The Black Sea

by Charles King

  In his magisterial account of the aftermath of the First World War The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, Arnold Toynbee identified three false antitheses inscribed on the minds of most Westerners who looked at the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.3 The first was the antithesis between Christianity and Islam, the second between Europe and Asia, the third between civilization and barbarism. The boundaries between these opposing categories might look clear enough from a distance, Toynbee said, but as soon as one stepped off a ship or alighted from a train in Istanbul or Odessa or Batumi, they began to look simply laughable.

  As the Black Sea becomes the eastern frontier of NATO and the European Union, bisected by distinct immigration policies, trade restrictions, and security doctrines, one wonders whether the boundaries between Toynbee’s antitheses may harden—boundaries that will be different from those erected by tsars and sultans or by the social systems that defined the cold war, but nevertheless real to anyone who tries to transgress them. The visa officer and the customs agent may become the twenty-first century’s equivalent of the quarantine doctor of the nineteenth. Yet their efforts, as with those of their counterparts in centuries past, will no doubt be frustrated by the activities of expert boundary-crossers, people who, by their very desire for movement, have long bound the Black Sea world together, in defiance of the best-laid plans of empires and states. Along the coasts, however, this new frontier may well be populated by fewer and fewer people, as young men and women seek better lives in urban areas inland or, for a select few, even farther afield in London, Berlin, and New York. In the present century, the old Black Sea may live on, like many lost civilizations across Europe’s east, mainly in the hearts of people from the region but no longer in it.

  But regions also have legs. Vibrant Black Sea communities can be found far removed from the sea itself: among the descendants of Pontic Greeks in Athens and Thessaloniki; among Turkish and Laz bakers, construction workers, and entrepreneurs in New York; among Jews, Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians—and virtually any combination of these categories—in Paris, Los Angeles, and Tel Aviv. Even well beyond the sea, the tug of regional affiliations can still be felt. When they move abroad, immigrants from the Anatolian coast are more likely to resettle in multiethnic environments, among the same diverse communities that they knew in their home towns and villages, rather than among their ethnic kin.4 Especially for first-generation migrants, one’s regional neighbor (hemşeri, in Turkish), someone from the same village, mountainside or stretch of coastline, can still be a far closer associate than a member of the imagined communities of nation or religion. In spite of the homogenizing categories used by outsiders—civilized and barbarian, native and foreigner, pure and adulterated—facing the water and embracing its multiplicities can still be a respectable way of living one’s life.

  NOTES

  1. Arnold J. Toynbee, “The East After Lausanne,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1 (September 1923):86.

  2. These data are incomplete and only suggestive of general trends. I thank Adam Tolnay for compiling them.

  3. Arnold J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, 2nd edn. (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970 [1923]), p. 328.

  4. Lisa DiCarlo, “Migration and Identity Among Black Sea Turks” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 2001), p. 23.

  Sources for Introductory Quotations

  Tournefort Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, A Voyage into the Levant, trans. John Ozell, Vol. 2, (London: D. Browne, A. Bell, J. Darby et al., 1718), p. 124.

  Byron Byron, Don Juan, Canto 5, v.

  Auden W. H. Auden, “Archaeology,” Selected Poems: New Edition, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage International, 1979), p. 302.

  Herodotus Herodotus, The Histories, 4.46.

  Xenophon Xenophon, Anabasis, 4.7.

  Ovid Ovid, Tristia, 3.3.1–14, in Ovid, Poems of Exile, trans. Peter Green (New York: Penguin, 1994).

  Procopius Procopius, History of the Wars, 3.1.10-11.

  Rubruck The Journal of Friar William of Rubruck, Contemporaries of Marco Polo, ed. Manuel Komroff (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), pp. 58–9.

  Peyssonnel Claude Charles de Peyssonnel, Observations historiques et géographiques sur les peoples barbares qui ont habité les bords du Danube et du Pont-Euxin (Paris: N. M. Tilliard, 1765), p. 7.

  Pirî Pirî Reis, Kitab-ı bahriye, trans. Robert Bragner, Vol. 1, (Istanbul: Historical Research Foundation, 1988), p. 57.

