The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Each of these projects had its costs, of course, both human and environmental. Forced labor was used on many of the major building projects completed in the communist lands. The Danube–Black Sea canal was popularly known in Romania as the “Canal of Death,” because of the high mortality among the political prisoners who were used in the first stages of construction in the early 1950 s. But the projects also had a major impact on the health of the sea. The sea’s natural state, a relatively thin layer of livable water above a mass of hydrogen sulfide, was naturally precarious. The irony was that just as Turkey and its communist neighbors were fully realizing the developmental advantages of their position as littoral countries, the sea was beginning to die.

  Part of the sea’s sickness was the direct result of the growth of industry and urban centers around the coasts, particularly in the north and west. Ports such as Novorossiisk, Odessa, Constanţa, and Varna continued to expand after the Second World War, becoming major regional centers with sprawling suburbs, dockyards, and industrial concerns. Industrial effluents, including oil and chemical pollutants from terminals and processing facilities, ran into the sea. Hydroelectric power stations built on the northern rivers raised the temperature of the water in the estuaries and led to the demise of sensitive fish species. Farther inland, industrialized agriculture, using chemical pesticides and fertilizers, created run-off that bled into the water. All these problems, however, were experienced by many other bodies of water in the twentieth century. But in the case of the Black Sea, two specific processes were at work, and each contributed substantially to the sea’s problems. One was a result of the sea’s own idiosyncrasies, the other the fault of an American interloper.

  In inland seas, life depends on a steady supply of organic nutrients brought in by rivers. But there can be too much of a good thing. Excessive organic matter, in the form of run-off from farm land or the waste produced by cities upriver, is a particular danger in the Black Sea. The process of natural organic decay uses up oxygen, which in turn further depletes the thin oxygen-rich layer at the top of the sea. More importantly, excessive nutrients allow the flourishing of plant life, particularly forms of plankton that also absorb the scarce oxygen, a process known as eutrophication; these plankton upsurges can have a devastating effect on fish stocks. Periodic increases in hypoxia (low oxygen levels in the life-supporting layer of the sea) are the result of these processes. From 1973 to 1990 the area affected by hypoxia increased from 3,500 sq. km to some 40,000 sq. km, particularly in some of the shallowest reaches of the sea, the northwestern shelf along the coasts of Romania and Ukraine.62

  The marked increase in agricultural run-off and urban waste in the last three or four decades of the twentieth century was only one worry. The other was a newcomer to the ecosystem, which began to appear only in the early 1980 s. Hiding in the bilge water of ships arriving from the Mediterranean was a species of large invertebrate known to scientists as Mnemiopsis leidyi, an animal similar to a jelly-fish. Mnemiopsis is native to the temperate zones of the Atlantic, but it found the Black Sea an agreeable home. The plankton increase, which coincided with the jelly’s appearance, provided huge amounts of fodder, which in turn allowed the creature to reproduce at a startling rate. Today, Mnemiopsis and its jelly-fish cousins are readily visible to anyone strolling along the Bosphorus, where the jellies bob in a seething mass in the back-channels along the shore, hundreds and thousands of them, some as big as basketballs. By the late 1990 s, the estimated mass of Mnemiopsis, about 900 million tons, was greater than the annual fish harvest of the entire planet.63 The jellies gorged themselves on plankton, fish larvae or food usually eaten by small fish, and their appetite led directly to the decline of several fish species. That, in turn, meant a food shortage for other commercially important fish higher up the food chain.

  The advent of Mnemiopsis coincided with another important development in the health of the sea: the knock-on effects of large-scale commercial fishing. The rise of industrial fishing after the Second World War led to a huge increase in fish takes. New technologies, especially dredge nets that could reach deep into the sea, even scraping the bottom and yielding huge catches, produced abundant fish hauls in the middle of the century. But the price of increasing yields was a progressive fall-off in fish stocks as time passed. Catches fell by perhaps a third from 1986 to 2001. In the 1960 s, some twenty-six species were fished commercially, but by the 1990 s only six were available in sufficient quantities to allow large-scale harvesting.

