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  BLACK SEA

  NEAL ASCHERSON

  A DIVISION OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1995 by Neal Ascherson

  All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First published in 1995 in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape

  First American edition, 1995

  Fifth printing, 2001

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Ascherson, Neal. Black Sea / Neal Ascherson. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Black Sea Region—History. I. Title. DJK66.A83 1995 909'.096389—dcio 95-19721 CIP

  BLACK SEA

  Acknowledgments

  MANY PEOPLE, LIVING and dead, have helped me to write this book. The germ of the idea, as I now realise, came to me when I was sixteen years old, as I read Mikhail RostovtzefPs classic work about the Black Sea past, Iranians and Greeks in South Russia. At the time, I was being taught Latin and Greek literature, and I felt it was important not to be stereotyped as a 'classicist'. I tried to find some private niche from which I could understand the classical world not as a Graeco-Roman — or as a schoolboy forced into some post-Victorian version of a Graeco-Roman mind-set - but as a knowing outsider. I wanted to be a monk who wrote Latin in rhyme, or a dangerous Scythian who travelled light and put down no roots. In any case, the result of opening Rostovtzeff was an imaginative invasion and occupation which I have never since thrown off. Most of a lifetime passed before I could carry out the invader's command, before I could stand on the burial mound of a nomad king above the outfall of the Dnieper or the Don. But it was Rostovtzeff who issued the original order.

  I would like to honour the authors of several other books on which I drew heavily in certain sections, especially Alan Fisher {The Crimean Tatars) and Patricia Herlihy, whose excellent Odessa: A History was my main source for that city's nineteenth-century past. Franqois Hartog's The Mirror of Herodotus, in a marvellously lucid translation from the French by Janet Lloyd, is at the centre of several of my arguments, and so is Edith Hall's Inventing the Barbarians. Anthony Pagden's dark and prophetic book, European Encounters with the New World, helped me to understand the meaning of journeys between cultures. For the Black Sea's ecology, most of my data and many ideas are drawn from the work of Laurence Mee and J. F. Caddy, both of whom were patient and helpful with my enquiries. Tom Nairn's thinking about nationalism has guided all that I have written on that theme.

  Two people above all deserve my thanks for their assistance and support. Marzena Pogorzafy carried out elaborate and impeccably presented research into the sources for the sojourn of Adam Mickiewicz in Odessa and Crimea, and for the strange ideology of 'Sarmatism' which possessed the old Polish aristocracy. The volumes of extracts which she left with me remain absorbing reading in themselves, and I will always be grateful to her. Professor Anthony Bryer of Birmingham University took me to the 18th World Congress of Byzantinology at Moscow in August 1991, and thereby allowed me to be a witness to the unsuccessful putsch which exploded a few days after the Congress ended and ultimately destroyed the Soviet Union. He opened to me his enormous knowledge of Byzantine history and above all of the Grand Comnenian Empire of Trebizond, and he tirelessly provided me with ideas and contacts; my mistakes and perverse reflections on those matters are my own, and I hope that he will forgive them. I am also deeply grateful to Igor Volkov, of the department of archaeology at the University of Rostov-on-Don, who showed me round the city and museum at Azov, furnished me with specialist literature on the history of the lower Don, and answered later enquiries with long and helpful letters about the history of archaeology in southern Russia.

  I would like to thank Anatoly Ilyich Kudrenko, director of the museum at Olbia, and especially Valeriy Fedorovich Chesnok, director of the Tanais museum, who allowed me to stay on the site, helped to organise a programme for me and offered me much friendship and advice. Salutes, too, to Irina Tolochko and Zhenya Malchenko, to Yura and Volodya Guguev; and to Inna Soltys, who translated for me in Odessa and showed me her city. I am also grateful to Dr George Hewitt of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, whose introductions and contacts helped me to enter and study Abkhazia, to the staff of the Ukrainian Institute for Marine Ecology in Odessa, and to Timothy Taylor of the University of Bradford, for giving up so much of his time to conversations with me about Sarmatians and Thracians and for supplying me with copies of his own work and that of the late Tadeusz Sulimirski. Finally, I would like to thank Wolfgang Feurstein for welcoming me at his home in the Black Forest and for talking so openly and passionately about his work on Lazi culture.

