I could be entertained by a book that was about the Black Sea in the literal nautical sense, but I was glad to discover that Neal Ascherson’s subject was the Black Sea in the largest possible sense—this isn’t a book about a body of water so much as it is a history of the surrounding lands and people over the past three millenia. Ascherson is Scottish, and I have no idea how or why he came to be so passionate about the Black Sea region. But he combines a love for the region with deep and wide learning, and the result is this marvelous book.
In recent history, the Black Sea region is where Russians and Turks have clashed. But two thousand years ago there were no Russians, and what Turks there were were way off to the east grazing their ponies on the steppes of central Asia. The lands around the Black Sea were home to strange peoples and tribes such as the Scythians and the Sarmatians, known today only from footnotes in weighty history books.
And also the Greeks. During the Golden Age, Greek merchants established a string of outposts along the shores of the Black Sea. As much trading posts as colonies, these were places where the Greeks exchanged natural resources (grain, fish) for finished goods (jewelry). As such the Black Sea was the birthplace of imperialism, where the difference between “civilization” vs. “barbarism” first seemed to make sense.
Known as “Pontic Greeks,” the descendants of these settlers exist in small pockets to this day:
Apart from the cities, this rural Pontic society amounted to far the greatest concentration of Greek-speaking population in the Hellenic or Byzantine worlds--much more numerous than that of the Peloponnese. Constantinople finally fell to Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453, and Trebizond was captured by the Turks in 1461 after a siege of forty-two days. But the Pontic Greeks remained in their valleys and villages, and the monasteries clung to their wealth and most of their estates for many more centuries. Many people, including some of the great families of Trebizond, converted in a superficial way to Islam, but continued to speak Pontic Greek--a language which over the millennia had steadily diverged from the tongue spoken in the Aegean or in the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
Who did they think they were, in this pre-nationalist age? In the first place, they did not think of themselves as "Greek" or as a people in some way rooted in the peninsula and islands we now call "Greece." Sophisticates in Trebizond might address one another in the fifteenth century as "Hellenes," but this was a cultural fancy rather than an ethnic description. Outsiders, whether Turks or northern Europeans, referred to them and to all the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire as "Rom" or "Rum" people, or as "Romanians"-citizens of the Roman Empire, in other words, who were also distinguished by their Orthodox Christian faith. Struggling with these categories, a Pontic Turk whose village had once been Greek told Anthony Bryer: "This is Roman (Rum) country; they spoke Christian here..."
The people of the Pontic valleys and cities themselves seemed to find identity in three things: in belonging to a place or patris which could be as small as a village, in not being Western (Roman Catholic) Christians, and in feeling themselves to be members of a polity which was so ancient, so sacred and superior to all others that it scarcely required a name. We call this community, weakly enough, "the Eastern Empire," or "Byzantium." That cannot convey the almost Chinese degree of significance which the "Rom" people attached to the Empire even long after it had been overthrown, as if it were the eternal essence of all political community in comparison to which other states and realms were only transient realities.
Tragically, most Pontic Greeks were expelled from Turkey in 1923 during an event known to diplomats as “The Exchange.” The Pontic Greeks themselves have a different name for it: the Katastrofe. Finding themselves relocated to the modern state of Greece, the Pontics discovered that 2500 years out in the hinterlands had substantially differentiated them from their long lost cousins. Really they are a people without a land, weeping in their trailers as they remember their Zion. But they are perhaps luckier than the Pontic Greeks who lived on the northern and eastern sides of the Black Sea, who eventually had to contend with Joseph Stalin. Uncle Joe didn’t really like folks who thought of themselves as different. I won’t go into details.
Pontic Greeks are one chapter in Black Sea. There is also a wonderful episode about politics and intrigue in 19th century Odessa, featuring the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz and the mata hari with whom he had a passionate affair. And another about Cossacks—I’d always wondered exactly what a Cossack was. Now I know. In Putin’s Russia they are making a comeback, filling the niche that the Hell’s Angels occupy in our part of the world. Complete with motorcycles.
These various excursions are unified by certain clear themes. One is the inescapable fact that these lands cannot truly be possessed. They can only be conquered and held for a few brief centuries. Where a current map shows only nation states like Turkey and Russia and Georgia, small remote enclaves of ancient peoples linger in remote valleys, taking on the religions and some customs of their current landlords, but retaining crucial traditions and differences. I'm glad that this is so.
Another is the corrosive and destructive power of nationalism. In the beginning there was romantic nationalism—the revival of ancient customs and languages. Kilts and bagpipes and epic poetry. Nothing wrong with all of that. But then there was the phase of redrawing the map to align with the newly revived tribal identities. And finally there was the third stage—getting rid of the outsiders. All around the world we see populations being separated, Muslims, Christians and Jews getting away from each other. Lands that once supported peoples of multiple religions and ethnicities are becoming ever more homogenous. Just look at Egypt, or Palestine, or India, or the Balkans. As a result, the world becomes a duller and more dangerous place.
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