  According to Laurence Mee, a British oceanographer and one of the world’s leading experts on the sea’s ecology, the sum of all these developments was, by the end of the century, “an environmental catastrophe.”64 Some species, especially some types of plankton essential for higher forms of sea life, were virtually eliminated, gobbled up by the hungry jellies. Fish species that were of significant commercial value—as they had been for millennia, in fact—were found in such small numbers that they were simply no longer worth trying to catch. Some species known to ancient authors for their annual migrations around the seacoast were difficult to find. The anchovy, long a dietary staple along the southern coast, was wiped out in some parts of the sea.

  The human consequences of these changes were predictable but devastating. Fishing fleets were laid up. Fish processing centers were closed and their workers fired. A major source of protein began to disappear from regional diets. Migration from the coasts to urban centers inland increased. Tourist facilities, troubled by coastal erosion and polluted beaches, were boarded up. Coastal communities now faced perhaps the greatest environmental, economic, and social crisis in their entire history. For more than two millennia, empires, states, and nations had staked out their claims, both political and historical, to the waters of the Black Sea. By the end of the twentieth century, it was no longer clear that the sea was a prize worth having.

  Notes

  1.Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, in The Complete Travel Books of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966–7), p. 253.

  2.Adolphus Slade, 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, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1833), p. 155.

  3.Henry C. Barkley, A Ride Through Asia Minor and Armenia: Giving a Sketch of the Characters, Manners, and Customs of Both the Mussulman and Christian Inhabitants (London: John Murray, 1891), p. 146. Barkley was speaking specifically of Armenians.

  4.Edith Durham, High Albania, reprint edn. (London: Phoenix Press, 2000), p. 1

  5.F. N. Gromov et al., Tri veka rossiiskogo flota, Vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Logos, 1996), p. 210.

  6.Gromov et al., Tri veka rossiiskogo flota, Vol. 1, p. 218.

  7.Bernd Langensiepen and Ahmet Güleryüz, The Ottoman Steam Navy, 1828–1923, trans. James Cooper (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 3.

  8.See Slade, Records of Travels. Slade was the British naval adviser to the Ottomans and witnessed the full extent of naval engagements on the Black Sea during the 1828–9 war

  9.Gromov et al., Tri veka rossiiskogo flota, Vol. 1, p. 242.

  10.Gromov et al., Tri veka rossiiskogo flota, Vol. 1, p. 242.

  11.Langensiepen and Güleryüz, The Ottoman Steam Navy, p. 6.

  12.Midhat Paşa would later be twice named grand vizier, before being banished to Arabia for treason under Sultan Abdülhamit II. He was strangled while in prison. On Dobrudja under Midhat Paşa, see the standard biography by his son, Ali Haydar Midhat, The Life of Midhat Pasha (London: John Murray, 1903; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1973), and Georgi Pletn’ov, Midkhat Pasha i upravlenieto na Dunavskiia vilaet (Veliko Turnovo: Vital, 1994).

  13.Mose Lofley Harvey, “The Development of Russian Commerce on the Black Sea and Its Significance” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1938), p. 130.

  14.Harvey, “The Development of Russian Commerce,” pp. 158, 163, 171.

  15.Karl Baedeker, Russia, with Teheran, Por
t Arthur, and Peking, 1st English edn. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914), p. xviii.

  16.Nikolai Nikolaevich Reikhel’t, Po Chernomu moriu (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1891), pp. 230–1.

  17.Harvey, “The Development of Russian Commerce,” p. 104.

  18.Harvey, “The Development of Russian Commerce,” p. 147.

  19.Harvey, “The Development of Russian Commerce,” p. 181.

  20.William Eleroy Curtis, Around the Black Sea: Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), p. 57.

  21.A Hand-Book for Travellers in the Ionian Islands, Greece, Turkey, Asia Minor, and Constantinople, Including a Description of Malta; With Maxims and Hints for Travellers in the East (London: John Murray, 1840); A Handbook for Travellers in Turkey, 3rd rev. edn. (London: John Murray, 1854).

  22.Baedeker, Russia, with Teheran, pp. xvi, 445.

  23.Thomas Forester, The Danube and the Black Sea; Memoir on their Junction by a Railway Between Tchernavoda and a Free Port at Kustendjie (London: Edward Stanford, 1857), pp. 210–11.

