The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Much of the sea was indeed a frontier in the former sense in the early modern period, when the steppeland along the northern shore was still a sparsely populated prairie—the “campi deserti et inhabitati” of early European cartographers—at the intersection of the Ottoman empire, Poland, and Russia. It was a frontier in the latter sense for much of the nineteenth century, when the Black Sea lay between Europe’s rising and falling powers, the Russians and Ottomans. But the longer history of the sea and its littoral is not simply the story of a geographical periphery and its gradual absorption into empires and, later, modern states; nor is it only a story of the insidious construction of the region as backward and uncivilized. Rather, it is about the ebb and flow of the sea’s peripheral status, a long sine wave oscillating between backwardness and isolation on the one hand, and substantial integration with the wider Mediterranean, European, and Eurasian worlds on the other. The frontiers that have run along the coastline or through the middle of the sea have been multiple—ecological, military, religious, economic, even epidemiological—but none has been perennial, and the outlines of one have rarely overlapped exactly with those of another.

  When the ancient Greeks first encountered the Black Sea, it lay literally at the edge of the known world, a place inhabited by mythical beasts, half-men, and heroes. However, from the middle of the first millennium BC, the growth of Greek trading colonies not only stitched the coasts together but also brought them into a broader system of exchange with the Mediterranean. That integrated system lasted until the beginning of the first millennium AD, when the opening up of other sources of wealth, particularly grain from Egypt and the transportation route to the east through the Indian Ocean, reduced the significance of the Black Sea ports. These old connections were revived somewhat in the early Byzantine period, with the cross-sea commerce in furs and other products between Constantinople and the peoples of the forest–steppe zone in the north; but it was not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the sea was once again at the center of a global economic and social system, this time tied to the great commercial empires of the Italian city-states. That link continued until well after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. As the successors to the Genoese and Venetians, the Ottomans were for a time able to control most of the coasts through outright conquest or condominia with local rulers, and to use the region’s resources to build their own empire. As Ottoman power declined in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea became a prize that the sultan guarded jealously, its coasts in large part sealed from foreign commercial and political influence. That situation would obtain until the opening of the sea to European merchants in the late eighteenth century. From that point on, the sea was never again the preserve of any single power, and the new race for access to the region’s wealth, particularly the burgeoning grain trade from the southern ports of the Russian empire, restored the link with the Mediterranean and extended it to the Atlantic as well.

  From the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, the coastline was carved up among a number of newly formed nation-states, with each asserting a right not only to a piece of the coast but also to a section of the coastal waters. The coming of the modern state, however, did not automatically ensure the easy integration of the littoral into broader economic and social structures. The coastal areas remained largely peripheral to the new states whose power centers lay farther inland—as they are, in fact, today. The provinces of Dobrudja and Bessarabia, bounded by the sea and the Danube and Dnestr rivers, were the most ethnically heterogeneous parts of Romania in the first half of the twentieth century and a hotbed of banditry and separatism; they are still culturally diverse areas inside Romania and the Republic of Moldova, where the stagnant economy and inadequate social services are major problems. In Ukraine the Crimean peninsula has been a persistent concern for the central government; its large Russian-speaking population and substantial Russian naval presence, along with a Crimean Tatar minority that is jobless and discontented, have at times presented an obstacle to the consolidation of the new Ukrainian state. In Georgia a bloody civil war over the status of the coastal region of Abkhazia led to the effective loss of that area and the creation of a new, de facto Abkhaz state in the 1990s, with its capital in the port city of Sukhumi. Except in its Kurdish southeast, Turkey has not experienced the violence of some of its former Soviet neighbors, but its own Black Sea coast, populated by ethnic Turks, Turkomans, Laz, and Hemşin, among other groups, has been a serious development challenge; it has long been one of Turkey’s poorest areas, and out-migration has been responsible in part for the influx of economic migrants to the slums that ring Istanbul. The modern history of the Black Sea is thus also the story of centers and peripheries within each of the states around its rim.

