The modest house where the renowned poet Anna Akhmatova lived, now a museum devoted to her life and work, is one of the best places to eat in town.

Having been warned by her father not to disgrace the family by aspiring to be a poet, she spurned her family name of Gurenko and styled herself Akhmatova, a pen name she took from Ahmet Khan, a forebear descended from Genghis Khan.

As a modernist she sought to bring clarity back to poetry, rejecting the vagueness of the symbolists – such as the work of Maximilian Voloshin – in favour of precise concrete imagery. But Akhmatova, now an icon of Russian literature of whom the Crimeans are most proud, fell foul of the authorities under Stalin and was denounced for, among other crimes, writing poetry that was full of mysticism and eroticism…