Black Sea Read Free Page A

natural life, the fish mattered most.
    The voyage of the Argo is a Bronze Age legend. When Jason crossed the Black Sea, ran his boat up the river Phasis in Colchis (part of modern Georgia) and tied her fast to the trees overhanging the bank, he was after magical treasure - the Golden Fleece of Colchis. But gold is for heroes. All along the Black Sea coasts, inshore dredgers bring up from the sea-bed big stones pierced with a hole: the anchors of Mycenaean ships. These carried the real Bronze Age venturers. They brought with them from the Aegean luxurious trade goods like ornamental pottery and decorated rapiers, but they were looking for food to bring home, and what they took away seems to have been mostly fish: sun-dried, or cured with salt from the Dnieper and Danube estuaries. When the Mycenaean kingdoms passed away and were replaced by small, hungry city-states perched on Greek and Ionian headlands, the ships returned to the Black Sea on the same errand, which became steadily more desperate as the city-states grew more populous and their small arable hinterlands grew less fertile through over-cultivation. By the seventh century BC, the Ionian Greeks were establishing coastal colonies all round the Black Sea, settling into communities whose first business was the curing, packing and exporting of fish.
    Satisfying this need, a very simple one, led unexpectedly into one of the formative moments of human history. The significance lay not just in the meeting of settled, literate people with pastoral nomads. That had happened before, and would happen again. It was important because the literate people brooded on this meeting, and constructed from it - the first 'colonial' encounter in European experience — a series of questioning discourses which still remain with us.
    One discourse concerns 'civilisation' and 'barbarism'. A second is about cultural identity, and about where its distinctions and limits should be drawn. A third is a deep self-criticism which imagines that technical and social sophistication entails not only gain but loss — a departure of conscious and rational behaviour from what is 'natural' and spontaneous.
    All three themes, provoked by the encounter in the Black Sea, were debated in the classical world. They receded after the dissolution of the western Roman Empire in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. But in the early modern period they returned to European consciousness with a steadily more commanding urgency, prompted by the encounters with the Americas, Africa and Asia and, later still, by the developing ideology of nationalism. On the Black Sea itself, however, these matters were not so much debated as lived. Around the fish-drying screens and the smokehouses, typical patterns of ethnic and social mingling arose which have still not entirely passed away.
     
     
    At the outset of his famous book Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, the Russian scholar Mikhail Rostovtzeff wrote: 'I take as my starting-point the unity of the region which we call South Russia: the intersection of influences in that vast tract of country -Oriental and southern influences arriving by way of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, Greek influences spreading along the sea routes, and Western influences passing down the great Danubian route; and the consequent formation, from time to time, of mixed civilisations, very curious and very interesting.'
    But it was not only around the northern fringes of the Black Sea, and not only in the classical period, that these Very curious and very interesting' communities appeared. The city of Byzantium (to become Constantinople and finally Istanbul) was such a society through the Middle Ages and up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century. So was the Grand Comnenian Empire of Trebizond (on the south coast of the Sea) during the mediaeval period, and so was nineteenth-century Constanta near the Danube delta, and the city of Odessa on the Ukrainian coast which was founded only