  Gilles Pierre Gilles, The Antiquities of Constantinople, trans. Ronald G. Musto, ed. John Bell, 2nd edn. (New York: Italica Press, 1988), p. xxxviii.

  Evliya Evliya Çelebi, Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Joseph von Hammer, Vol. 2, (London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1834), pp. 67, 74.

  Johnson Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 123.

  Ségur Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, Memoirs and Recollections of Count Ségur, Ambassador from France to the Courts of Russia and Prussia, Vol. 3, (London: H. Colburn, 1825–7), p. 84.

  Melville Herman Melville, Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856–May 6, 1857 ed. Howard C. Horsford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 94.

  Twain Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, in The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966–7), pp. 291–2.

  Curtis William Eleroy Curtis, Around the Black Sea: Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), pp. 3–4.

  Hossu Gheorghe Hossu, Importan¸ta canalului Dunăre–Marea Neagră în construirea socialismului în R. P. R. (Bucharest: Editura de Stat, 1950), p. 3.

  Curzon Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Frontiers: The Romanes Lecture, 1907 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), p. 5.

  Bibliography and Further Reading

  A work on the history, society, and politics of the Black Sea necessarily crosses several boundaries: the disciplinary ones between history and the social sciences, and the regional ones between central and eastern Europe, the Russian empire/former Soviet Union, and the Ottoman empire/Turkey. The purpose of this section is to offer the reader a sense of the sources I have used in several of these fields and to provide a few signposts for anyone interested in journeying deeper into the Black Sea world. More detailed references, including those in languages other than English, can be found in the notes to each chapter.

  GENERAL WORKES

  Any book on seas, frontiers, and regions trails along behind two giants, Owen Lattimore and Fernand Braudel. Lattimore’s Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York, 1951) and Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London, 1972) are fundamental works. An influential study that follows in (and responds to) the Lattimore tradition is William McNeill’s book on southeastern Europe on the eve of modernity, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964). On the meaning of regions, there is still no more thoughtful primer than Oscar Halecki’s The Limits and Divisions of European History (London, 1950). On the mutability of regional labels in Europe, two excellent guides are Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford, 1996) and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).

  The history of seas, although it does not yet have a name as a scholarly field (pelagic history? benthology?), is a boom area. Martin Lewis and Kären E. Wigen make the case for paying more attention to bodies of water in The Myth of Continents (Berkeley, 1997). Sea-centered works that I have found useful are, on the Mediterranean, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (Oxford, 2000); on the Indian Ocean, K. N. Chaudhuri’s classic Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 1985) and Richard Hall’s brilliantly readable Empires of the Monsoon (London, 1996); on the Pacific, O. H. K. Spate’s sweeping three-volume The Pacific Since Magellan (Minneapolis, 1979, 1983, 1988) and Walter A. McDougall’s engaging
but at times plain wacky Let the Sea Make a Noise (New York, 1993); and on the Atlantic, Barry Cunliffe’s beautiful Facing the Ocean (Oxford, 2001).

  On the Black Sea in particular, two books that served as inspirations for my own are Gheorghe Ioan Brătianu, La Mer Noire: Des origines à la conquête ottomane (Munich, 1969) and Neil Ascherson, Black Sea (London, 1995). The former is a magisterial work of interpretive history by a major Romanian historian; the anticipated second volume was preempted by the author’s death in a communist prison. The latter is part travelogue and part historical essay, a beautifully written meditation on the meanings of civilization and barbarism. An older synthesis, which liberally plagiarizes other published works, is Henry A. S. Dearborn, A Memoir of the Commerce and Navigation of the Black Sea, and the Trade and Maritime Geography of Turkey and Egypt (Boston, 1819). Anthony Bryer and David Winfield’s two-volume The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos (Washington, 1985) is a stunning analysis of the geography, archaeology, architecture, and history of the southeastern littoral. It will never be surpassed, if for no other reason than that some of the sites that the authors catalogued have since been destroyed by town planners and highway engineers.

