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Black Sea odyssey

Our trip to the Black Sea began on the Dnieper River in Ukraine and ended in the tiny Turkish fishing village of Sariyer at the mouth of the Bosphorus.
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Our trip to the Black Sea began on the Dnieper River in Ukraine and ended in the tiny Turkish fishing village of Sariyer at the mouth of the Bosphorus. The Dnieper is one of five major rivers that flow into the northern side of the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, a long narrow marine channel, is its only connection to the other oceans of the world.

Wisps of early morning mist were rising from the surface of the water when our van rolled into Sariyer. The passenger ferry back to Istanbul would not be leaving for another hour - time for a second cup of coffee. Ahmet, our driver, led us to a small outdoor café on the very edge of the quay where we settled down to watch the passing scene and reflect on what we had learned during our two-week sojourn on and around the Black Sea.

At Sariyer the Bosphorus, a narrow 31 km waterway linking the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea, is only about half a kilometre wide and a little more than 100 metres deep. It effectively throttles the flow of tidal water in and out of the Black Sea and limits the mixing of oxygen-rich surface water with stagnant bottom water. Looking at the clear blue surface it's difficult to believe that 90 per cent of the water in the Black Sea is a toxic brew of hydrogen sulfide gas. For hundreds of years it has yielded a bountiful harvest of fish - salmon, sturgeon, anchovies and sardines - but all of this life is confined to the upper few hundred feet of water. Below a depth of about 150 metres the Black Sea, 1,100 km long and two kilometres deep, is a zero-oxygen "dead zone," utterly devoid of life.

The cause of dead zones is fairly simple: microscopic plants, phytoplankton, in the sunlit surface water produce oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. But when they die and sink to the bottom they are broken down by bacteria which use up the oxygen and release a variety of toxic gasses. When there is no mixing between the surface and the depths the toxins are trapped and continue to accumulate.

In the Black Sea the problem is exacerbated by the addition of pollutants, particularly nitrogen and potash, which stimulate the growth of more phytoplankton and result in more dead organic matter at the bottom.

Between them the Dnieper, Dniester, Danube, Don, and Southern Bug rivers drain most of Eastern Europe into the Black Sea, bringing with them the industrial pollutants and agricultural runoff from 16 nations. Over fishing, pollution and the introduction of noxious species have all contributed to a dramatic decline in its fish population, but the Black Sea fishery continues to limp along while measures are slowly being taken to mitigate the problem.

It was probably the abundance of fish that brought the first settlers to the shores of the Black Sea, but no one knows who they were or when they came. According to some scientists the Black Sea was once a fresh water lake and the Bosphorus was the river valley through which it drained into the Mediterranean. Rising sea levels following the last ice age is believed to have drowned the ancient river valley, converting it into an arm of the sea and gradually changing what was a lake into the present Black Sea. Divers have discovered what appear to be the remains of old settlements on the submerged shoreline of the former lake, suggesting that human habitation of the area goes back at least 5,000 years.

The first record of human settlement dates back 2,500 years to the 5 th century BC when Tauric tribesmen were either absorbed by or pushed back from the coast by Greek colonists. The Greeks founded several settlements on the Black Sea coast, including the city of Khersoness on the Crimean Peninsula. We spent a day exploring the remains of this once busy port, which is now an active archeological site under UNESCO protection. The excavations, begun in 1824, have unearthed an astonishingly rich record of life in this once busy port where ships from the Mediterranean and riverboats from the Baltic met with overland traders from Asia. The remains include the foundations of residential villas, temples and workshops complete with wine presses, fish-pickling cisterns and potters' ovens. The marble columns of a 6 th century basilica silhouetted against the Black Sea are not that different from those in modern Greece. Despite the turmoil of regional wars and invasions the city of Khersoness survived and prospered for more than a thousand years until it was finally sacked and burned by Mongol raiders in 1397 AD.

Over the centuries the Black Sea region was swept by a succession of invasions, wars and alliances that chronicle the history of Eastern Europe. In the 1 st century AD Roman outposts on the Black Sea became the nucleus of Byzantium, the eastern wing of the Roman Empire. By the 6 th century AD Scandinavian traders, using the Dnieper River and Black Sea to reach Constantinople founded the vast Kyivan Empire. In 1240 AD the region was overrun by Tatars of Batu Khan's Mongol army and became part of a vast Mongol Empire, "the Golden Horde," that extended from the Danube River east to the China Sea.

Today six countries share the Black Sea coast, and the Bosphorus, though controlled by Turkey, has become a busy international shipping lane. Across the channel from our Sariyer café a freighter heading north into the Black Sea moves slowly past the remains of an old Roman Fortress standing on the opposite shore. It's one of more than 45,000 freighters that pass through the Bosphorous each year en-route to and from ports on the Black Sea or one of the rivers flowing into it. Closer by, a pair of dilapidated local fish boats repeatedly cast their nets and come up empty, but a cormorant fishing beside the wharf is having better luck. In the time it took us to finish a cup of strong Turkish coffee the long-necked diver got three fish, giving his beak a satisfied shake after downing each wriggling catch.

"My granddad says when he was a boy all you had to do was dip your net in the water and it would come up full of fish," Ahmet tells us, and adds with a shrug, "But it's not like that anymore."

The blast of an air horn announced the arrival of the passenger ferry. We said goodbye to Ahmet and climbed aboard for the trip back to Istanbul. As we left the Black Sea and headed down the Bosphorus I wondered if life in this remarkable landlocked sea would continue to flourish or whether it was just a matter of time before even the cormorants came up empty.