The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Grain—barley, rye, and especially wheat—remained the mainstay of Russian business; Russian wheat accounted for up to a third of world wheat exports before the First World War. New products also began to compete for the attention of foreign shippers and investors. Extractive industries such as coal and manganese, an ore used in steel production, were developed in the Caucasus by British, German, and other European concerns. But in the decades after the Crimean war, it was one industry in particular that began to spark the interest of Russian, European, and even American businessmen.

  Petroleum deposits around the Black Sea and the Caspian had been known since antiquity. Strabo noted oil seepages along the Caspian coast, and the Byzantines used crude petroleum from around the Sea of Azov as the basis for their secret weapon, sea-fire. The commercial potential of the substance was only realized in the mid-nineteenth century. Refining crude oil into kerosene for lighting and as an industrial lubricant was developed principally by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, which had cornered the market on production and distribution from the fields of western Pennsylvania. Soon, foreign companies sought to break Standard’s stranglehold on the international exploitation and transport of oil by focusing on two important sources in the Caspian and Black Sea regions.

  One was Baku, a city perched on a peninsula jutting out into the Caspian, which had been taken under Russian control only in the early 1800 s. Petroleum was at first collected from hand-dug pits, but after the middle of the century, drilling rigs were erected on the model of those used in the Pennsylvania fields. The elimination of the tsar’s official monopoly on oil exploration and transport in the early 1870 s opened the door to foreign industrialists, among them the Swedish Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds. Within only a couple of decades, the area around Baku became a forest of black derricks cut by rivers of oily mud.

  The other major petroleum source lay across the Black Sea. Oil pits in the region around Ploieşti, in south-central Romania, had been in operation since the middle of the century, and drilled wells were sunk in the 1860 s and 1870 s. After independence in 1878, the country developed its own refining industry, and international investors, principally Germans, were soon clamoring to have a stake in the Romanian oil business.

  The problem with both the Baku and Ploieşti fields was their relative inaccessibility. They lay rather far from major sea-ways—Baku was on the landlocked Caspian, Ploieşti was inland from both the Danube and the Black Sea—and neither was served by major rail links. Late into the nineteenth century, getting oil from well to market was still accomplished in the same way as in the earliest Pennsylvania fields: pumping crude oil into wooden barrels and then hauling it in wagons over impassable roads.

  The opening of the rail spur from Batumi to Poti and, in the 1880 s, the completion of the Transcaucasian railway made Batumi the chief conduit for the export of Russian oil. After arriving at the port in tanker cars, the crude oil could be pumped into newly designed ocean-going tankers and sent across the sea to the Mediterranean and beyond. Pipelines soon replaced railcars as the primary means of moving oil from field to port.

  In the west, construction on a rail link with Köstence had been under way much earlier, since the late 1850s, and it would soon become one of the premier transport projects undertaken by Midhat Paşa. The original impetus was the grain trade. Köstence (the ancient Tomis) was one of the finest natural harbors on the western coast, but the lack of easy access to the interior—muddy roads across the Dobrudja steppe, plus the difficulty of crossing the Danube—was a brake on its development. The plan was to build a railway from the port to the Danube, where it would link up with a further rail line to Bucharest. The Köstence line was to provide an alternative to transport up the Danube and a direct link to roadways and rail connections across the Danube plain and into central Europe. The sultan engaged a group of foreign engineers to plan the route and to begin laying the track. Work was frequently halted, especially during the wars of the 1850 s and 1870 s; at the end of the last Russo-Turkish war, the port and the Dobrudja region passed from the Ottoman empire to independent Romania. It was not until 1895 that the rail line was finally completed with much fanfare by the Romanian state—which renamed the port Constanţa. Soon, oil from the Ploieşti fields was flowing from Constanţa just as the Caspian fields had found an outlet at Batumi.

