The Black Sea

by Charles King

  The appropriation of the sea and its lost peoples did lead to certain contradictions, of course, because the heritage claimed by one group was also claimed by at least one other. Romanian and Bulgarian historians clashed over the ancient indigenous population of Dobrudja—proto-Romanian for some, proto-Bulgarian for others. Russians and Romanians debated the history of the medieval Moldovan and Wallachian principalities north of the Danube—representatives of a Slavic culture for some or of a latinate culture for others. Bulgarians and Tatars both claimed the legacy of the ancient Bulgar khanates, which originated along the Volga river. Ukrainians and Russians both looked back to the Rhos as the progenitors of their respective nations, as well as the earliest example of a Slavic state north of the sea.

  For many historians in the countries that now touched the littoral, demonstrating the essential connection between the nation and the water was crucial to justifying the existence of an independent state and blocking the natural imperial ambitions of the Russians. The sea, declared the great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga in 1938, “lives in our poetry and in our conscience … [It has been] linked throughout our history to the totality of our way of thinking and of feeling.” 43 His contemporary, the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, was similarly categorical about the place of the sea in the history of his own nation. “While the historical circumstances of life have oriented Ukraine toward the west,” Hrushevs’kyi wrote in a famous passage on the “Black Sea orientation” of the Ukrainian people, “geography has oriented her toward the south, toward the Black Sea—‘that sea of the Rus’,’ as the Kievan chronicle of the twelfth century has it, or in modern terminology, the Ukrainian sea.”44

  Debates on the true ownership of the sea and the coasts were carried on in the pages of learned journals and books. During peace conferences at the ends of major wars, they were published in pamphlet form and expedited to Europe’s great powers to convince diplomats of the justice of one or another position. The outcome of these arguments had real political consequences. The work of historians was used to justify a particular territorial settlement, and claims about the historical right to territory remained the basis for irredentist movements in peacetime and often the starting point for another war. At one time or another over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the status of virtually every littoral area—Dobrudja, Bessarabia, Crimea, Abkhazia, the Pontic coast, and other disputed enclaves—would turn in part on the ability of states to field the most convincing arguments about their respective nations’ historical rights to a piece of real estate and, by extension, access to the water.

  But just as historians, ethnographers, and other intellectuals were appropriating the sea for their distinct national programs, others were beginning to understand the Black Sea as a discrete unit. Rather than dividing it among nations and states, new generations of scientists were uncovering the ways in which what happened in one part of the sea was intimately linked with the fate of every other.

  Knowing the Sea

  The modern science of ecology begins with the idea that no organism is an island. Living creatures are connected to one another in a complex system of interdependence, and changes to one part of that system inevitably affect the ability of any of the other constituents to stay alive and reproduce. Philosophers and scientists from Aristotle forward had intimations of these essential connections, but the systematic study of the natural environment—that is, its study as a system—is a young science. The earliest appearance of the word “oecology” dates only from the 1870 s, and it did not come into general use until many decades later.

  Seeing oceans and seas as ecosystems was a particularly late development. Large bodies of water are startlingly complex; understanding them requires the input of a variety of otherwise unrelated fields, from fluid mechanics to microbiology. Oceanography, as a catch-all name for the many scientific fields involved in the study of marine environments, requires both an intimate knowledge of the peculiar physical interactions of water, land, and weather, and an understanding of the way in which all of them affect the animal and plant species that live throughout the biological column, from surface dwellers to the inhabitants of the dark depths.

  The oceanographic study of the Black Sea has a long pedigree as speculative philosophy but a rather short one as science.45 Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci had theories to account for some of the sea’s obvious peculiarities, such as why a body of water that takes in so many rivers manages not to overflow. But it was not until the late seventeenth century that the first experimental model was devised to explain one of the sea’s most important characteristics, the exchange of water with the Mediterranean.

  In 1679 a young Italian count, Luigi Fernando Marsigli, traveled to Istanbul and became intrigued by stories about the double current in the Bosphorus, a top one flowing from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and an undercurrent flowing in the opposite direction. Marsigli confirmed the existence of the two currents by lowering a rope, to which he had affixed pieces of white cork, into the strait. As he predicted, the corks near the surface floated toward the Mediterranean while those farther down on the rope began to arc in the opposite direction, toward the Black Sea. That was not news; any fisherman who cast a net into the strait knew of the same phenomenon. What was novel was Marsigli’s explanation.

  Previous speculations about the cause of these currents had rested on the nature of the strait itself or on the weather. Perhaps the underwater geography was somehow responsible, or maybe winds from the north pushed water from the sea into the Mediterranean. Marsigli proposed that the twin currents had nothing to do with the supposed slope of the sea floor or the prevailing winds, but rather with the nature of the water itself.

