On September 21, we drove from our boat in Sevastopol across the Crimean Peninsula. On the way we stopped at Alupka Palace. During the month of February, 1945, the "Big Three," Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at the Livadia Palace near Yalta and made final decisions concerning World War II. Churchill stayed at Alupka and Roosevelt stayed at Livadia. Stalin, I think, stayed in a Dascha not far away, right on the Black Sea (maybe the same one where during the 1991 coup Gorbachev was placed under house arrest and replaced by Yeltsin).
The bottom photo is Alupka Palace and you see our group, minus me the photographer, going in (the two young people work for Wilf's company and are acting as our guides). The Palace is located on the side of a very high mountain and the next photo up shows the view of that. If your eyes are sharp, you can see a tram going up the mountain suspended from a cable. On the other side of the palace is the Black Sea. The photo above that shows the outside of the rooms where Churchill stayed during the conference. He choose this location, even though it is about 3 hours by winding roads from the conference location, in part because it looks like an English castle. The top photo shows the front of the Livadia Palace, built by the last Tzar, where the Big Three met, negotiated, and signed the agreement.
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