  Finally, there is the term “nation.” The ideology of the nation, as it has been understood in much of modern European history, contains at least three propositions. One is analytical: that the nation—defined in terms of a common language, a common culture, shared historical memories, and often a distinct homeland—is and always has been the fundamental unit in human societies, far more basic than class, religion or other forms of association. The second is normative: that the nation should command the exclusive allegiance of all its constituents, whose identities and destinies are bound to it. The third is prophetic: that in instances in which the demographic boundaries of nations and the political boundaries of states do not coincide, social movements that seek to rectify this disjuncture are both predictable and praiseworthy. The first proposition is normally called national identity, the second national self-determination, and the third nationalism. As any good undergraduate knows, these concepts have a history of their own. They emerged in the late eighteenth century, came to fruition in the nineteenth, and form so much a part of our normal way of thinking about human society and international politics that it is difficult to look back to an era before the national idea was dominant.

  Today, in much of eastern Europe, history is usually viewed through a national lens. The main nodal points in the historical narrative are those in which previously unconscious nations come to perceive themselves as distinctive and then rise up to throw off foreign oppression. It is a story, in other words, about how peoples become nations and how those nations, in turn, become nationstates. That way of seeing things should not be surprising, of course. In some cases, east European intellectuals are still sorting through a range of topics officially forbidden during the communist period, including nationalism. In others, particularly in the new states that emerged out of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, many intellectuals see it as their duty to justify the states’ new-found independence by reference to historical antecedents.

  Yet writing the history of nations is always about silencing voices. It involves drawing lines around people, excising connections among human communities, and reading onto the messy past the lineaments of pure identities and immutable boundaries. The real life of peoples and cultures is usually cacophonous, perhaps occasionally choral, sometimes even gloriously so; but it is rarely solo. This book asks the reader to listen to some of those still voices from the past. It is about how, over the long course of history, the Black Sea has more often been a bridge than a barrier, linking religious communities, linguistic groups, empires, and, later, nations and states into a region as real as any other in Europe or Eurasia.

  Beginnings

  For millennia, people have known two things about the Black Sea. One was that sailing it demanded an iron will and an even stronger stomach. Stanley Washburn, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, covered the first Russian revolution from a steamer off the Crimean coast and offered a recipe for concocting something like the sea in the throes of a mid-winter storm. Take “one hole 900 miles long by 700 breadth,” he wrote, rather exaggerating the actual size:

  sow the bottom promiscuously with rocks, scatter a few submerged islands in the most unexpected places, and fill this in with the coldest water obtainable. Surround the sho
res with a coast like that of Maine, and wherever there seems, by any oversight, to be a chance of shelter, insert a line of reefs and ledges of sharp rocks…. Now import a typhoon from the South seas, mix judiciously with a blizzard from North Dakota and turn it loose. Add a frosting of snow and sleet, garnish with white-caps, and serve the whole from a tugboat, and you have a fair conception of the ordinary December weather in the Black Sea.8

  Ancient visitors would have agreed with Washburn’s depiction. The Greeks perhaps adopted their earliest name for the sea, Axeinos, from an Iranian word meaning “dark” or “somber.” Folk etymology may have transformed that name into Axenos, “unwelcoming,” a label that would have fit with early sailors’ own experience of its waters. Storms appeared out of nowhere. Impenetrable fogs obscured the headlands, making navigation impossible. From on board ship, the water appeared opaque, with a visibility of only a few meters, compared with the stunning clarity of the Mediterranean. Only sometime later did Greek and Roman seamen settle on the name that would eventually stick—Pontus Euxinus, the hospitable sea—which was perhaps meant to ward off the wrath of the gods.

  Voyagers many centuries later would follow a similar logic in christening Africa’s treacherous southern point the “Cape of Good Hope.”9 Heaven, sailors seem to believe, appreciates irony.

