Terrible and fine: the reporting from the most dangerous city of Europe

The new era which came after the end of World War II, Marseille — the principal French Mediterranean port — entered fairly shabby. The glamour and luxury of French Riviera, all this Cannes, Nizz and Seong Track, were at the same time and close (geographically) and infinitely far (mentally). It was the severe working city, dirty, become impregnated with a smell of fish, not feeling a sentimentality and pity to feeble, the "melting boiler" attracting humiliated and outcast. At the beginning of the century here behind long port franc poor Italians went, in the 1915th Armenians, in the 1917th — from revolution and civil war Russians ran from punishment. To Marseille moved from the French African colonies, but his post-war person was created substantially by natives from Corsica.

Get acquainted. Paul Carbon is the Corsican gangster and the collaborator who for the first time has thought up how to connect the Turkish opium plantations with the end user far over the ocean. In Turkey cultivation of opium poppy for needs of pharmaceutical industry was quite legal business. Carbon still has in the late thirties organized in Marseille the first laboratories on production from these raw materials of heroin and has adjusted the working logistics on transportation of goods at first from the Middle East to Europe, and then from Europe to North America. Marseille became the major intermediary in this deadly, but bringing millions of dollars, to the scheme "French coherent".

Afterwards the Algerian, Armenian and even Vietnamese gangs joined Corsicans, but Napoleon Bonaparte's fellow countrymen remained the first among equal. In cellars of Old port and in mansions of quite prosperous suburbs, on embankments and in lanes operation in which gangsters, diplomats, police officers, chemists and policies participated began to boil. By 1969 when "French of downlink" reached a pica of the development, in Marseille and its neighborhoods about 80 — 90 percent of all heroin consumed by the USA were produced. The ships which are annually chartered by mafia with seemingly harmless load in holds actually transported across the ocean of ton of the purest drug bringing to gangs fantastic sum and killing the victims.

By the beginning of the 1970th the scale of a problem grew so that U.S. authorities and top-level France directly were engaged in its decision. Hunting for drug dealers joined army, Americans lobbied a total ban on cultivation of opium in Turkey, the income of creators of "French of downlink" began to be reduced inevitably, and together with it also bitter competitive struggle for raw materials and a customer began. The friends began to shoot with pleasure each other




With defeat of "French of downlink" Marseille plunged into a cruel depression, and business was even not in the shots which became a customary element of a daily landscape. Tens of thousands of migrants, generally from the countries of North Africa continued to move to the city which still remained sea gate of the country, there was only already nothing to be engaged in it. The port continued to be the largest employer, a row built also big oil refinery, but jobs weren't enough for all, and at the enterprises there were regularly strikes. To the middle of the 1990th unemployment reached 20%, indecent for Western Europe, the city plunged into despair, a hopelessness and fear.


It is still accepted to frighten by Marseille, and in many respects such reputation is deserved. Here it is really necessary to be extremely careful and accurate. the 1990th, become and for this city dashing, for a long time behind, but echoes of that difficult decade are still felt.

"Twenty young people by means of a barricade have stopped the cargo train and have robbed it", "Have beaten the bus driver for refusal to pass in salon of two women in a burqa", "The fire brigade has been fired by natives of Africa, seven rescuers is wounded" — headings of this sort don't surprise residents of Marseille for a long time. Alas, bedroom communities, especially in his North, continue to remain criminal ghettoes where on entrances to some quarters your car will be surely stopped and will search in search of police officers. However, the first rule of the tourist who has appeared here says: never and under no circumstances in senses and sober memory on own initiative it isn't necessary to stop by in these areas.

But even in the center to relax it turns out hardly. Not to get the smartphone, not to call, use paper cards, not to put on expensive jewelry and hours, to hide money in the most hard-to-reach spots, not to carry a bag in night-time, and it is better not to walk in the evenings at all — the list of recommendations for tourists seems infinite and reminds rather requirements to guests of the Latin American megalopolises. Only the action takes place in Europe, on the bank of the Mediterranean Sea, and it is that case when it is better to be reinsured.


Separate headache for visitors is movement across Marcel on the car. A stop on red light at night — it is dangerous, open salon during a trip around the city — it is dangerous, foreign numbers by car — it is extremely dangerous. In more detail in this very peculiar city we will tell about features of traffic in separate material on Sunday.

Marseille surely keeps championship in the country in number of crimes in general and murders in particular. "A barbecue in a Marseilles way" — such name was given by gutter press to the corpses which have burned to a skeleton with the shot head which still periodically find in the city. Violence for the last decades became a part of his spirit, and let the tourist haven't enough chances to get incidentally into firefight and other showdowns between gangs, more freely on streets from it you doesn't feel.



At the same time Marseille remains exclusively interesting city from the tourist point of view. The wood of masts of Old port, two forts which protect an output from it, the neobyzantine bulks of a cathedral and a basilica of Notr-Dam-de-la-Gard, narrow small streets of the historic center and spacious avenues with scale building of times of the Second empire — Marseille impresses contrary to own reputation.



Especially as the city actively changes directly in the eyes. Yes, on suburbs and at the station young people from the second or third generation of aboriginals still trade in the hashish brought from Morocco, but the city isn't the heroin capital any more. At your car which is harmlessly parked on the street can "wring out" a blinker plafond in several minutes as it, for example, happened to us, but by at the same time there go ultramodern trams. Somewhere there are still multystoried slums, and on the bank of the Mediterranean Sea new fashionable quarters of the Euroméditerranée project with the first skyscraper of the great architect Zakhi Hadid grew. The question price — 7 billion euros.





In the city there is too much violence, solved in the Parisian palaces then it was "pumped in" money. To the place of old docks where the cars which are once filled by heroin loaded shopping centers, creative spaces with night clubs, cafe and restaurants, houses for employees of the next offices, cultural objects came to the ships going to New York. In 2013 Marseille became the European capital of culture, the number of tourists grew up and since then remains stable. To the city began to come behind impressions again: to rise on the calcareous hill to Notr-Dam-de-la-Gard, to go to Château d'If and on the Friulian islands, to sit in traditional brasserie in Old port, having tried the well-known local bouillabaisse there, to buy the freshest seafood in the traditional fish market.




The center of Marseille was flooded by surveillance cameras, submachine gunners go here and at last slightly releases feeling of alarm which was before the invariable satellite. At all kosmopolitichnost of the place, high level of poverty and crime the wave of terrorist attacks which swept recently across France passed the city. Even in 2005 when in Paris hundreds of cars burned, in Marseille any didn't suffer. In this strange fact all paradoxicality of the megalopolis: criminal groups control local uncomfortable youth, without allowing it to be radicalized. People got used to poverty here, and the economic problems which recently disappointed many in Europe in this city already throughout generations an integral part of daily occurrence.





And unites bourgeois middle class and inhabitants of northern areas, Muslims and Catholics, office clerks in good suits and that guy who has snatched out a handbag at the stood gaping tourist, soccer. Local Olimpik is more, than just team, and "Velodrome" which snow-white wave of a roof is noticeable from many points of the city is, more, than stadium. In days of home games, let and at only several o'clock, all city becomes a single whole in which class or religious distinctions at last cease to play some essential role

In the evening couples gather on the hill of Notr-Dam-de-la-Gard that under a gilded statue of Virgin Mary, keepers of the city to spend the next day. From cars the newest hits of the local hip-hop-industry are heard, by with dead-pans and guns at the ready those who have to protect the city from approach of a new era walk. Marcel enjoys the sunset sun, and on its streets other life begins. The city fills up, mafia wakes up.