Empire and Odyssey in
Far East Russia - 2007

The Bryner summer house at Sidemy, an hour by yacht across Amur Bay from Vladivostok. This photo was taken in the 1940s; now only the foundation remains.

Jules's light house at Sidemy. The light house is on Rabbit Island, three hundred yards from the Bryner beach.

Honeymoon Cottage with the light house in the background.

The Cottage, on a bluff over Bryner beach, is where my great-grandparents (in 1882) and my grand-parents (in 1916) spent their wedding nights.

Inside the cottage.

In the early Soviet era, the Bryner Estate was a Communist Youth Pioneer Camp. Later, my sweetheart, Olya, spent her summers as a young teenager right here. She was able to show me all around the coast, where my father had spent his childhood in the 1920s.

Olya as a Pioneer Girl, age 11. She was photographed for winning an award as a drummer.

Same eyes eighteen years later . . . but much happier without Lenin talking in her ear!

With Olya at the Bryner tomb, built for the whole family, where Juli was buried in 1920. His remains were moved before the Bolsheviks arrived at Sidemi to desecrate the site in 1922.

This is a statue of Mikhail Yankovsky, wth whom Juli Bryner owned the 8,000-acre Sidemi peninsula. Yankovsky was an exiled Count from Poland and renowned tiger hunter. This region was also the home of the Siberian Tiger, which, at 11 feet in length, was the largest feline on earth . . . now on the verge of extinction. Bryner and Yankovsky had their own private army to fight the tigers, Siberian wolves (also the world's largest), gangs of Chinese bandits known as Hungu'tse, or "Red Beards."