  He began with the observation that the upper and lower layers of water in the strait exhibited different properties. Even Aristotle had known that the Mediterranean, and therefore the bottom current, was saltier than the Black Sea; with so much fresh water entering the Black Sea through its river system, its salinity was far less than the world’s oceans. Marsigli argued that the differential salinity also represented a substantial difference in density, and he simply measured the specific gravity of water samples from the top and bottom of the strait to prove his point. The cause of the double current, he reckoned, lay in this basic observation: The differential densities produced a pressure gradient that in turn created motion in opposite directions, a standard hypothesis of fluid mechanics. Marsigli gathered his observations in a famous letter to the queen of Sweden, a document that would become the first genuinely scientific study of the physical peculiarities of the Black Sea.46

  Marsigli was a typical example of the Enlightenment naturalist, a European aristocrat who engaged in scientific research as an adjunct to other pursuits, in this case adventure travel in the Orient. Others followed his example in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they usually confined their work to the coastline. Peter Simon Pallas, a German geologist in Russian service, conducted important research on the paleogeography of the northern coast in the 1790 s. He was followed by another Prussian, the Baron von Haxthausen, who conducted geological and botanical studies on the steppe and in the Caucasus in the early nineteenth century.47 It was not until some time later, though, that Marsigli’s real successors would appear.

  The development of oceanography on the wider sea depended on two things: relative peace between the Ottoman and Russian empires and the growth of statesponsored, professional institutions that could engage in long-term scientific study. Both finally began to emerge after the 1820 s. The establishment of a permanent Russian naval presence in Sevastopol and the creation of a southern Admiralty at Kherson and, later, Nikolaev provided the institutional support for the growth of a science of the sea. There was also, of course, a strategic rationale: Russian and foreign captains needed a better understanding of the currents and anchorages. There had been limited work in these directions—the Barbié maps in Anthoine’s memoirs were based
on reports from the Russian Admiralty—but for more than half a century after the opening of the sea to European vessels, there were still no reliable maps of major sections of the coastline, not to mention studies of the water and its characteristics.

  That soon began to change. In 1832 the first preliminary hydrographic atlas of the Black Sea appeared in St. Petersburg. Published by the general directorate for roads and communications, a division of the Russian interior ministry, the atlas contained nearly sixty plates that mapped in detail the coastal areas from the Danube to the Caucasus. The atlas not only showed the physical features of the coastline and ports but also indicated soundings based on the latest Admiralty data. A decade later an even more elaborate atlas, drawn by the cartographer Egor Manganari, was issued by the newly created Black Sea Hydrographical Office in Nikolaev. Manganari’s work deserves to be counted among the greatest contributions to the cartography of the sea.48 His Atlas of the Black Sea, published in 1841, was dedicated to Tsar Nicholas I, and the tsar’s own large presentation copy was bound in green leather with rich gilt lettering. The intricate maps of the coastline were based on more than a decade of research. The atlas also featured remarkable drawings of each of the major ports, including those on the Ottoman coasts, and even showed the placement of individual buildings. Soundings were given for all the Russian-controlled coastline and the entire northwestern shelf of the sea, farther out into the depths than had ever been recorded. The atlas featured beautifully drawn elevations, a prominent feature of nineteenth-century coastal cartography in general, which gave the viewer a sense of what the coastline would look like from a ship at sea.

  The Manganari atlas marked the beginning of serious attempts to chart the physical features of the sea as a whole, not simply the parts controlled by one or another power. There were holes, of course. The Russians had little intelligence about the urban landscape of the Ottoman ports, which is why some of the overhead views of cities such as Sinop and Trebizond have blank spots where fortifications, batteries, and other sensitive structures were located. But in its day, the Manganari atlas was an extraordinary achievement. For the first time someone sitting well beyond the sea had an intimation of two things that would only really become available in the late twentieth century: something approximating a modern satellite image of port facilities and the ability to take a “virtual” sail along the coastline by examining in sequence the striking coastal views.

  Over the rest of the nineteenth century, Russian cartographic efforts followed in the Manganari tradition. Expeditions were launched farther into the sea to take soundings and record the currents. More intelligence was gathered on the nature of the Ottoman ports and anchorages. But as the century progressed, scientists around the sea took a greater interest in subjects beyond the sea’s physical features. They also began to analyze sea life and the ways in which the different parts of the sea—the northwest shelf, the shallow Sea of Azov, the depths along the southern coast—were linked together in a single ecological web. The growth of specialized scientific bodies that could sponsor research (and could pressure the military to provide ships and other assistance) facilitated serious study of the sea’s geology, chemistry, and biology. There was also now a political imperative: the growing desire by governments to understand precisely what kinds of riches lay in the sea and how they could best be exploited.

  In 1890 the pioneering Russian geologist Nikolai Andrusov conducted the first systematic study of the Black Sea depths. Using a steamer on loan from the Russian navy, Andrusov logged over 3,000 km in only eighteen days, taking depth measurements, recording temperature and salinity at various points, charting the currents, and recovering dredgings from the sea floor. Andrusov’s chief discovery was the sea’s anoxic layer, a phenomenon that he correctly surmised was enhanced by the decay of organic matter. Just as the Manganari atlas had been a quantum leap in the accurate representation of the sea’s physical geography, Andrusov’s work contributed a great deal to understanding the sea’s chemistry and its relationship to natural biological processes.

