Black Sea
Page 34
Best of all, there is a display of human will to 'save' the Black Sea. In Odessa, a long and desperate battle was fought by the independent ecologist Alia Shevchuk and her friends to stave off the Ukrainian oil-terminal project, an ostentatious scheme forced ahead in the early 1990s by President Leonid Kravchuk; when elections deposed Kravchuk in 1994, his successor promised at once that the project would be reduced or even cancelled. And in the same city, in 1993, I watched Ministers for the Environment from Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Turkey sitting down with experts from several different United Nations agencies and the World Bank to draft a declaration on the protection of the Black Sea, as part of a continuous action plan. I heard the Turkish delegate and the Bulgarian delegate warmly welcoming each other's ideas — something inconceivable at normal international conferences, where proceedings have often been held up for days while Turkey and Bulgaria wrangle about history and minorities. And all the ministers happily let themselves be steered by discreet UN advice from offstage - something which could never happen at a conference on the North Sea, where governments, especially those of Britain or France, are neurotically touchy about maintaining the appearance of sovereignty. There is a good spirit stirring here. The international campaign for the Black Sea has become popular. All hopes are still fragile, of course. Much depends on persuading polluter states far upstream in the Danube basin — Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary — to collaborate and to contribute their money and wisdom. But it may be that the cause of the Black Sea itself, of its waters and its creatures, is at last beginning to achieve what so many millennia of human activity have failed to achieve: the union of the peoples who live around it.
Epilogue
THE NAVAL MUSEUM at Istanbul, a seaside palace in the Besjktas, district, stands next to one of the busy ferry terminals for commuters travelling to work across the Bosporus. The museum has few visitors. Often there is nobody there at all, apart from the man at the ticket desk. But the thump of engines from freighters passing through the Narrows and the whistles of the ferries make its silence companionable.
Huge state galleys are preserved here, with benches for a hundred and forty oarsmen. There is an imperial harem boat, its thirteen banks of oars manned by black-whiskered male dummies in fez, sash and baggy trousers; the kiosk aft for the women of the seraglio is thickly curtained, furnished with upholstered seats piled with cushions. Around the walls of the museum are models of ironclads in glass cabinets, and the garden outside is a park of antique naval guns.
Near the entrance, overshadowed by the galleys and their carved prow-spikes, lies the Chain. Only a few links survive. They are made of black, rough-forged iron, each link a metre long and beaten into a figure-of-eight shape which was then crudely welded together at the waist. This is what is left of the great chain made in the eighth century to the order of the Byzantine emperor Leo III, 'the Isaurian'.
Supported on a string of timber rafts or buoys, the Chain was stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn in times of danger. It kept out the Arabs in the time of Leo III, and a hundred years later blocked the attacking ships of Thomas the Slav, a pretender to the imperial throne. In the eleventh century, the Viking warrior Harald Hardrade, commander of the Empire's 'Varangian Guard', ran his galleys against the Chain during his escape from Byzantine service to claim a kingdom in Norway.
Harald had been forbidden to leave the city by the Empress Zoe, co-ruler with the emperor Michael Kalafates, who ordered his arrest. In revenge, Harald and his men attacked and blinded the emperor and kidnapped Maria, niece of the empress, as a hostage. Then, according to the Heimskringla sagas, Harald and his followers went to the Varangians' galleys, of which they took two, and rowed to Saevidarsund [the Golden Horn]. And when they came to the iron chain that lay across the sound, Harald said that the men should fall to their oars on both galleys and that the men who were not rowing should run aft and each should have his sack with him. Thus they ran the galleys onto the iron chain, and as soon as the ships were fast and their movement stopped, he bade all his men run forward again. Then the galley Harald was on plunged forward, and after swinging on the chain slipped off, but the other galley stuck fast to the iron chain and broke its back, and many were drowned, though some were picked up from the water. In this way Harald came out from Micklegarth [Constantinople] and thus went into the Black Sea. But before he sailed away from land he put the girl ashore and gave her a good escort back to Micklegarth . . .5
The Chain was used again in a vain attempt to hold off the attacking Crusaders in 1203, and it was run out for the last time during the final siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The navy of Mehmet II, 'the Conqueror', failed to break through it by direct assault, and the Sultan, taking over command from his humiliated admiral Baltaoglu, prepared his own plan to outflank the Chain altogether. If the fleet could not enter the Golden Horn by sea, then it would enter it by land. A two-mile track of log rollers laid on brushwood was constructed uphill from the Bosporus at Be§ikta§, and a few days later the Greek defenders of the city saw from the battlements the appalling sight of topmasts slowly appearing over the ridge to the east of the Golden Horn. With sails up and drums beating, more than seventy Turkish warships were dragged up the slope and down the other side until they reached the water of the Golden Horn and moored under the walls of Byzantium. From that moment the fall of Constantinople, the extinction of the Byzantine Empire and the triumph of Islam and the Ottomans were only a matter of time.