  24.Twain, The Innocents Abroad, pp. 255–6.

  25.R. Arthur Arnold, From the Levant, the Black Sea, and the Danube, Vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), pp. 193–4.

  26.Vasilii Sidorov, Okol’noi dorogoi: Putevyia zametki i vpechatleniia (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia A. Katanskago, 1891), p. 259.

  27.N. Begicheva, Ot Odessy do Ierusalima: Putevyia pis’ma (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Glavnago upravleniia udelov, 1898), p. 10.

  28.Sidorov, Okol’noi dorogoi, p. 79.

  29.Reikhel’t, Po Chernomu moriu, p. 59.

  30.Henry C. Barkley, Between the Danube and the Black Sea, or Five Years in Bulgaria (London: John Murray, 1876), p. 263.

  31.Barkley, Between the Danube and the Black Sea, pp. 228–9.

  32.Mark Pinson, “Ottoman Colonization of the Circassians in Rumili After the Crimean War,” Etudes balkaniques, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1972):76.

  33.Alan W. Fisher, “Emigration of Muslims from the Russian Empire in the Years after the Crimean War,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1987):356.

  34.Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995), p. 339.

  35.Mark Levene, “Creating a Modern ‘Zone of Genocide’: The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Winter 1998):396; Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 99.

  36.Kaori Komatsu, “Financial Problems of the Navy During the Reign of Abdülhamid II,” Oriente Moderno, Vol. 20, No. 1 (2001):218.

  37.“Trebizond: Extracts from an Interview with Comm. G. Gorrini, Late Italian Consul-General at Trebizond, Published in the Journal ‘Il Messaggero,’ of Rome, 25th August 1915,” in Arnold J. Toynbee (ed.) The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire,1915–1916 (London: HMSO, 1916), pp. 291–2.

  38.Technically, the treaty merely sanctioned a separate convention concluded between Turkey and Greece the previous January.

  39.Quoted in Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 341.

  40.Quoted in Nicolae Bîrdeanu and Dan Nicolaescu, Contribuţii la istoria marinei române, Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Editura ştiinţifică şi enciclopedică;, 1979), p. 164.

  41.S. M. Solov’ev, History of Russia, Vol. 3 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1976–2002), p. 164.

  42.V. P. Vradii, Negry Batumskoi oblasti (Batumi: G. Tavartkiladze, 1914). See also Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington: Howard University Press, 1986), chapter 1.

  43.Nicolae Iorga, “Poporul românesc şi marea,” Revista istorică Dări de samă, documente şi notiţe, Vol. 24, Nos. 4–6 (April–June 1938):100.

  44.Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Na porozi Novoï Ukraïny (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1991), p. 16.

  45.Parts of this section rely on Adam Tolnay, “From the Water System to the Ecosystem: The Black Sea in the Development of Oceanography,” unpublished manuscript (Georgetown University, 2002).

  46.On Marsigli, see Margaret Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 1650–1900 (Ashgate: Aldershot, 1997), pp. 148–9.

  47.Peter Simon Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire, in the Years1793 and 1794, 2 vols. (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees et al., 1802–3); August von Haxthausen, Transcaucasia: Sketches of the Nations and Races Between the Black Sea and the Caspian (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854).

  48.Egor Manganari, Atlas Chernago moria (Nikolaev: Gidrograficheskii chernomorskoi depo, 1841). The copy located in the Library of Congress belonged to Tsar Nicholas II.

  49.Bîrdeanu and Nicolaescu, Contribuţii la istoria marinei române, Vol. 1, p. 228.

  50.Grigore Antipa, Marea Neagra˜ (Bucharest: Academia Româna˜, 1941), Vol. 1, pp. 16–17.

  51.Charles Warren Hostler, Turkism and the Soviets (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 157–8. See also Etienne Copeaux, “Le mouvement ‘prométhéen’,” Cahiers d’études sur la Mediterranée orientale et le monde turco-iranien, No. 16 (July–December 1993):9–45.

  52.On the activities of these groups inside Turkey, see Lowell Bezanis, “Soviet Muslim Emigrés in the Republic of Turkey,” Central Asian Survey, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1994):59–180.