  The other thing that has long been known is that the Black Sea is a callow upstart as seas go, a relatively young body of water whose unpredictable behavior was perhaps the result of a violent birth. In the first century BC, the Greek traveler Diodorus Siculus encountered a strange legend among the natives of the Aegean island of Samothrace. The sea, old men said, had once swallowed their island. They claimed that in the murky past, the Black Sea to the east had been a great lake. At some point, it suddenly overflowed, destroying the villages around it and hewing out a narrow passage toward the Aegean, a channel that would become the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The deluge coming from the Black Sea was so great that the Mediterranean rose up and inundated entire islands. Now and then, Diodorus reported, Samothracian fishermen would find pieces of carved marble columns caught in their nets, the remnants of some lost civilization ravished by a flood.10

  Diodorus was not alone in reporting such oddities. His contemporary, the geographer Strabo, argued that the sea had once been a lake and that the many rivers that disgorge into it had, in the recent past, filled it to overflowing. The water was so fresh, he said, that it could freeze over in harsh winters, when barbarians would blithely wheel their carts onto it and dig fish out of the slush.11 Cattle were even known to wade into the shallows, eagerly drinking from the brackish waves that lapped around them.12 Other peculiarities were reported in the straits that linked the sea to the Mediterranean. When fishermen cast their nets into the Bosphorus, the nets formed an S-shape; the top floated toward the Mediterranean while the bottom was drawn back on a deep countercurrent toward the Black Sea.13 Sailors even claimed that they could fight the top current by lowering tethered weights beneath their ships and allowing the hidden river below to pull them along.

  These ancient accounts of the sea’s origin and its characteristics were not quite as fantastic as they appear. Toward the end of the last ice age, some 18,000–20,000 years ago, the Black Sea was a small, shallow body of water, about two-thirds of its present size, a formation that geologists call the Neoeuxine lake. The lake was the last stage in a series of expansions and contractions over the space of several million years, when the Black Sea basin had at times been connected with the wider oceans, at other times linked with what would become the Caspian Sea, and at still other times isolated as a tiny, semi-saline lake. This new lake lay in a depression separated from the Mediterranean by a thin isthmus connecting Europe and Asia Minor. As the glaciers retreated, the melting ice water swelled the world’s oceans. At some point, the lake was joined with the Mediterranean, with the waters hollowing out the narrow Bosphorus and Dardanelles and creating the intermediary Sea of Marmara.

  Exactly how and when this happened, however, has remained a source of controversy. Natural philosophers in the Enlightenment adopted the view of the ancients—that the lake, filled up by the major rivers that empty into it, burst its banks and flooded the Aegean. Counting back through biblical genealogies, the French naturalist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort fixed the date of the deluge at some point before 1263 BC. “This Route [the Bosphorus] was certainly traced out by the Author of Nature,” Tounefort wrote, “for according to the Laws of Motion by him establish’d, the Waters always throw themselves that way where they can find the least opposition.”14 For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scientists rejected these claims on two accounts. First, the available geological evidence seemed to point toward a gradual conjoining of the two seas, beginning about 9,000 years ago, as both the Mediterranean and the lake rose from glacial melting. Second, ancient geographers and their Enlightenment successors seemed to have the process reversed: The rate of increase in ocean levels after the last ice age would have far outstripped the rate of change in the Neoeuxine lake, which was fed only by river run-off. It was the Mediterranean that invaded the lake, not the other way around.

  In the 1990s, oceanographers and geologists began to suggest a model of the Black Sea’s evolution that combined both ancient and modern visions.15 The creation of the Black Sea may have been both more recent and more rapid than had earlier been believed. Studies of the strata in the seabed’s sediment have revealed something intriguing. The lower layers contain the remains of freshwater creatures, as one would expect in an ancient lake. The higher layers yield the remnants of marine life, deposited after the lake had become a sea. But between these layers, there is virtually no transition zone. The silt deposited between the time when freshwater animals dominated and the time when they were displaced by marine interlopers is miniscule, suggesting a mixing of freshwater and saltwater that, in geological time, was virtually overnight. Analysis of mollusk shells in the sediment points to a recent date for this change, perhaps only 7,500 years ago—c. 5500 BC—in the middle of the Neolithic period.