  These and other modernized ports became the natural conduits for the raw materials and products of the industrial revolution, into and out of the western Caucasus and the eastern Balkans. They were part of a growing network of rail links around the sea from Bulgaria to Georgia. Under the power of steam, goods could be taken all across Europe by rail, then across the sea itself by steamship to the other shore. Varna, which had been linked by rail with the Danube already in the 1860s, had a population of nearly 40,000 by the early twentieth century; it later became the major port of the new kingdom of Bulgaria. Constanţa remained smaller in population, but the active petroleum trade made it a vital commercial center for the Romanian kingdom. Batumi was likewise far less populous than many other ports, but it was unrivaled as an export center. The value of Batumi’s exports increased by well over 300 percent from the 1870 s to the 1910 s.19 Visitors frequently compared even the lesser Russian and Balkan ports, with their right-angle streets and industrial warehouses, to those on the southern coast, which had been largely bypassed by the changes of the late nineteenth century. “It was pleasant to escape the musty smells which are attached to every Turkish town,” wrote an American traveler to Batumi in 1910, “and to see healthy, clean dogs that could be touched without contamination.”20

  “An Ignoble Army of Scribbling Visitors”

  The successive troubles across the Near East after the 1850 s brought the Black Sea world literally into the drawing rooms of west Europeans. Many families in Britain and France now had personal ties to the region, through fathers, sons, and uncles who had fought in Crimea, or sisters and aunts who cared for the sick and wounded. Vicarious connections were also forged by the many news reports and engravings that chronicled a series of international crises. Beautifully produced war albums on the conflict of 1877–8 could be purchased at local booksellers. Newspapers carried vivid stories of the persecution of Christian populations in the Ottoman empire, many based on actual episodes of horrific communal violence: the Bulgarian atrocities of the 1870 s, the Armenian massacres of the 1890 s, the mutual bloodletting of Christians and Muslims during the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. Pulp fiction writers seized upon the themes of the exotic Orient, the mysterious seraglio, the barbarous Turk, and the tempestuous sea to thrill audiences in London, Paris, and New York.

  The growing familiarity with the region among outsiders also produced a desire to travel there, perhaps to visit the resting place of a relative from the Crimean conflict or simply to see a world that seemed to breed turmoil. Steam travel made the journey by sea far easier than in the past, and rail connections to major cities in the Balkans and Istanbul meant that part of the journey could be completed overland in the comfort of a first-class carriage. Guidebooks instructed intrepid travelers on the most propitious routes and most interesting sites. The London publisher John Murray printed its first guide to “the East,” including the Anatolian coast, already in 1840; revised and expanded editions were issued during the Crimean war and periodically thereafter.21 The German firm of Karl Baedeker joined the industry later in the century, producing its first guide to Russia in 1883.

  Baedeker recommended a tour of eight weeks across the Russian empire, from Warsaw to St. Petersburg, then south to Kiev, Odessa, and Crimea, and finally across the sea to Batumi and the Caucasus. The first English-language edition, published in 1914, warned tourists that some of the things they might encounter would be unexpectedly civilized. “Odessa … is a modern town,” the guide reported, “and offers little of interest to the tourist.” Nevertheless, for travelers sailing on to the Caucasus, especially if they intended to go off the beaten path, Baedeker advi
sed procuring the following items in Odessa or, in a pinch, in Tiflis:

  rugs

  a lantern

  an air-cushion

  rubber overshoes

  an alarm clock

  pins and needles

  thread

  string

  straps

  preserved meats

  condensed milk

  bread (“seldom obtainable in the mountains and never good”) or biscuits

  tea

  sugar

  quinine

  opiates

  Vaseline

  carbolic acid

  bandages

  soap

  matches

  candles

  insect powder

  wrapping paper

  writing materials22

  If one had difficulty acquiring these goods, or met with an intransigent official, one could always apply to a local consular agent—British, French, Austrian, even American—who could be found in ports from the Danube to the Caucasus.

