by Charles King
Barkley arrived in Varna by steamer, seasick after a particularly wave-tossed journey from Istanbul; an equally bumpy wagon ride brought him to Köstence. He spent the next several weeks cooling his heels in the port and taking frequent hunting trips into the marshy plain, returning with great quantities of hare, partridge, and bustard. At last the home office in London sent word that construction work could commence. That was when the real adventure began.
Barkley was put in charge of some 500 workmen tasked with leveling the track for the rail line. They were drawn from across the Dobrudja province—Christian and Muslim, Moldovan, Wallachian, Bulgarian, and Turk, in various combinations—and were overseen by a cudgel-wielding foreman from Durham, whose lazy eye spooked some of the natives.
It was an inhospitable place to work. Insects rose in clouds from the marshes, and malarial fever was a frequent problem. The popular way of warding off mosquitoes—by burning heaps of manure—was scarcely more bearable. The work itself was also hard going. The earth on the plain was packed hard in summer, and in digging it up the workmen frequently encountered carved stones and barrow graves which were a nuisance to remove or dig through. Barkley usually ordered the antiquities to be broken up and scattered, but some he sent back to the university museum in Oxford.
The rail line from Köstence to the village of Karasu on the Danube was finally completed in 1860. But as the first engines began to make the short trip across the steppe, further problems arose. The local peasants did not understand that trains could not be easily stopped, and they would drive their sheep across the rails just as an engine approached. The results could be stomach-turning. “I shall never forget the awful appearance the engine presented …,” Barkley later wrote, describing a train’s encounter with a flock of seventy sheep. “From the rails to the top of the funnel it was one mass of gore, and though I bobbed behind the firebox I was not much better, and it made me feel sick to feel the hot blood bespattering my face and hands.”30
Over the next few decades, however, rail became the driver of Dobrudja’s progress. The completion of a bridge over the Danube in 1895 allowed the rail link to be extended to Bucharest, where it joined the main trunk line that led on to central Europe. Just as Köstence/Constanţa became Romania’s primary seaport after 1878, so Varna became the outlet for the Bulgarian principality also created by the Berlin treaty. Both seaports became regular stops on the route from the Danube to Istanbul.
Barkley knew that he was participating in a project that would make a major contribution to commerce along the western shore. But of all the things he witnessed during his several years in Dobrudja, there was one event in particular that stood out in his mind, and one on which he dwelt at some length in his memoirs.
For much of the period Barkley spent in the region, Crimean Tatars had been streaming into Dobrudja by land and sea. Many were fearful of reprisals by the tsarist government, which blamed the entire Tatar people for the actions of a few Allied collaborators during the Crimean war. Others sought farmland that was being promised by the Ottoman state as a way of increasing the Muslim population in a largely Christian province. Barkley saw ships literally overflowing with Crimean Tatar immigrants as they sailed into Köstence harbor.
Steamers and sailing vessels, all without food or water, carried hundreds of passengers packed tightly together. Any remaining space was taken up with their belongings, including farm implements, carts, and even camels and other livestock. Many Tatars suffered from seasickness or, even worse, infectious diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and measles, which jumped from the ships to the ports and then across the entire province. Those who died at sea were simply thrown overboard, even if the ship was already in port, and the beaches from Köstence to Varna were littered with the bodies of the dead.
On Barkley’s direction, the new rail line was soon put to use. The Tatar immigrants were loaded onto rail cars and taken to the Danube. They were then to be transferred to river transports and moved upstream to resettlement areas designated by the Ottoman state. Once they arrived at the river, however, there were often too few boats waiting. Thousands of people had to sleep rough on the river banks until one arrived. The spectacle was horrific. “Many of them were so ill they were quite unfit to be moved, but they were equally unfit to remain exposed on the beach, so all were carried away,” Barkley recalled. “Many died in the waggons and were thrown out as the train moved along by their friends, now apparently rendered callous by extreme misery. Others were left where they died in the waggons, and were trodden on and crushed by their living comrades.”31
Barkley was witness to the first in a long line of large-scale population movements that would utterly reshape the character of the Black Sea littoral. In the 1850 s and early 1860 s, hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars moved out of the
Russian empire and into Ottoman lands, some to Anatolia but most to Bulgaria, Serbia, and Thrace. They were soon followed by other, even larger waves: the forced migrations of Circassians and other Muslim highlanders in the wake of Russia’s wars of conquest in the north Caucasus; the massacre of Armenians and other Christians in eastern Anatolia in the 1890s; the flight of refugees, both Christian and Muslim, in the Balkan wars and then during the First World War; and the organized killing and deportation of Armenians, Greeks, and others in the Ottoman empire from 1915 through the early 1920 s. Modern technologies of transport brought easier methods of getting goods such as wheat and petroleum across the sea, but they also now provided a new and efficient way of getting rid of “local foreigners.”
