Potemkin Stairs

Potemkin Stairs, also known as the Odessa Steps or Primorsky Stairs, are the monumental stairway connecting central Odesa with the harbour below. Built in the 19th century, the stairs became one of the city’s defining landmarks, but their global fame is tied above all to film history. For many viewers, the stairs are inseparable from Sergei Eisenstein’s silent Soviet film “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), which turned them into one of the most famous locations in cinema. The European Film Academy describes the Potemkin Stairs as one of the world’s most famous historical film locations, directly because of Eisenstein’s film.

In “Battleship Potemkin” (1925), the Potemkin Stairs are used for the legendary Odessa Steps sequence. After the people of Odesa gather in support of the mutinous sailors, Tsarist soldiers march down the stairs in rigid formation and fire into the crowd. The sequence shows civilians trying to flee down the seemingly endless steps, including a mother with a baby carriage, a young boy, an old woman and other victims caught in the massacre. The baby carriage rolling down the stairs became one of the most famous images in film history.

The scene is important not only because of the location, but because of how Eisenstein uses the stairs cinematically. The long descent, the repeated cutting between soldiers, victims and details in the crowd, and the geometric shape of the steps create a sequence that feels larger and more terrifying than the physical space itself. The massacre as shown in the film did not happen in that exact form on the stairs, but Eisenstein’s staging was so powerful that it helped turn Potemkin Stairs into a symbol of both revolution and cinema.

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