  One still needed a penchant for adventure to travel the sea. Quarantine restrictions delayed passage, venal customs officers required their pound of flesh, and as Baedeker put it, “hotels in the European sense” were sometimes hard to find, especially in areas not serviced by rail or steamer. Yet that, according to some writers, was the chief appeal of a journey across the Near East. “Some travellers may make Kustendjie [Köstence/Constanţa] the point of departure for Constantinople,” wrote the British travel writer Thomas Forester.

  [A] few be tempted to cross the Black Sea to the once imperial Trebizond, whence they may easily make excursions to the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, or, in a journey not longer than that from London to Marseilles or Milan … visit Erzeroum,—or Kars (a place for ever famous),—Erivan, and even Tehran …. All this may be accomplished with ease in the course of a long autumnal vacation; …. And now that all the old continental routes are “used up,” may not some part of the perennial stream of travel be turned into fresh fields offering many attractions, and, considering the distance from point to point, unequalled facilities of access?23

  As time passed, visitors who hoped to find something of the untamed steppe or the intriguing Orient along their journey were increasingly disappointed. Already in 1867, Mark Twain was surprised at Odessa’s broad streets and new houses. “I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I ‘raised the hill’ and stood in Odessa for the first time,” he wrote. “There was not one thing to remind us that we were in Russia.”24 Twain’s experiences were not unusual in the cities of the northern shore, and the glut of wide-eyed foreigners, including Americans, often frustrated later arrivals. A British traveler in Crimea complained about the traces left behind by his American predecessors. “The United States appears to have sent an ignoble army of scribbling visitors as her contingent to the Crimea, and the soft stone of the country has been delightful to their pocket knives…. [It] is carved and cut by nobodies, anxious to inform the world that they were ‘raised’ in New York or Philadelphia.”25

  The expanding transport industry supported not only foreign visitors but also growing numbers of well-heeled locals. Russian nobles and imperial administrators built impressive chateaux along the temperate Crimean coast. Mikhail Vorontsov, governor of New Russia and later viceroy in the Caucasus, was responsible for the most famous of these, his summer palace at Alupka; it was completed in the 1840 s and, with its mixed architectural styles and elaborate gardens, remains the premier example of Victorian-era pastiche in Russia—not surprising, since it was designed by the builder of Buckingham Palace. These summer houses and gardens provided the nucleus for new public resorts. Crimea had been hailed by poets and tsarist propagandists as the “garden of the empire,” and as the century progressed, the garden burst into full bloom.

  During the bathing season, which ran from mid-August to mid-October, resorts at Yalta, Alupka, and Alushta housed visitors from across the Russian empire and abroad. Elaborate villas, casinos, and bathing establishments grew up along the coast. Modern quays and embankments were crowded with fashionable nobles stepping off the steamer from Odessa and drinking in the salubrious air of the Russian Riviera. Vasilii Sidorov, an amateur botanist and travel writer, described the scene that awaited a visitor to Yalta in the 1890 s:

  “Yalta the Pure”—with its miniature public gardens; with its tourist shops where everything is sold for three times more than in other cities of Russia; where the same unnecessary tchotchkes bearing the phrase “Souvenir de Jalta” are flogged in every store window; with its dachas, bathing areas, post office and telegraph, club and library, the well-dressed walkers on the boulevard …. Yalta lives for visitors; here everything is made for visitors: music in the garden, beautiful carriages, Tatar cicerones in their colorful costumes waiting for you on the embankment, saddle horses, rowboats for taking a turn on the sea.26

  Other travelers embarked from Odessa or the Crimean ports for a holiday in Istanbul or, for the more pious, a longer journey to the Holy Land. Russian steamers made the quick journey across the sea very pleasant. Tourists crowded the decks to be the first to spot the opening to the Bosphorus, while delightful meals were offered to those with first-class accommodation. As another Russian traveler wrote in 1898:

  Finally the table was set for evening tea—just like at home: Biscuits and pretzels, fresh from the oven, gave off a delicious odor. Candles in bell-glasses threw a flickering light on the white tablecloth as gentle shadows danced on the inclined faces of the passengers, who were conscientiously engaged in studying their Baedekers.27