  53.Untitled editor’s note, Prométhée, Vol. 1, No. 1 (November 1926):1–2.

  54.T. Schätzl, “Polish Group ‘Prometheus’ in London,” MS dated March 19, 1951, Archives of the Piłsudski Institute of America, New York (hereafter “APIA”), Apolinary Kiełczyński Papers, II/2/A-B, Teka I/2, File “Materiały balkanskie,” p. 2.

  55.“La Mer Noire,” Prométhée, No. 24 (November 1928):1–3.

  56.Dmytro Boug, “La Mer Noire,” Prométhée, No. 73 (December 1932):22.

  57.“Kommunikat Prometeiskoi Ligi Atlanticheskoi Khartii,” March 1949, APIA, Jerzy Ponikiewski Papers, Sz.D/4, T. 1, file “Prometeusz,” pp. 3–6.

  58.Letter from Edmund Charaszkiewicz to Ali Akish, November 4, 1969, APIA, Charaszkiewicz Papers, II/3/D, T. 1, file “Sprawy ogólno-prometejskie,” p. 65.

  59.The story of the Struma is recounted in Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II’s Holocaust at Sea (New York: Ecco, 2003).

  60.Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 101–4.

  61.On the Black Sea in cold war strategy, see Harry N. Howard, Turkey, the Straits, and U.S. Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

  62.Yu. Zaitsev and V. Mamaev, Marine Biological Diversity in the Black Sea: A Study of Change and Decline (New York: United Nations Development Program, 1997), p. 15.

  63.“Bleak Story of the Black Sea Highlighted in Global Assessment of World’s Waters,” United Nations Environment Programme Press Release, October 12, 2001.

  64.Laurence David Mee, “Protecting the Black Sea Environment: A Challenge for Co-operation and Sustainable Development in Europe,” Centre for European Policy Studies (Brussels) and International Centre for Black Sea Studies (Athens), 2002, p. 4. From 1993 to 1998, Mee coordinated the Black Sea Environmental Program in Istanbul.

  The majority of the most important wars of the century have been Frontier wars. Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandisement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition—wars in which the personal element was often the predominant factor—tend to be replaced by Frontier wars, i.e., wars arising out of the expansion of states and kingdoms, carried to a point, as the habitable globe shrinks, at which the interests or ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another.

  Lord Curzon, 1907

  Sharing the common vision of their regional cooperation as a part of the integration proces
s in Europe, based on human rights and fundamental freedoms, prosperity through economic liberty, social justice, and equal security and stability …

  Charter of the Organization of Black Sea Economic Cooperation, Yalta, 1998

  Try something national! It’s good to try something national!

  Woman selling Tatar pastries, Chufutkale, Crimea, 2000

  7

  Facing the Water

  All ports, Fernand Braudel wrote, face both ways—out toward the sea and the multiple influences that come drifting in on the water, in toward the hinterland and the terrestrial cultures that anchor them to a particular place. From the mid-nineteenth century forward, many actors around the Black Sea worked systematically to turn both faces landward, to excise the multifarious identities that characterized life along the shore, and to claim the littoral regions as the patrimony of young nations and the property of even younger states. During the cold war, the sea became a barrier between rival countries and social systems. Each sought to differentiate itself from its antithesis across the water, even as their ideologies made the coasts and the sea itself into objects of state-led development.

  Similar processes have continued even after the end of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. New states appeared on the littoral—an independent Ukraine, Russia, and Georgia in 1991—but the habit of setting oneself apart from near neighbors has been perpetuated by the contest to join such institutions as NATO and the European Union. The portrayal of one’s own country as more attractive to foreign investors, more politically stable, even more civilized than those just down the coast has remained the normal mode of discourse. Today, there are few places in the world where political elites and average citizens know less about their neighbors than around the Black Sea. But this is a willful ignorance, furthered by versions of history that take the nation as timeless, the state as predestined, and the region as ephemeral. In the not very distant past, having a close connection with a fisherman, a trader, a port official, or even a relative on the other side of the water would have been unremarkable. It is testimony to the triumph of a particular way of understanding history, politics, and social relations that such connections seem less easy to imagine now.