Are these dark links really the same Chain which Leo the Isaurian commanded to be forged thirteen hundred years ago, the very metal rammed by Harald's ships on his way back to Norway? It seems unlikely. Chains break, iron rusts, and links require replacement every so often. And yet the thought leads to a familiar philosophical riddle: even though every link may have been renewed over the centuries, yet this is in essence still the Chain itself.
All around the Black Sea, reading its history or climbing through its ruins or talking to its people, I have remembered the old saying: This is my grandfather's axe. My father gave it a new helve, and 1 gave it a new head.' That is the truth about the Chain of Constantinople. But it is also the truth about ethnic identities; the only wise comment on all the claims to 'be' a Pontic Greek, a true Scythian, a Cossack, a Romanian, an Abkhazian, a Ukrainian.
Those who cherish and revive their 'native' language usually have ancestors who spoke a different one. Those who claim 'pure' lineage, in the genetic sense, are all to some degree mongrels. Even a secluded hill people like the Abkhazians might find in their pedigrees - if they could rescue and study the ramifications of each family tree over the centuries - a Greek waitress, a Jewish pedlar, a Mingrelian cattle-dealer, a Russian officer's widow, an Armenian tinker, a Circassian slave-girl, an Eastern Alan bandit, a Persian refugee, an Arab magistrate. Those who claim always to have dwelled in 'our' land can often be shown to have lived somewhere else in the not too distant past, like the Lazi or the Tatars or almost the entire population of the Lower Don.
Even the portrait of a common cultural tradition, as evidence of ethnic identity, all too often dissolves away at the first application of rigorous fact. The sense among the Pontic Greeks that 'home is Hellas' could logically be challenged by pointing out that many of them cannot speak Greek, that their education was Russian, that their biological mingling with Turkic, Iranian, Kartvelian and Slav peoples has been marginal but continuous for more than three thousand years, that most of them were born and brought up not among olive-trees and sea-winds but in Soviet Central Asia.
You could, if you were unwise, walk up to Crimean Tatars as they built their houses on waste lots outside Simferopol and suggest that their burning conviction of homeland and ethnic identity was false. And you could support that with some evidence. You might remind them that the Tatars of the Golden Horde had exchanged their own Mongolian language for the Turkic spoken by the local Kipchaks, that they abandoned shamanism for Islam, that they have interbr
ed continuously with Turks and Russians and that -like the Greeks, and for the same tragic reason of deportation — the land of their birth' is usually not Crimea but Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. But, in both the Greek and the Tatar case, you would have missed the point.
To demonstrate that tradition is wrong or invented does not put an end to this story. A claim to national independence does not fall simply because its legitimising version of national history is partly or wholly untrue - as it often is. The sense of belonging to a distinct cultural tradition, of 'ethnic identity', can be subjectively real to the point at which it becomes an objective social-political fact, no matter what fibs are used for its decoration. Grandfather's axe still lies on the table, gleaming, sharp and very solid.
This is a book about identities, and about the use of mirrors to magnify or to distort identity - the disguises of nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm has warned, most insistently in the years since the 1989 revolutions, that it is the duty of the historian always to denounce the element of myth in the construction of nations or ethnicities, and his hero in that particular struggle - one of mine, too - is T. G. Masaryk. This pedantic, authoritarian, invincibly honest man was the father and first President of independent Czechoslovakia. But Masaryk, facing down a tempest of abuse, was not afraid to proclaim that the 'Libuse Manuscripts', the epic poems which seemed to authenticate an antique and distinct Czech culture, were forgeries.
Hobsbawm fears above all the voice which proclaims: 'We are different from the others — and better.' On the Black Sea, that voice has often been heard in recent years, speaking Russian or Turkish or sometimes Romanian or Georgian. But it is a thought from inland, whose second point about 'superiority' has seldom carried much weight on the coast itself. There, the differences were blatant and numerous, and ethnic tensions were never absent. But it was elsewhere that sweeping moral conclusions were drawn. It was not the Ionian colonists at Olbia or Chersonesus who invented the polarity between 'our civilisation' and 'their barbarism', but wartime intellectuals far away in Athens.
When Adam Mickiewicz came to the Black Sea, once in his youth and the second time to die, he came as a Polish patriot whose supreme purpose was the restoration of Poland's independence and nationhood. But his nationalism, old-fashioned and 'pre-modern', did not assume that Poles were better than others and did not accept that a free Poland required false identity papers to re-enter history.
The human imagination, endlessly boastful and inventive, extends itself over landscapes and seas until its fabric conceals them completely. But at precisely that moment of intellectual conquest the fabric begins to fray, to develop widening holes, to disintegrate until nothing is left of it but hanks of brittle thread blown about by the wind. There reappears a coast inhabited by people who are not the sons and daughters whom their ancestors expected, a Sea whose fish change themselves and alter their paths a little in every season.
In El Hacedor, a collection of short pieces published in 1960, Jorge Luis Borges included a fragment attributed to 'Suarez Miranda: Viajes de Varones Prudentes; Lérida 1658'. Whatever the truth of that attribution, the passage is Borgesian, and - as far as this account of the Black Sea is concerned - leaves no more to be said.