  The past of the lands and peoples around the sea is divided among a number of disparate history-writing traditions. Mark Mazower’s extended essay The Balkans: A Short History (New York, 2000) is the best two hundred pages written on that region; the best thousand is perhaps L. S. Stavrianos’s The Balkans Since 1453 (New York, 2000). Much Ukrainian history-writing is marred by an uncritical nationalism, but a good balance is to read Orest Subtelny’s Ukraine: A History, 2nd edn. (Toronto, 1994) and then Andrew Wilson’s The Ukrainians (New Haven, 2000). There is simply too much to read on Russia, the steppe, and the sea, but the best place to start is with two important works: Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier (Bloomington, 2002), the title of which doffs a hat to McNeill (above), and Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field (Ithaca, 2004).

  The Caucasus is unfortunately still understudied compared to Russia or the Balkans, but Yo’av Karny’s Highlanders (New York, 2000) is an astute journalistic treatment of the region and its history. For a more scholarly analysis, the older Caucasian Battlefields (Cambridge, 1953), by W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, is a good point of entry. On the Ottoman empire and modern Turkey, the works of Halil İnalcık, Suraiya Faroqhi, Bernard Lewis, and Stanford Shaw have set the standard. Erik J. Zürcher’s Turkey: A Modern History, rev. edn. (New York, 1998) is a very useful synthesis. On Bulgaria and Romania, the basic works are Richard Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge, 1997) and Keith Hitchins’s two volumes, The Romanians: 1774–1866 (Oxford, 1996) and Rumania: 1866–1947 (Oxford, 1994).

  The Studies of Nationalities book series, published by Hoover Institution Press at Stanford University, is the best source for focused works on several of the peoples around the sea: on the Georgians and Armenians, Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Making of the Georgian Nation (1988) and Looking Toward Ararat (1993); Alan Fisher’s The Crimean Tatars (1978); and my own The Moldovans (2000). Two other series, one published by Macmillan–Palgrave and the other by Curzon Press, offer overviews of peoples such as the Abkhaz, Circassians, Laz, and others.

  Beyond these general studies, I have used archives, primary accounts of travelers from antiquity to the present, and a vast secondary literature in specialized fields. Some of the major sources are discussed below.

  ARCHIVES AND PRIVATE PAPERS

  Writing a history of the Black Sea based on archival sources would consume several careers, since it would demand a detailed investigation of collections in many countries and many languages, some of which are even now not easily accessible. I have sampled only some of them.

  The Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University hold the papers of the American Relief Administration, an extremely valuable collection on humanitarian efforts in southern Russia during and after the First World War. I also made use of the S. N. Paleologue Papers, on the evacuation of Russians to the Balkans during the war, along with the private papers of Mikhail N. Girs (Russian minister in Constantinople) and Frank A. Golder (a member of the American Relief Administration). The records of the U.S. Military Mission to Armenia in 1919 provide a remarkable portrait of human suffering in eastern Anatolia after the end of the war.

  At the Library of Congress, the Roger Fenton Crimean War Photograph Collection (now available online) is a priceless photographic chronicle of the war. The library’s Geography and Map Reading Room houses a useful array of historic Black Sea maps, including the extremely important atlas of Egor Manganari from 1841.

  At the archives of the Piłsudski Institute of America in New York, I consulted the papers of Edmund Charaszkiewicz, Jerzy Ponikiewski, and Apolinary Kiełczyàski. These personal papers, along with the journal Prométhée (published in the 1920s and 1930s in Paris), are some of the basic sources for the history of the Promethean movement.

  The Public Record Office in London contains valuable information on Black Sea commerce in the nineteenth century in the annual reports of the British consular offices around the sea, all in the Foreign Office files. The Admiralty and War Office files are less rich but still provide revealing documents, especially about the Second World War.

  The first British consul in Trabzon, James Brant, was a keen observer of the sea in the 1830s; his private papers are available at the British Library. At the library, I also consulted the papers of Henry Ellis and A. H. Layard, which contain correspondence related to Brant’s career.

  In Romania, I studied the history of the Vlach colonization program in Dobrudja through the files of the Ministry of Education, the National Office of Colonization, and the Society for Macedo-Romanian Culture, among others, located at the Central Historical Archive, National Archives of Romania, Bucharest. Little of this research actually made it into the final version of this book, but for an intrepid Ph.D. student, there is a fascinating story to be told about finding lost brothers and the problems of bringing them to the homeland.