The Unpeopling
The forced movement of people, as refugees from armed conflict or as settlers uprooted by governments and planted again in new territories, is nothing new around the Black Sea—nor, indeed, in any other part of Europe. In antiquity, the port cities were places of exile for impious poets and political dissenters. In the Ottoman period, the exile of entire villages, a practice known as sürgün, was used either as punishment for unruly locals or as a form of colonization to populate low-density areas. Similar policies were adopted as the Russian empire expanded south in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tatars, Greeks, and Armenians were moved out of Crimea, and Slavic peasants were moved south to help settle the New Russian steppe. The line between exile as punishment and exile as demographic policy was always fluid, of course, but rarely did forced population movements rest on the notion of the collective guilt of a distinct cultural group. Empires engaged in demographic engineering because doing so was the prerogative of the sovereign, whether caesar, sultan or tsar.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, organized population transfers both accelerated and changed in nature. Moving people could be accomplished more easily than in the past; railroads and steamships made mass transport far simpler than in the age of ox-cart and sail. There was a new philosophical impetus as well. The rise of nationalism, first as a cultural movement among European-educated intellectuals and then as a state policy that linked political legitimacy with the historical destinies of culturally defined nations, provided an additional reason for moving people from one place to another.
Subtle shifts in the central organizing ideas of the states around the sea were clear. Both the Ottoman and Russian empires had experienced periods of substantial reform in the middle of the century. During the Tanzimat period, the Ottomans aimed to catch up with the technological superiority of Europe and to recast the Ottoman imperial identity—which, though tolerant of other religions, had placed Islam at the center—as multiconfessional. Russia had likewise embarked on a series of reforms, spurred on by the defeat in the Crimean war, which led to the ending of serfdom. Both periods were shortlived, however. The Tanzimat experiment effectively came to an end with Sultan Abdülhamit II (reigned 1876–1909), a reactionary who worked to put back in place the most conservative visions of the empire as an Islamic state. Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II likewise instituted counter-reforms and again promoted the triune ideology of Orthodoxy, autoc
racy, and nationality as the basis for state power. Within and around these empires, smaller but no less exclusive visions of the nation were also in evidence. Romania had been granted independence in 1878 and soon set about creating a state by and for an ethnic Romanian nation, to the exclusion of Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities that lived on the same territory. The consequence of all these ideas—of cultural purity, of national territory, and of the alien within—would be a vast reengineering of settlement and identity on a mammoth scale.
In the nineteenth century’s earliest instances of forced population movements, compulsory immigration was a concomitant of border warfare, a strategy of frontier pacification not unknown in many other parts of the world. When a restive indigenous population refused to recognize the suzerainty of an expanding power, the government simply moved the people somewhere else. The expansion of Russia into the Caucasus highlands was accompanied by the cutting back of forests, destruction of villages, and movement of civilians to new locations—a policy pioneered by the imperial viceroy, Vorontsov, who had earlier served as governor of New Russia. After the military defeat of the remaining highland opposition groups in the early 1860 s, the Russian government organized the systematic emptying of Caucasus villages and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of highland Muslims—Circassians, Chechens, and others—to the Ottoman empire. Ships were dispatched from the Caucasus ports to Sinop, Trabzon, and Varna, where the highlanders were simply offloaded on the docks. So great was the level of death from disease, dehydration, and starvation that observers labeled the ships “floating graveyards.”32 There was, however, a reverse side to the policy of expulsion. Just as the Russians had hoped to rid the frontier of rebellious Muslims and resettle it with Slavic peasants and Cossacks, the Ottomans dispatched the highlanders to resettlement areas on their own restive frontiers in the Balkans, eastern Anatolia, and the Arab lands.
The movement of Tatars, Caucasus highlanders, and other Muslims out of the Russian empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century was spectacular—in round figures, perhaps 1.5 million migrants from Crimea and the Caucasus, many of whom died en route or shortly after arrival at their final destinations. According to one calculation, as a direct result of Muslim flight, the population of Crimea may have dropped by as much as a quarter and the population of the Caucasus uplands by a little more.33 The 1877–8 war prompted the exodus of still further communities, particularly Tatars and other Muslims (including people whom we would now call Turks) from Serbia and Romania; more left in the turmoil of the Balkan wars of 1913 and 1912. In all, at least 2.5 million Muslim civilians, probably far more, died as a direct result of war and official policies of ethnic cleansing in Russia and the Balkans in the century leading up to the First World War.34
On the other side of the sea, along the southeast coast, similar developments were taking place among Christian communities in the Ottoman port cities and deep into the Anatolian hinterland. The long history of commerce in cities such as Trabzon, Samsun, and Rize had attracted Greek and Armenian merchants and other Christian communities from Anatolia, the Aegean, and elsewhere, communities that now formed significant portions of the population. The Armenians in particular, with their strong social and family ties across the Near East, were at the core of the international trading network that stretched all the way from the bazaars of Tabriz to the markets of Leipzig. For the most part, religious communities lived in relative peace, with each exercising some degree of control over their own communal institutions and affairs, the basis of the Ottoman millet system of confessional self-governance. But the influx of Caucasus Muslims into the ports and their resettlement inland led to numerous disputes over land rights and periodic raiding by the highlanders. New settlers felt exploited by the older communities, while Armenians and other Christians felt overwhelmed by the tide of Muslim deportees.