  By then, along the Black Sea littoral, especially the southern coast, humans had established settled communities, perhaps building boats to sail across the ancient lake, trading and raiding on its distant shores. But the lives of these communities may have been suddenly transformed. At the time, the surface of the lake was far lower than that of the Mediterranean; the oceans, however, were beginning to rise. In time, the Mediterranean began to spill over into the lake. What began as a trickle soon became a torrent. Before long, the isthmus between Europe and Asia was breached in a flood of water, pouring out from the higher Mediterranean and plunging down into the low-lying lake. The change in the lake’s level seems to have been astonishingly rapid: perhaps as much as 6 in. a day, a speed that would have translated, in the flat steppelands on the northern shore, into an advance landward of up to a mile each day, until the Mediterranean and the new Black Sea reached equilibrium.16 The former shoreline, lying about 150m below the present sea level, is clearly detectable in underwater soundings.17 In recent years marine researchers have reported tantalizing possibilities: the potential discovery of submerged human settlements sitting on the ancient shore. If the flood theory is correct—and it does have its detractors—the people who lived there would have witnessed the birth of a sea.

  It does not take much to imagine the effect of these changes on the Neolithic communities that flanked the former lake, settlements that would have been uprooted as the waters advanced. They may have migrated from the lakeshore to other parts of Europe and the Near East. The making of the Black Sea would have been such a catastrophically memorable event that a folk version may have found its way into the oral traditions of the peoples of the Near East. As Diodorus Siculus discovered some five millennia after the sea’s probable formation, people in the Greek-speaking world still told of a calamitous flood. Even older flood tales contained in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and in the biblica
l Genesis may have had their origins in the rising waters of the Black Sea. Of course, deluge stories exist in many cultures, especially those that depend on seasonal river flooding to replenish the soil of low-lying agricultural lands; moreover, there is no reason to believe that such flood myths must necessarily have grown out of a single, real-world cataclysmic event. But if one is looking for an archetypal disaster inspired by the wrath of an angry god, the origin of the Black Sea is probably a good candidate.

  Geography and Ecology

  Today, the sea extends over some 423,000 sq. km, almost twice the size of the North American Great Lakes. It is a little larger than its neighbor, the Caspian, and about twice as deep, reaching depths below 2,000 m. From the Bulgarian port of Burgas in the west across to the Georgian port of Batumi in the east is 1,174 km; from the tip of Crimea in the north to the Turkish port of Inebolu in the south is only 260 km. For 2,000 years, sailors have claimed that from the middle of the sea on a clear day they could see headlands on both the northern and southern shores at the same time.18 That is surely an old salt’s tale, but it does reflect the degree to which people have thought of the two shores as natural partners and the sea itself as a compact unit. The journey across was relatively quick, and for a good part of the way one remained within sight of land.

  In antiquity, writers compared the sea to a barbarian’s compound bow, and that is not a bad analogy.19 The western tip lies at the Bosphorus (or more properly, the “Thracian Bosphorus”), where the sea binds itself to the world’s oceans; the eastern lies on the Rioni river, filled by water from the Caucasus mountains. In between, two arcs curve north. One passes the coasts of Bulgaria, Romania, and Ukraine, the other Georgia and Russia. The arcs bend sharply toward each other, forming two shallow gulfs. The western one sweeps around the mouths of the Danube and Dnepr rivers; the eastern one leads on to the strait of Kerch (also known as the “Cimmerian Bosphorus”), which connects the sea to its smaller sister, the shallow Sea of Azov. The two arcs meet at the archer’s hand, the diamond-shaped peninsula of Crimea. The bowstring, although not nearly as straight as ancient geographers imagined, stretches across the length of modern Turkey.