Black Sea Read Online Free

The Crimean peninsula has functioned as a sort of theatre, an apron-stage, for events important to the whole Black Sea region and its peoples. The Greeks made Crimea the centre of their trading empire and so did the Italians a thousand years later; the Crimean War was fought here in the nineteenth century, and Crimea was the scene of some of Hitler's and Stalin's worst atrocities in the twentieth. In 1945, the Yalta conference held on Crimea's southern tip became the code-name for Europe's division during the Cold War.
    But I also begin in Crimea because, by pure chance, I first saw the Black Sea there. And, finally, because any child shown a map of the Black Sea would by instinct first put its finger on that pendant, on that funny brown tag which sticks out so rudely into the smooth blue oval.
    After Crimea, the book goes in many directions. It is not a guidebook, and I am not a circumnavigator. Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania all get less attention than they deserve. But the intellectual trail I was following led away from those countries on the edge of Europe in the opposite direction, towards the north and east. From Crimea, the investigation of 'barbarism' took me to Olbia, near the estuary of the river Dnieper, and from there - leaping over Crimea again - to the ruins of Tanais and Tana on the delta of the river Don. Soon this trail was approaching the mysteries of nationalism and identity, with all their shameless games with shadows and mirrors and their enormous creative power.
    But the track divided. One branch led to the Cossack peoples of south Russia and Ukraine, to Odessa and to Poland, while another turning took me to north-eastern Turkey, where the Pontic Greeks once lived and the tiny Lazi people still does. A journey to Kerch, to explore the 'Bosporan Kingdom' of classical times, again forked into two investigations: of the genuine historical Sarmatians, who commanded this region for a few centuries before and after the birth of Christ, and of the re-invented, fantasy Sarmatians who rode out of the Polish national imagination and were appointed Poland's ancestors. The newest Black Sea state of all, however, is not imaginary; I reached the end of the road in tiny Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia only in 1992, and I tried there to measure the reality or unreality of Abkhazian independence against all that I had learned on the journey until then.
    The prologue and epilogue to this journey are both at the Bosporus. In between is the Black Sea, which is not only the subject but the leading character of this book. The Black Sea has a personality which is not caught by some adjective like 'unpredictable' or phrase like 'friendly to strangers' and which - because it is not made up of traits or epithets but of the interplay of circumstances - cannot be described in detail at all. These circumstances, adding up to an identity, include fish and water, winds and grass, cliffs and forests, migrating birds and human beings. This is not just a place but a pattern of relationships which could not have been the same in any other place, and this is why Black Sea history is first of all the history of the Black Sea.
     
     
    Chapter One
     
     
     
    The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.
     
     
    Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore
     
     
    ON THE BLACK SEA , my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.
    The Russian Revolution's final victory over its enemies was the moment at Novorossisk, in March 1920, when British battleships moved out to sea carrying General Denikin's defeated White Army on their foredecks. My father was a midshipman there, a boy of eighteen who then and for the rest