  One of Andrusov’s contemporaries was the Romanian zoologist Grigore Antipa. Like many in his generation, he received his training abroad, in Germany and Italy, and returned to Romania in the 1890 s to begin a career in state service. He was tasked with completing a study of Romanian fisheries—how they might apply the latest scientific techniques to increase productivity—and creating a museum of zoology that would highlight the natural wealth included inside the country’s new borders, redrawn by the treaty of Berlin. A comprehensive study was necessary, for knowledge about the coast and the sea was sparse in Romania. (The first Romanian map of the country’s Black Sea coastline would not be produced until 1900; the Romanian navy was still using it in the 1950 s.)49 Over the course of his career, Antipa became Romania’s leading expert on the Black Sea and one of the country’s foremost authorities on fisheries and water resources. He was arguably the father of modern biological research in his country, and the museum of natural history in Bucharest, an institution which he directed, was later named in his honor.

  Manganari, Andrusov, and Antipa represented a new type of scientist around the sea. They were young, all under thirty at the time of their most important early work. They were part of the first generation of local scientists in their respective fields—cartography, marine geology, biology—and had been trained in central and western Europe. They taught in the new universities that sprang up in national capitals and provincial cities and used their knowledge in the service of the state. They were part of a growing international community of scientists and scholars who shared their findings in learned papers and at international conferences—and sometimes shared even more: Andrusov was married to the daughter of the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of Troy.

  The work of these and other researchers pushed the scientific knowledge of the sea to a level that had never before been attained. They founded new scientific sub-disciplines and were among the first to treat the Black Sea as a unit of study, a complex system that had to be understood as a whole through an analysis of its geography, geology, chemistry, and biology. But the goal of their research was not simply disinterested science. Throughout his career, Antipa in particular was clear about the extra-scientific nature of his work. Understanding the sea was valuable on its own, of course, but that knowledge was linked in Antipa’s mind with the greater project of using the sea’s riches to fulfill the historical destinies of the nations around it. In his magisterial work The Black Sea (1941), a summation of his entire career of scientific research, Antipa emphasized the link between science and the national goals that it was meant to further:

  We should recognize that today we … have the necessary geographic base to carry out an important maritime activity which … our location at the mouth of the Danube and our very territory obliges us to carry out…. Therefore, today, when we are laying the basis for the development and organization of our … state, it is of utmost necessity that we clearly affirm and forcibly protect the vital national interests … that we have along the seacoast, which opens to us a wide route for … trade in the produce of our country and of the work of our people.50

  The chief task, Antipa argued, was to prevent neighboring states from taking undue advantage of the sea’s wealth. The Black Sea should never become “an internal Russian lake,” he wrote, and the other states around the rim—Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey—should cooperate to prevent any encroachments by the Soviet imperialists of the north.

  Even the science of the sea could not escape the lure of the national idea. Where it had once been celebrated as the patrimony of nations newly freed from the Ottoman yoke, the sea was now touted as a treasure to be guarded against the rapacity of the expansionist Soviet Union. Antipa was not alone in viewing things in this light. There were political leaders, too, who had a vision for building a bulwark against the country that now controlled the majority of the shoreline, from the Danube to the south Caucasus.

  T
he Prometheans

  After the First World War, all four states around the Black Sea were, in different ways, young countries. All were built on the ruins of older states or empires, but each had either new borders or, in the case of republican Turkey and the Soviet Union, radically new bases for social order. All faced problems of integrating new territories, rebuilding after the devastation of war, and defending sovereignty and independence against a range of threats.

  For three of these states, the central strategic conundrum was how to deal with the existence of the fourth. The ideology embraced by Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey—nationalism—was powerful but self-limiting. Each state had territorial disputes with at least one of its neighbors, but these disputes did not go beyond arguments about rectification of borders. The Soviet Union, by contrast, espoused an ideology that proclaimed its own universality: the liberation of all toiling masses from the triple perils of imperialism, capitalism, and nationalism. The international relations of the Black Sea region thus necessarily concerned how to build a system of alliances to ward off the Bolshevik threat, while consolidating the independence and borders of the new states that had emerged from the peace treaties.

  As in the rest of Europe, the war had brought profound geopolitical change to the region. Romania emerged from the postwar treaties with the former Hungarian region of Transylvania, Russian Bessarabia, Austrian Bukovina, and part of Bulgarian Dobrudja now inside its borders; these changes doubled the country’s territory and population. Bulgaria, although losing some of its seacoast to Romania, was nevertheless confirmed in its independence, which had only been fully won from the Ottomans in 1908. In the turmoil of the Bolshevik revolution and the ensuing civil war, the Crimean Tatars had declared their own country, as had Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; several different states had emerged, although hardly consolidated, on the territory of Ukraine. The Ottoman empire had been transformed into the Turkish Republic, fighting for its own independence against an invading army of Greeks and Allied occupiers.