Chekhov visited Crimea repeatedly long before the final move to Yalta. Acquaintance with the city took place in 1888, during a short trip from Sevastopol to Feodosia. Yalta itself did not make much impression on him then, only the sea was remembered. “… Wonderful, blue and tender, like the hair of an innocent girl, ” Chekhov wrote. A year later, he found himself here again, settling near the embankment. During a visit to Yalta in 1894, Anton Pavlovich rented a room at the “Rossiya” Hotel, where he wrote the story “Student”. The next date with the Crimea took place in 1896, and in 1898 the Yalta period of the writer’s life began.

He came to Yalta on the recommendation of his physicians and settled there until the end of his life. Before the construction of the house in Aoutka, Chekhov rented rooms in different boarding houses and at the ‘Omyur’ dacha. This was the name of the house built in 1888 by the amateur architect Konstantin Romanovich Ovsyany and owned by Kapitolina Mikhailovna Ilovaiskaya, a good friend of Anton Pavlovich. The name of the house - ‘Omyur’ - is of Turkic origin and means ‘life’. The hostess rented out rooms to vacationers, giving guests the opportunity to dine here. It was very convenient for the sick Chekhov. He lived in the ‘Omyur’ from October 1898 to April 1899.

At the ‘Omyur’ dacha Chekhov created such of his works like ‘The Darling’, ‘On Official Duty’, ‘A Doctor”s Visit’, ‘The New Villa’. The presented sketch depicting ‘Omyur’ was created by Sergei Mikhailovich Chekhov, the writer’s nephew. On the stand under it there are postcards with Yalta places of that time: the Church of St. John Chrysostom and a flower garden on the city embankment.

An exposition dedicated to Chekhov was planned to be organized at the “Omyur” dacha back in the 1980s. But the idea was implemented in the early 1990s, when, by order of the Yalta authorities, the rooms in which Anton Pavlovich lived became vacated in the house. The exhibition was then temporary. In 2006, the head of the Ukrainian government, Yuri Ivanovich Yekhanurov, facilitated the opening of a new exposition “Chekhov and Ukraine”, where the most popular part was “Chekhov and the Crimea”. In 2015, the exposition was updated, and its “Crimean” department took the spot.