... In that Empire, the art of Cartography reached such Perfection, that the map of one single Province covered a whole Town. With time, these excessive Maps ceased to give satisfaction, and the Colleges of Cartography drew up a Map of the Empire which was done to the same scale as the Empire itself, and which coincided with it at every Point. Less absorbed in the Study of Cartography, the following Generations came to conclude that this vast Map was useless and, not without Impiety, abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West, there survive shattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Beasts and by Beggars; in all the Land, no other relic of the Cartographic Disciplines remains.
Chronology
c. 850—800 BC Early Scythians appear in Black Sea steppes.
c. 750—700 BC First Ionian Greek colonists found trading posts on Black Sea shores.
c. 700 BC Foundation of Greek colony at Olbia.
512 BC First Persian invasion of Europe. Darius crosses the Bosporus and Danube, and (according to Herodotus) pursues the Scythians into the Don steppes.
490 BC Persian Army defeated at Marathon.
480 BC Second major Persian expedition, under Xerxes, defeated by Athens at naval battle of Salamis.
c. 480 BC Greek colonies in Crimea and Taman region combine into Bosporan state.
472 BC First production at Athens of Persae, by Aeschylus.
c. 450 BC Herodotus visits Olbia and subsequently begins publication of Histories.
440-37 BC (?) Pericles sends naval expedition to acquire Greek colonies on the northern Black Sea coast for Athens.
438 BC Spartocid dynasty installed over the Bosporan Kingdom, at Panticapaeum.
432 BC Completion of the Parthenon at Athens. 431 BC First production of Medea, by Euripides. 431-404 BC Peloponnesian War.
356 BC Birth of Alexander (the Great) of Macedon.
334 BC Alexander defeats Persia, at battle of Issus. 323 BC Death of Alexander.
Third century BC Sarmatian peoples enter the Black Sea steppes and push the Scythians westwards.
107 BC Death of Peirisades the Last; Mithridates Eupator, King of Pontus, becomes ruler of the Bosporan Kingdom.
63 BC Death of Mithridates at Panticapaeum, after defeat by Roman armies under the command of Pompey. Bosporan Kingdom becomes Roman dependency. Sack of Olbia by Dacian-Getic Army.
55 and 54 BC Julius Caesar takes Roman expeditionary force to Britain.
49 BC Roman conquest of Gaul completed.
44 BC Julius Caesar appointed Roman dictator for life.
27 BC Collapse of Roman Republic; beginning of Roman Empire.
c. 8 AD Ovid exiled from Rome to Tomi (Constanta), by the emperor Augustus.
43 AD Roman invasion of Britain.
70 AD Romans destroy the Temple at Jerusalem.
c. 95 AD Dio Chrysostom visits Olbia.
c. 240 AD Goths arrive on Black Sea, invading Roman possessions there.
313 Christianity granted toleration in Roman Empire.
330 Capital of Roman Empire transferred to Constantinople.
370 Huns enter Black Sea steppe and attack Roman Empire. Destruction of Tanais and Olbia.
378 Combined Vizigoth-Sarmatian Army defeats Romans at Adrianople in Thrace.
410 Vizigoths sack Rome. Withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain.
527 Justinian crowned emperor at Constantinople.
610 Accession of Emperor Heraclius; Empire now known as 'Byzantine'.
632 Death of the Prophet Mohammed.
641 Arabs conquer Egypt and invade Maghreb.
Eighth century Khazars establish empire in Black Sea steppe and ally with Byzantine Empire.
800 Coronation of Charlemagne in Rome, as ruler of new Western (later Holy Roman) Empire.
862 Rurik from Scandinavia captures Novgorod, in Russia.
882 Capital of Russian-Viking state moved to Kiev.
960 Mieszko I founds Polish Kingdom, under the Piast dynasty.
991 Vladimir of Kiev allegedly baptised at Chersonesus, in Crimea.
1055 Seljuk Turks, arriving from east, take Bagdad.
1071 Seljuk Turks defeat Byzantine Army at Manzikert, in eastern Anatolia.
1096 First Crusade.
Twelfth century Arrival of Karaite Jewish sect in Crimea.
1204 Fourth Crusade; Byzantium conquered and looted by Frankish Crusaders. Alexius Comnenus founds Grand Comnenian Empire of Trebizond.
c. 1204 Venetians establish colony at Soldaia (Sudak) in Crimea.
1206 Mongols led by Chingiz (Genghis) Khan begin conquest of Asia.
1223-40 Mongol invasions of Russia.
1234 Mongol conquest of China; Chin dynasty overthrown.
Mongol host, later known as the Golden Horde, on the lower Volga.
1253 Friar William de KuriruquisT^ubruck) travels to meet Batu Khan.
i z61 Byzantine Empire restored at Constantinople.
1264 Kublai Khan founds Yuan (Mongol) dynasty in China.
1275 Marco Polo of Venice arrives in China.