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WHY
SHOULD YOU VISIT THE BLACK SEA?
WHY IS IT CALLED ‘BLACK’?
WHY IS IT A ‘SEA’?
It helps to look at a map.
But the main answer is that the art of
travel on this overcrowded planet these days, is to get to sites that mass tourism has not
yet found, or has momentarily abandoned in panic.
This is
becoming imperative as the numbers of organised group tours explodes. Global
sightseers from Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, St Petersberg, Seoul and many
other hitherto cloistered cities everywhere are cluttering up every wellknown
attraction from Florence to Machu Pichu; from the view sites on Mount Everest
to the bottom of the Red Sea.
However the
Black Sea was still a haven from the tourist hordes when we were there in September 2007.
The Black Sea, of course is famous for attracting people – and driving
them out again. Or raping women and decimating the men.
For 5,000 years the region has been a magnet for barbarians and
civilizations. It has
attracted aggressive specimens of both forms of culture, simultaneously or in
waves, from the West and the East, from the North and the South. Their
artifacts, ruins and some of their treasures are piled up all around the shore.
More of that later.
FIRST let us look at the Black Sea itself. Once, about 22,000 years ago,
it formed as a lake. During the last global warming, however, sea-levels rose
from melted ice at the Poles and other glacial zones, causing the Meditteranean
Sea to pour over the rock-ridge at the eastern end of the Bosporus. A giant
waterfall then filled the lake and its basin to a depth of more than two
kilometres.
One theory is that this was recorded as the
biblical Flood.. The theory dates the genesis of the Sea of Azov to
5600 BCE, and there are traces of Neolithic settlement under its waters. (The
Sea of Azov – an adjunct to the Black Sea beyond the Crimea peninsula - is “the
shallowest sea in the world”, averaging no more than 15 metres).
Three of Europe’s four greatest rivers – The
massive Danube, the Don and the Dnieper – drain into the Black Sea. So do
several others, including the River Caucausus (Sochi) and the Dienster.
In all, the drainage of 17 European countries discharges into the Black
Sea and connects with the world’s oceans
by squeezing through the narrow channel of the Bosporus, which is only
700metres wide in places. (Google for map –‘Black Sea Rivers basin’.)
Sailing west through
the Bosporus means sailing constantly downstream, so why doesn’t the level of
the Black Sea ever drop in dry or frozen periods?
Because, several metres below the surface flow, there is a dark and heavy
counter-current flowing back into the Black Sea. . . a darker, more saline flow driven by its own
weight. It is this deeper water of
heavier salinity that helps distinguish the Black Sea from all others on the
planet, for it covers the stagnant dead, dark waters in the bottom of its basin
- waters poisoned by hydrogen sulphide
created by rotting vegetation swept into the basin over thousands of years.
The Black Sea is
indeed blacker than most in its invisible depths. By contrast, in its broad
shallows stretching from its river mouths, its marine life is among the richest in the world. Before the pollution and overfishing of the past hundred years,
there was a super-abundance of bonito, salmon, turbot, sprat, anchovy, and many
more species breeding in the top 100 metres among giant sea-grass fields. Sturgeon were so abundant
until quite recently that caviare was “the food of the poor” in that region.
The beluga weighed tons, and it was possible to catch fish with your shirt tails
in the Bosporus, while an estimated million tons of small anchovies would
stretch for miles in their annual migrations around the Black Sea . . only to be threatened with extinction by
mass over-fishing in the 1980s.
It was this abundance
that originally attracted to its shores people – nomadic tribes, imperial armies; barbarian
hordes; bands of civilised traders – over the past 5,000 years.
We shall find traces of many of these disparate ethnic groups as we sail to their haunts on the coastline.
The Russians in the
early Twentieth Century added another uniqueness to the Black Sea.
With slave
labour and efforts greater than those employed in cutting the Panama Canal,
they dug canals that linked Moscow and the Volga River to the Baltic and the
Caspian Sea; to the North Sea, and to the Meditteranean via their water-course
to the Black Sea.
Today a foothold of Russia shares with half a
dozen old and new nations the coastline of the
Black Sea.
WHY IS IT CALLED ‘BLACK’? There are
numbers of linguistic and historic theories, but the simplest and most
satisfying is the visual theory. The
Black Sea does, in certain lights and circumstances, appear blackish –
certainly not green, or grey or blue, as the Danube is supposed to be.
The Black Sea is very deep at its centre, with its ‘dead’ lower layer reaching 2kms in places, and impregnated with the hydrogen
sulphide of rotten vegetation.
Visibility in the Black Sea averages only five metres,
compared with as much as 35m in the Mediterranean. So the tendency to a dark, opaque surface is strong.
Source of all life on Earth? The irony of the Black
Sea’s indepth infertility is that its waters cover, what some claim to be, the
world’s oldest form of life.
Traditional
views of early life on Earth focus on plants formed three billion years
ago. Recent discoveries by German scientists, however, involve corals made by
micro-organisms living on methane and sulphates in total darkness at the bottom
of the sea’s original lake. The newly
discovered organisms live on methane and are thought to have originated four
billion years ago.
When
we sailed the Black Sea recently our view was centred on life in the 21st
century, and going back only 5,000 years. |
