When Ukrainian forces sunk Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, in April, they sent it to join a veritable fleet of ghost ships stranded below. The Black Sea — bordered by Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania and, of course, Russia and Ukraine — has been central to the conflict between the last two of those nations. But the region has also borne witness to centuries of other struggles, many of which resonate with the battles being fought on its shores today.
This kind of “historical simultaneity” fascinates the German journalist and travel writer Jens Mühling, whose book “Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea” was published in the United States this year in translation by Simon Pare. Though it recounts a journey made in late 2018 and early 2019, its English-language release this year is timely, appearing just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has underlined the sea’s importance for its own region and for the wider world. The blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast has crippled the ability of one of the world’s largest grain exporters to ship wheat and other products to the rest of the world, contributing to a growing global hunger crisis, particularly in parts of the Middle East and Africa. A deal to resume shipping through the sea, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey this month, brought some hope of a resolution to the crisis, but subsequent Russian attacks on the key port of Odessa have dampened expectations.
Far from a remote frontier, the war has made clear that the Black Sea plays a central role in the global economy and global security. It’s a place we should all be getting more familiar with.
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To better understand the connections between the current struggles and the histories that inform them, I called Mühling, a specialist in Russian and Eastern European affairs who was the editor of a German-language newspaper in Russia for two years. As he pointed out to me, “Parts of the Black Sea coast that I traveled in 2018, which were Ukrainian at the time, are now occupied by Russia, including almost the whole coastal stretch between Crimea and Odessa.” In the book, he starts his journey on the eastern side of the Kerch Strait, which separates Russia from the Crimean Peninsula, a territory Russia annexed and has de facto controlled since 2014. Proceeding clockwise, he visits Georgia, backtracks for complex geopolitical reasons to the semiautonomous enclave of Abkhazia, then continues on to Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine, ending his journey in Crimea on the opposite side of the strait.
Mühling makes for an observant and often wry traveling companion, conversant in several of the region’s languages. His account may remind readers of past travelogues such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time of Gifts” or John Steinbeck’s “A Russian Journal,” both of which dip a toe in the Black Sea’s waters, but as Mühling points out, the sea has been an object of fascination for foreign writers since the time of Strabo and Herodotus.
“Ever since the discovery of the Black Sea by the Greeks, it’s been portrayed as a place where strange people live,” Mühling told me. For the Greeks, the Black Sea was the edge of the known world, inhabited by, as he writes in the book, “cannibals, hellhounds, man-slaughtering Amazons, dwarves mounted on flying cranes, Cyclopes, lice-eaters, and werewolves.”
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The real and not-quite-so-fantastical inhabitants got short shrift in the ancient literature. To this day, the simplistic image of the region as an uncivilized frontier may inform the actions of the powers that surround it, including the war in Ukraine. Mühling suggests that Russia “is trying to portray this as a crusade of civilization against barbarism.” He continued, “Russia’s narrative really sounds familiar if you’ve studied Black Sea history a little bit.”
Share this articleShareMühling is certainly drawn to the obscure and the surprising in the places he visits. One section on the nationwide tree-relocation campaign by Georgia’s billionaire ex-prime minister, for example, verges on magical realism. But he refuses to exoticize local quirks in the way of Herodotus and his ilk. He instead sets out to discover whether a Black Sea regional identity exists, distinct from the nation-states that surround it. This led to what he said was an unexpected focus on little-known ethnic minority groups.
Many of these, Mühling explained, “have migratory histories that are sometimes quite baffling and that usually took place around the Black Sea coast. You run into people who will tell you that their ancestors lived on a different stretch of the coast and had to leave because of some human-made catastrophe. As a result, you have a lot of links across the sea.” The groups Mühling encounters include Turkish-speaking Greeks living in Russia; Russian “Old Believers,” Orthodox Christians persecuted for rejecting 17th-century church reforms, who have settled on the Danube River delta in Romania; and Karaites, a Jewish sect that recognizes only the Torah, not the Talmud, in Crimea. Mühling’s approach can be seen as an attempt to push back against a nation-state-centric view of the region at a time when nationalism is very much in evidence.
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Two major themes about the Black Sea emerge from Mühling’s narrative journey. One, it is a cultural region in constant flux. The borders are frequently changing and contested: Abkhazia’s independence and Crimea’s control by Russia are not recognized by most of the world, even if they are reality on the ground. This means that any journey like Mühling’s entails a stroll across a shifting landscape. “You do become very aware of this continuous change because it’s basically happening in front of your eyes,” he says.
Second, that constant cultural flux has not exactly produced a harmonious melting pot. Antipathy toward the people living farther along the coast is a constant theme. “Our coast! The Turks stole it from us!” an Armenian couple he meets in Russia laments to him in one characteristic interview. And one of the views he encounters most consistently in his journey from country to country is hostility toward Roma people.
Still, human connection across cultural lines is possible. In Crimea, Mühling tells the story of Vladimir, a Russophone marine biologist, and Alla, his Ukrainian wife, formerly a TV reporter for a Ukrainian-language station, who has faced antipathy both from local Russian-speakers and from friends back home over her decision to stay on the peninsula. Alla’s son from a previous marriage tells Mühling about the day in 2014 when “Vladimir woke me up one morning and said, ‘Max, we’re part of Russia now.’ ” The line echoes one from Vladimir Putin, who in a 2014 speech justifying Crimea’s annexation described the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a time when “millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones.” Putin himself had caused history to repeat itself.
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Once again the region’s borders are in flux. People are on the move again as well: More than 8 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the invasion. Reading the book today, the reader can’t help but wonder how Alla and Vladimir — and the other Ukrainians and Russians Mühling encountered — are faring.
And of course, the waters themselves have been a theater of war. As Mühling proves, the traces of this conflict will lurk beneath the Black Sea’s surface — and reverberate on its shores — long after the war has ended. Indeed, the Black Sea is unique among major bodies of water for its two layers. The top layer, fed by freshwater from rivers like the Danube, the Dniester and the Dnieper, teems with life. But 90 percent of the sea, which consists of heavy salty water streaming in from the Mediterranean, is clinically dead. Two hundred meters below the surface, the water contains no oxygen. The only life that survives in this layer is bacteria that consumes organic waste and produces toxic hydrogen sulfide.
Here, history literally lurks below the surface. Thanks to the lack of oxygen, ships that sink in the Black Sea are stunningly well preserved. Byzantine-era vessels have been found with their ropes and rigging still visible. In 2017, an Anglo-Bulgarian team discovered the oldest intact shipwreck ever found: a 2,400-year-old Greek trader — the spitting image of those painted on vases at the British Museum.
What’s left of the Moksva will rest there, too, as silent and still as the remainders of other eras nearby.
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