Black Sea Read Free

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.
    Fish brought the Black Sea into history. There were, of course, other factors too: other prodigious sources of food and wealth. The south Russian plains for example, the so-called Pontic Steppe, formed a level expanse of prairie stretching for almost 800 miles from the Volga River to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in the west, a band of open country some 200 miles deep between the sea-coast and the forest country to the north. The grasslands of the Pontic Steppe could feed the horses and cattle of a whole nomad nation; later, its best soil was ploughed up and grew the finest wheat in the world before the cultivation of North America. In the mountains of the Caucasus, whose snowy summits were visible from far out at sea, there were both timber and gold. Across the river deltas wandered flocks of edible birds which darkened the sky with their migrations. But in all that apparently infinite plenty of