  The expansion of travel and tourism meant that more and more people were beginning to experience their own seacoasts for the first time. Popular Russian, Romanian, and other writers began to record their journeys across the sea, and publishing houses in Moscow, Kiev, Bucharest, and Sofia produced a steady stream of travel books for the growing literate populations farther inland. Some were simple diaries filled with tales of ingratiating Tatar baggage handlers, jolly Greek steamer captains, and salacious Turkish officials. Others were more contemplative works about life on the frontier; the coastline, although now integrated into modernizing states and empires, still represented the romantic ideal of the unspoiled borderland—but one that could be conveniently transgressed and observed, rather than feared.

  Most authors focused on the strange habits of their foreign neighbors. To Russian writers, the Romanian of Bessarabia was a gypsy ready to steal one’s purse. To the Romanian, the Bulgarian of Dobrudja was a clownish peasant unsure of his real identity. To them all, the Turk was a natural outsider whose time on the European continent was thankfully drawing to a close. If they could afford it, travelers could even take back a graphic representation of the sea as a turbulent meeting place of civilizations. Artists such as Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900), a native of Feodosiia and the nineteenth century’s nonpareil painter of Pontic seascapes, captured the essence of the tempestuous sea and its coastline, the waves battering against the ancient cliffs of Crimea, the wild water lapping against primeval shores that were at last on their way to becoming civilized. A region that had been traversed and described by British and French travel writers for more than a century was now discovered anew by observers from the emerging urban centers of the hinterlands.

  Many travelers were surprised to find how little they knew about their own homelands. They encountered people who spoke languages different from their own, with mores that reminded them of the decadent Orient, not the refined Christian countries that now ringed most of the coast. Visitors from Moscow and St. Petersburg, for example, usually returned home with the news that, beyond the tourist resorts of Crimea, their seacoast was in fact another country. Russian writers decried the influence of Mammon in their ports, especially Odessa, where the “endless supply of Jews” created a city with a dead spirit, consumed by commerce.28 The port cities, swelled by the booming trade in grain, petroleum, and other products, had attracted a bewildering c
ollection of peoples, each with their own language and style of life. As some complained, the Russian character of these cities, the empire’s very antechamber, had been perilously diluted. “Unfortunately, Novorossiisk is a city that is far from being completely Russian,” a popular Russian guidebook noted in 1891. “Both in the [urban] population and in the population of neighboring villages, foreign elements—Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Czech-Catholics, usually foreign subjects—are very strong, as are local foreigners.”29

  All around the sea, these “local foreigners”—Jewish innkeepers, Greek and Armenian merchants, Muslim highlanders—would become of increasing concern to governments in the national capitals. The visions of timelessly pure nations now being taught in the schools and universities farther inland, the struggle for national liberation being celebrated during public holidays, and the theories of ethnic purity and religious piety being expounded by poets and historians were, as many visitors were discovering, sorely at odds with the multifarious reality of the coast.

  Trouble on the Köstence Line

  One of the earliest European observers of the rapid changes in transport, commerce, and travel after the Crimean war was a young British civil engineer named Henry Barkley. In the late 1850 s Barkley was invited by his elder brother, a prominent businessman with connections to the Ottoman state, to help design and build railways in the coastal region of Dobrudja, soon to become the Tuna vilayet.

  The Barkley firm was the prime mover in the growth of railways along the western Black Sea. It won the concession to lay rail lines from Varna and Köstence to river stations on the Danube, and the firm would later complete the project by building the first major railroads in independent Romania. Just as the Russians would embark on the Transcaucasian railway project as a way of undercutting the importance of British interests in Trabzon, so the Ottomans reckoned that rail links to Varna and Köstence would help these ports compete with Odessa—especially since, at the time the Ottomans began the project, wheat was still being brought to Odessa in ox-carts, not railcars.