sea.

The lighthouse carries the name of Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, the governor-general who did so much to shape nineteenth-century Odesa, the same figure remembered by a cathedral, a palace, and a much-debated statue in the city center. It is fitting that his name should also belong to the beacon at the harbor's edge, for Odesa was always a creature of the sea, and Vorontsov understood that its future ran out through this very channel. Today the red-and-white tower remains a beloved emblem of the port, appearing on postcards and in the memories of everyone who has sailed in past its light. In three patient flashes, it goes on spelling the name of the city it has watched over for so long.