  From time to time, I would arrive exhausted, dirty and hungry at the door of successive Moscow correspondents of the Independent, sometimes at moments of frantic crisis. I was always made welcome. Nothing can repay the kindness of Peter Pringle and Eleanor Randolph, or of Andrew and Martha Higgins. I will always remember my days and nights with them.

  There would have been no book, and nothing to acknowledge, without the patience, encouragement and forbearance of my wife, Isabel Hilton, who put up with interrupted holidays and lonely weekends over several years. I only hope this book in a small way makes up for all these deprivations.

  to my Father

  Contents

  Introduction 1

  Black Sea 12

  Epilogue 271

  Chronology

  277

  Select Bibliography 285

  Index 291

  Introduction

  I must admit, I can be perfectly happy reading . . . and equally happy pouring the sands through my fingers and resting with the whole of my being, while the wind pats my cheeks with its cool, damp hands. It seems to be pleased that there is not another soul on the beach, all the way to the horizon where the bluish promontories look like a company of bears lapping the sea-water.

  All day long, the stiff grass rustles on the cliffs. Infinitely old, this gentle sound, heard on this shore for century after century, imparts the love of wisdom and simplicity.

  Konstantin Paustovsky, Years of Hope

  At this [Homeric] time, the Sea was not navigable and was called 'Axenos' [inhospitable] because of its wintry storms and the ferocity of the tribes that lived around it, and particularly the Scythians in that they sacrificed strangers . . . but later it was called 'Euxeinos' [friendly to strangers] when the Ionians founded cities on the seaboard.

  Strabo, Geography

  ONE DAY EARLY in 1680, a young Italian named Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli stood on a boat anchored in the middle of the Bosporus, off Istanbul, and lowered a weighted line over the side.

  All navigators knew and had always known that the Black Sea ran out in a torrent through the Bosporus to the west, flowing on through the Sea of Marmara and the straits of the Dardanelles to reach the Mediterranean. In the third century BC, Apollonius Rhodius had told how Jason and the Argonauts had fought their way eastwards against the torrent, rowing their vessel upstream through the Bosporus to reach the Black Sea along 'the narrow strait of the winding passage, hemmed in on both sides by rugged cliffs, while an eddying current from below was washing against the ship as she moved on ...' The same current now tugged Marsigli's boat towards the distant Mediterranean as she strained at her anchor.

  Marsigli had tied white-painted cork markers to the line, at regular intervals. At first, as he payed out the line, he watched the markers moving aft, slowly born westwards by the current flowing from the Black Sea. But then, peering intently over the side, Marsigli saw what he had hoped to see.

  The deeper markers, glimmering below him, were beginning to move in the opposite direction. Very slowly, they shifted along until they were under the bo
ws of his boat and the weighted line took the shape of an arc, streaming out west near the surface and then, at a greater depth, curving round to point east. Now he knew. There were two currents in the Bosporus Narrows, and not one. There was an upper flow, but there was also a deeper counterflow, running below it from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea.

  Marsigli was only twenty-one. He was to have a long, adventurous and useful life. He was briefly captured by Tatars near Vienna, became an officer in the Habsburg armies on the Danube, and later established Europe's first research centre for oceanography at Cassis, in the south of France. But nothing he did later was more important than his discovery of the Bosporus undercurrent. In methodology and implications, it was a landmark in the new science of the sea. It was also the first step towards the study of the Black Sea for its own sake: not as a ring of shore inhabited by strange people, but as a body of water.

