Sidemy
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.
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."