The Russo-Turkish war and the peace settlement afterward gave a political tenor to these communal tensions. Encouraged by the success of Balkan Christians in throwing off Ottoman control and establishing new states, Armenian leaders, especially those living in western Europe and Russia, increasingly militated for the creation of an autonomous or independent Armenia. Revolutionary societies were formed for achieving that goal, if necessary by force. The tsar, seeing a potential lever against the Ottomans, stoked those aspirations. The experiences of the 1870 s set the stage for growing conflict between Armenian communities and the Ottoman state. In the ports, support for the most radical Armenian groups was probably limited, but there was dissatisfaction with the Ottoman tax system. Raiding by Kurds and other Muslims in the interior, including the Caucasus refugees, were also sources of discontent.
In the summer of 1894 a tax revolt by Armenians in Sason, in eastern Anatolia, was the tocsin for the revolutionary associations, who hoped to enkindle a full-scale rebellion against the empire. Their efforts failed, but the hint of revolution was a convenient cover for Abdülhamit II, who had come to question the loyalty of Armenians to the Ottoman state. From 1894 to 1896, Ottoman irregular troops were dispatched to quell a string of supposed insurrections, and large-scale attacks on Armenian communities followed. As many as 80,000—some estimates go as high as 300,000—Armenians and others were killed in a mêlée of officially sanctioned punishment, chaotic brigandage, land disputes, and communal revenge.35
The Hamidian massacres were not aimed at the wholesale extermination or expulsion of the Armenians, but they did mark an important change from the flight of the Tatars and Circassians three decades earlier. Russian tactics in the Caucasus campaigns had been abominable, with villages scorched and men, women, and children rounded up for movement to new locales. Yet the motive was not who the Muslims were but where they were—in the path of Russian imperial expansion, in the unconquered highlands that were seen as a security threat by the Russian state. In the Armenian case, however, communities were targeted because of their identity. Armenian civilians in the port cities along the coast and in the major cities and villages all across eastern Anatolia presented little immediate danger to the Ottoman government; revolutionary activity was limited to bands of guerrilla fighters who were mainly based abroad—and usually at odds with Armenian elites within the Ottoman empire. As it turned out, the Hamidian massacres were only the opening act in a long drama of human suffering, in which individuals all around the sea would be labeled as inherent threats to states and empires, uprooted from their homes, and killed or forced to migrate. The ideas of “local foreigners” and enemy peoples would reach their apotheosis a short time later, in a great unmixing of the multiethnic and multiconfessional communities along the coast from 1915 to 1923.
The First World War came slowly to the Black Sea, and naval operations were strategically inconsequential compared with the movement of troops along other stretches of the eastern front. Russia and Turkey formally entered the war on opposite sides in November 1914, but it was not until the next year that Bulgaria joined on the side of the Central Powers. Almost another year passed before Romania was persuaded to break its neutrality and throw in its lot with Britain and France. Early on, the Allies worked to capture the greatest strategic asset in the region—the entryway to Istanbul and the sea at the Dardanelles—but their ill-fated assault at Gallipoli dragged on through most of 1915.
On the sea, Russian and Ottoman navies clashed infrequently. Both entered the war in imperfect condition. The Russian fleet was poorly furnished in terms of both men and equipment; the dire living conditions on board Russian ships had been the cause, in the summer of 1905, of the famous incident on board the cruiser Potemkin, when a mutinous crew seized the ship and sailed it to Constanţa. The Ottomans were in no better shape. Spending on the navy was insignificant; the state’s massive public debt meant that further borrowing was impossible. In any case, the Ottomans by this stage were far more concerned about internal rebellion than projecting their power at sea. Before the war, expenditure on the gendarmerie—one of the instruments of the violence of t
he 1890 s—exceeded the entire naval budget.36 Still, the sultan had made the strategically important move of trading in the longstanding connection with the British navy for a closer relationship with Germany, a relationship that eventually led to the transfer of armored warships, along with their German crews, to the Ottoman service.
The Ottomans made preemptive attacks on Russian bases even before the tsar’s declaration of war. Ottoman ships bombarded Sevastopol, Novorossiisk, and Odessa, but Russian losses were inconsiderable. Russia quickly responded with a massive mine-laying effort along the Anatolian coast and disruption of coal transport, a strategy that destroyed virtually all the Ottoman navy’s collier ships by mid-1915. (The navy resorted to using Bosphorus passenger ferries and small sailing ships to transport coal.) The only major battle was a brief fogbound encounter off the Crimean coast between the German dreadnought Goeben, now Ottoman-flagged, and Russian battleships, which led to no more than a dozen casualties. On land, the Russians pushed from the south Caucasus into eastern Anatolia, taking Erzurum and Trabzon by the spring of 1916. The collapse of the Russian armies in the revolutions of 1917 allowed the Ottoman forces to retake the southeast coast, but by that stage, the Black Sea was already a secondary front. The real fate of the Ottomans lay to the southwest, in clashes with British forces in the Levant, and Ottoman successes across the Near and Middle East were progressively reversed over the course of the next year.