  Almost all discoveries have an element of successsful presentation about them. The undercurrent (Marsigli's Corrente Sottano) was known to those who worked in the waters of the Bosporus for a living, as Marsigli handsomely admitted. In his first account of his achievement, he wrote that 'my speculations had been stimulated not only by ideas formulated in my own inner cogitations but also by reports from many Turkish fishermen and above all by the urgings of Signor Cavalier Finch [Sir John Finch], Ambassador to the Porte of His Majesty the King of England and a great savant in the study of nature: to whom this notion was first disclosed by one of his ships' captains who was not able to reach any clear conclusions by experiment, perhaps for want of time . . .'

  Marsigli's true glory is the way in which he followed through and consolidated his initial experiment. After the sounding, he took water samples at varying depths and was able to show that the water of the undercurrent was denser and more saline than the overcurrent running out of the Black Sea. He then constructed a demonstration apparatus: a vertically divided tank filled on one side with dyed sea-water of higher salt content and on the other with less saline water. Opening a hatch in the tank's partition, he allowed the two samples to mingle until the coloured sea-water had found its place as a visible layer at the bottom of the tank. And, without fully understanding what he had done, Marsigli had also discovered one of the basic facts of oceanography: that currents are generated not by gravity, like the flow of rivers, but by other forces which include the principles of fluid mechanics - in this case, a pressure gradient. The movement of heavier Mediterranean water into the Black Sea was impelling the lighter water in the opposite direction.

  After Marsigli, other scientists, most of them Russians, began to explore the strange and stubborn nature of the Black Sea. Marsigli had shown that the Sea's water was less salty and dense than that of the Mediterranean, and he had explained a mystery: why its shore-level did not fall in spite of its outflow through the Bosporus. But it was left to others, much later, to uncover the basic fact about the Black Sea which makes it unlike all other seas: that almost all of it is dead.

  On the atlas, the Black Sea appears as a kidney-shaped pond, connected to the outer oceans by the thread-like channel of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. And yet it is a sea, not a fresh-water lake: a salt-water mass some 630 miles across from east to west and 330 miles from north to south - except at its 'waist', where the projecting peninsula of Crimea reduces the north-south distance between the Crimean shore and Turkey to only 144 miles. The Black Sea is deep, reaching down to more than 2200 metres in places. But there is a large, shallow shelf in its north-western corner, off the stretch of coast which reaches round from the Danube delta in Romania in the west to Crimea in the north. This shelf, less than a hundred metres deep, has been the breeding-ground for many of the Black Sea's fish species.

  As one travels clockwise round the Sea from the Bosporus, the Bulgarian and Romanian shores are seen to be low-lying, like most of the Ukrainian coastline. Then come the towering sea-cliffs of the Crimean mountains. The eastern and southern coasts (Abkhazia, Georgia and Turkey) are mostly mountainous, sometimes fringed with a narrow coastal plain and sometimes — as in north-eastern Turkey — plunging steeply down to the Black Sea in forested ridges and gorges.

  But it is the rivers which dominate the Black Sea. Only three major rivers — Rhone, Nile and Po — run into the far bigger Mediterranean. But the Black Sea receives five: the Kuban, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester and, above all, the Danube whose drainage basin extends across the whole of eastern and central Europe and almost to the borders of France. The Danube alone carries 203 cubic kilometres of fresh water into the Black Sea every year, more than the entire flow of river water into the North Sea.

  It is these rivers, source of so much life, which over tens of thousands of years extinguished life in the Black Sea depths. The inrush of organic matter from the rivers was too much for the bacteria in sea-water which would normally decompose it. They feed by oxidising their nutrients, using the dissolved oxygen normally present in sea-water. But when the organic inflow is so great that the supply of dissolved oxygen is used up, then the bacteria turn to another biochemical process: they strip the oxygen from the sulphate ions which are a component of sea-water, creating in this process a residual gas: hydrogen sulphide, or HS.

