Black Sea Read Free Page B

in 1794. So, too, on a smaller scale, were towns like Sukhum and Poti and Batumi on the coast of what was once Colchis, which began as Greek colonies and survived until the end of the Soviet period as sites where peoples of many different languages, religions, trades and descents lived together.
    They were 'curious' because power in those places was not concentrated. Instead it was dissolved, like oxygen in the warm upper layers of the Sea, among many communities. The title of supreme ruler might belong to a man or a woman whose family origins were among pastoral steppe nomads, Turkic or Iranian or Mongol. Local government and regulations of the economy might be left to Greek, Jewish, Italian or Armenian merchants. The soldiery, usually a hired force, could be Scythian or Sarmatian, Caucasian or Gothic, Viking or Anglo-Saxon, French or German. The craftsmen, often local people who had adopted Greek language and customs, had their own rights. Only the slaves - for most of these places kept and traded in slaves during most of their existence — were powerless.
    Sudak, on the Crimean coast, was a Greek, then a Byzantine and finally a Genoese colony. Now there remains only an enclosure of mediaeval Italian walls and towers, perched on the slanting sea-cliff west of Cape Meganom. Here I was shown a stone tomb, dug among Byzantine foundations, which had contained the body of a Khazar noble.
    The Khazars were Turkic-speaking pastoral nomads who arrived out of central Asia in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, and put together an 'empire' around the northern shores of the Black Sea, including Crimea. Offered conversion to Christianity by St Cyril, the Khazars preferred to adopt a form of Judaism. So it came about that this particular warrior, with his ancestry in shamanistic Asia, chose to be buried by the Jewish ritual in a city whose overlords were Greek Christians. And there was one extra touch, neither Christian nor Judaic. The funeral was completed by a human sacrifice, and the victim - brained by an axe blow — was thrown into the tomb to lie beside its Khazar occupant.
     
     
    Peoples who live in communion with other peoples, for a hundred or a thousand years, do not always like them - may, in fact, have always disliked them. As individuals, 'the others' are not strangers but neighbours, often friends. But my sense of Black Sea life, a sad one, is that latent mistrust between different cultures is immortal.
    Necessity, and sometimes fear, binds such communities together. But within that binding-strap they remain a bundle of disparate groups - not a helpful model for the 'multi-ethnic society' of our hopes and dreams. It is true that communal savagery - pogroms, 'ethnic cleansing' in the name of some fantasy of national unity, genocide - has usually reached the Black Sea communities from elsewhere, an import from the interior. But when it arrives the apparent solidarity of centuries can dissolve within days or hours. The poison, upwelling from the depths, is absorbed by a single breath.
     
    These lands belong to all their people, but also to none of them. Like the terminal moraine of a glacier, the Black Sea shore is a place where the detritus of human migrations and invasions has been deposited for more than four thousand years. The shore itself, worn and quiet, speaks of the patience of rock, sand and water which have received much human restlessness and will outlive it. This is the voice heard by many writers - Pushkin and Mickiewicz, Lermontov and Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam among them - who learned to listen to the slight sounds and large silences of the Black Sea and to measure themselves against a geological expanse of time. They stepped for a moment out of the confines of their own dangerous lives and, in Konstantin Paustovsky's words, acquired 'the love of wisdom and simplicity'.
     
     
    This book about the Black Sea begins with Crimea. There are sound reasons for this, and some more personal ones.