  TRAVELER’S ACCOUNTS AND OTHER PRIMARY TEXTS

  Meticulous bibliographies of travelers in the Black Sea region from various periods can be found in the journal Archeion Pontou, Vol. 32 (1973–4) and Vol. 33 (1975–6), and in Bryer and Winfield (above).

  For antiquity, the basic texts are well known: Herodotus, not always a sober guide; the military adventurer Xenophon; the careful geographer Strabo; and the whinging Ovid, one of our earliest postcard writers. Apollonius’s Argonautica, from the third century BC, is the chief source for the Jason legend. The “Borysthenitic Discourse” of Dio Chrysostom is a fascinating but tainted account of a major Black Sea colony in the first century AD. The important periplus of Arrian from the second century reveals a great deal about the Roman military on the southern and eastern coasts. Ammianus Marcellinus, the historian of the late Roman empire, discusses the Black Sea in some detail, but his highly eccentric version of the truth owes much to Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, both of whom had their own vices as writers. Occasional references to the sea and intriguing tidbits about the peoples around it can be found in many other ancient writers, but most of what they have to say is derivative of earlier accounts.

  From the Byzantine period, two major writers stand out. Procopius, the historian of the reign of the emperor Justinian, offers various views of the difficult frontier beyond the coast. The emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus wrote an instructional guide to empire management (De administrando imperio), part of which focuses on relations with barbarians on the northern shore. In the later Byzantine period, a number of travelers left accounts of the sea, particularly of the Genoese and Venetian trading colonies. One collection is Manuel Komroff (ed.) Contemporaries of Marco Polo (New York, 1989). Other important records are those of Josafa Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini (Travels to Tana and Persia [London, 1873]), Pero Tafur (Travels and Adventures, 1435–1439 [New York, 1926]), Ibn Battuta (Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1
354 [New York, 1929]), and Ruy González de Clavijo (Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403–1406 [London, 1928]). Francesco Balducci Pegolotti’s fourteenth-century guidebook for Italian merchants in the East is available as La pratica della mercatura, Allen Evans (ed.) (Cambridge, MA, 1936). To track down Slavic/Russian accounts of the Black Sea, from the Middle Ages forward, the best guide is Theofanis G. Stavrou and Peter R. Weisensel, Russian Travelers to the Christian East from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century (Columbus, 1985).

  Among Ottoman travelers there is no one to rival the seventeenth-century writer Evliya Çelebi, who suffered a shipwreck off the Crimean coast and witnessed an unsuccessful Ottoman assault on the fortress of Azov. A condensed version of his Seyahatname is Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1834). On the encounters between Ottomans and Cossacks on the sea, the major source is Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan, A Description of Ukraine (Cambridge, MA, 1993).

  There is a wealth of travelers’ accounts, some more informative and reliable than others, from the late eighteenth century forward, when the sea was reopened to foreign commercial vessels. Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, accompanied Catherine the Great on her journey to Crimea in 1787 and left an entertaining record in his Memoirs and Recollections of Count Ségur (London, 1825–7). There is no better first-hand account of the difficulties of trade in the late eighteenth century than Antoine-Ignace Anthoine de Saint-Joseph’s Essai historique sur le commerce et la navigation de la Mer-Noire, 2nd edn. (Paris, 1820). Another Frenchman, E. Taitbout de Marigny, tried his hand at trade with the Caucasus coast in the early nineteenth century and recorded his travails in Three Voyages in the Black Sea to the Coast of Circassia (London, 1837). The most accurate Western description of Ottoman social life and of Istanbul in the nineteenth century is Charles White, Three Years in Constantinople; or, Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1844 (London, 1845). On the Ottoman navy, there is the account of a British adviser, Adolphus Slade, published as Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, etc., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea, with the Capitan Pasha, in the Years 1829, 1830, and 1831 (Philadelphia, 1833). J. A. Longworth was an observant and patriotic traveler in the north Caucasus and recorded his journey in A Year Among the Circassians (London, 1840).