  This is one of the deadliest substances in the natural world. A full breath of it is usually enough to kill a human being. Oil workers know and dread it; they watch for its rotten-eggs reek and at the first whiff they run. They are right to do so. Hydrogen sulphide almost instantly destroys the sense of smell, so that after the first sniff it is impossible to tell whether one is inhaling more.

  The Black Sea is the world's biggest single reservoir of hydrogen sulphide. Below a fluctuating depth of between 150 and 200 metres, there is no life. The water is anoxic, without dissolved oxygen, and impregnated with HS; because much of the Black Sea is deep, this means that some 90 per cent of the Sea's volume is sterile. It is not the only place in the oceans where HS has accumulated. There are anoxic areas on the floor of the Baltic Sea, and under some Norwegian fjords where water circulation is slight. Off the Peruvian coast, hydrogen sulphide is sometimes brought welling up from the depths to the surface in the periodic catastrophes known as 'el Nino', where it kills the entire ecosystem, destroying the coastal fisheries and reacting with paint on ships' bottoms to turn them black (the 'Callao Painter' effect). But the Black Sea deeps remain the largest mass of lifeless water in the world.

  And yet, until the last hundred years, the Black Sea has seemed to human beings a place of almost monstrous abundance. The poisonous darkness lay far below, unknown to anyone. Above the hundred-fathom line, the 'haloclyne' or 'oxyclyne' which marks the upper limit of anoxia, the Sea boiled with life. Salmon and huge sturgeon — the beluga can reach the length and weight of a small whale — crowded up the big rivers to spawn (caviar was so plentiful that in fourteenth-century Byzantium it was the food of the poor).1 Along the shores and on the shallow north-western shelf of the Black Sea, there lived spiny turbot, sprat, goby, ray, grey mullet and whiting, most of them feeding off underwater prairies of Zostera sea-grass.

  On the other side of the Crimean peninsula, in the far northeastern corner of the Black Sea, is the Sea of Azov, resembling a miniature version of the Black Sea itself with its narrow channel -the Kerch Straits - connecting it to the larger ocean. This small sea, shallow and landlocked, used to be the home of more than a hundred breeds of fish in the 130 miles between the Kerch Straits and the marshy delta of the river Don. At every spate, the Don delta would flood up over miles of reeds and brackish mud, providing spawning-grounds for fat river fish which could be caught by the cart-load. Millions of marine fish on their migrations to breeding areas pushed through the Bosporus at Istanbul, or through the Kerch Straits into the Sea of Azov. Catching them required little more effort than sticking a hand-net out of a sea-side window, and Strabo wrote that in the Golden Horn, the creek of the Bosporus which runs up under the walls of Istanbul, bonito could be pulled from the water with bare
hands.

  Out in the open waters, among the schools of dolphin and porpoise, two fish species performed a slow, gyratory migration around the Black Sea, their progress almost as punctual as a shipping schedule. One was the bonito (palamud), a member of the mackerel family so important to food and trade that its image appears on some Byzantine coins. The other was the hamsi, or Black Sea anchovy.

  To this day, the shrunken remnant of the anchovy hordes spawn off the Bay of Odessa in July and most of August, setting off on their anti-clockwise journey round the Sea between the last week of August and the first days of September. Travelling about twelve miles a day, in groups whose biomass even now weighs up to 20,000 tons each, they pass the delta of the Danube, skirt the shores of Romania and Bulgaria, and then turn east along the coast of Anatolian Turkey. By early November, the shoals are midway between Istanbul and Sinop, several hundred miles to the east. The fish have grown heavier and are travelling more slowly in tighter groups as they enter the main fishing areas off Trabzon (Trebizond). Finally, in the New Year, the anchovies reach the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, somewhere off Batumi, and then divide: some heading north along the Georgian and Abkhazian coasts and round to their point of departure, others returning to Sinop and then cutting straight across the central Black Sea to the Bay of Odessa. One estimate of the hamsi biomass, done before genocidal overfishing collapsed the species in the 1980s, suggested that something approaching a million tons of anchovies swam in this circular pilgrimage every year.