Black Sea (49 page)

There was hatred, and even violence. But this is a trap from which there is no escape. The big boats have to go on fishing, even though the stocks are so near extinction that few ever make a profit: it is that or ruin and emigration. The owners of the small boats now set nets all winter for a few whiting or mullet a day; it is that or hunger. The Turkish government, with some justice, asks why bodies like the World Bank are not ready to pay to repair the damage which they helped to create a few years ago.

But this, for once, is not a story special to the Black Sea. It is a tragedy as familiar to fishing communities in Norway or Peru as it is in Turkey, and the heavy word 'over-capitalisation' conceals the crudity of its plot. A government encourages the murder of fish species merely to win a respite from social pressures. A state, anxious to be popular, pays a whole deluded human community to set out on a journey which starts from one sort of poverty and must end in another. In the Black Sea region of Turkey, this journey lasted some thirty years. Now the people are back more or less where they started, but the fish have gone.

Behind all predictions of what will happen to the Black Sea, there creeps a nightmare. It is a possibility so terrible that most scientists prefer not to discuss it. Many of them — to be fair — have brought forward good reasons to argue that it need not be taken seriously. It is a Black Sea apocalypse.

This nightmare is known by the harmless word 'turnover', a phenomenon which has been observed and studied in lakes whose depths are anoxic and charged with hydrogen sulphide. 'Turnover' means a sudden rolling-over of water layers, as if the whole balance of pressures and densities which had kept the heavier mass below the lighter, fresher mass were reversed and overthrown. With 'turnover', in some lakes an annual event which takes place in autumn, the deep and poisoned waters burst through to the surface, annihilating all life.

It is possible to define the Black Sea as merely the biggest of all anoxic lakes. If 'turnover' were to take place in the Black Sea, it would be the worst natural cataclysm to strike the earth since the last Ice Age, more devastating in its human consequences than the eruption on Thera in about
1500
BC which destroyed the Minoan cultures, or than the Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia in
1883.

A first warning sign would be a rise of the anoxic water-level. A few years ago, American researchers on a study voyage in the Black Sea claimed that the oxycline, the upward limit of the poisonous undermass, had risen by thirty metres in only twenty years. Pollution and the effett of reduced river flows on the Sea's water-density, they concluded, were beginning to create the conditions for the ultimate disaster.

They were probably wrong. Russian oceanologists at once pointed out that they had been measuring the oxycline level for far longer than the Americans, and had registered variations of up to thirty metres upwards and downwards since they began surveys some seventy years before. The British marine environmentalist Laurence Mee, who runs the Global Environment Facility task force for the Black Sea at Istanbul, calculates that the rivers would have to run at half their present flow for more than a century before the density balance of the Sea could be seriously affected. All this is reassuring; the weight of scientific evidence suggests that the Black Sea is not about to capsize. But, as Mee allows, 'the debate continues'. An edge of fear, a shadow of apocalypse, has entered all discussions on the rescue of the Black Sea, and it will never quite go away.

Change cannot be avoided, but man-made disaster sometimes can. As I came to know better some of the scientists and politicians concerned with the Black Sea, I noticed that those with most experience were also those least ready to issue melodramatic forecasts of doom. To be truly familiar with the Sea is to appreciate the resilience - sometimes almost inexplicable - of its ecological system. The crisis is real enough; the damage done in the last few decades by pollution, overfishing and the reduction of river flows is so great that much of it cannot be reversed. But it was always wrong to think of 'restoring' the Sea to its previous status quo. A natural ecosystem is not eternal and static, but a process of continuous change and adaptation. Currents alter their direction; fish vary their migration routes. New and intrusive species do not need transport by ships' water-ballast but in the past were brought in by freak winds or by birds, to exterminate existing life-forms and upset an
older ecological balance. Until now, the Black Sea and its marine life have been able to absorb these impacts and arrange them into a new and different equilibrium.

The Black Sea has not yet lost this power. There have been a few seasons in recent years when the Don River was allowed to flow with its old freedom through the Tsimlyansk dam; sturgeon and shad ran up the Don again to breed, and there were astonishing revivals of fish stocks in the Sea of Azov. Some new surveys suggest that damage by
Mnemiopsis
to the zooplankton mass on the northwestern shelf is much less in some areas than scientific projections suggested. This cannot easily be explained, but the Bulgarian biologist Violeta Vasileva said to me in Odessa, 'We were astonished at the way in which the ecosystem had rebalanced itself. I now feel that the Black Sea has far more fight-back capacity than I used to think.' Fishing restrictions in Turkey are beginning to produce a rapid climb in
hamsi
numbers, rather to the alarm of conservationists who worry that the boats will put to sea again before the recovery is complete and once more push the species to the verge of extinction.

Even the economic slump which ran round the Black Sea after the collapse of the Communist systems has brought unexpected relief. The closing of factories and the new, prohibitive costs of imported fertilisers and chemicals have made the big rivers temporarily cleaner, and slowed down the eutrophication of coastal waters. In Abkhazia, the sewage treatment plants at Sukhum were blown up during the
1993
war with Georgia, but so many of the inhabitants have fled that the sea off Sukhum's beaches is purer than it has been for twenty years.

Best of all, there is a display of human will to 'save' the Black Sea. In Odessa, a long and desperate battle was fought by the independent ecologist Alia Shevchuk and her friends to stave off the Ukrainian oil-terminal project, an ostentatious scheme forced ahead in the early
1990s
by President Leonid Kravchuk; when elections deposed Kravchuk in
1994,
his successor promised at once that the project would be reduced or even cancelled. And in the same city, in
1993,
I watched Ministers for the Environment from Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Turkey sitting down with experts from several different United Nations agencies and the World Bank to draft a declaration on the protection of the Black Sea, as part of a continuous action plan. I heard the Turkish
delegate and the Bulgarian delegate warmly welcoming each other's ideas — something inconceivable at normal international conferences, where proceedings have often been held up for days while Turkey and Bulgaria wrangle about history and minorities. And all the ministers happily let themselves be steered by discreet UN advice from offstage - something which could never happen at a conference on the North Sea, where governments, especially those of Britain or France, are neurotically touchy about maintaining the appearance of sovereignty. There is a good spirit stirring here. The international campaign for the Black Sea has become popular. All hopes are still fragile, of course. Much depends on persuading polluter states far upstream in the Danube basin — Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary — to collaborate and to contribute their money and wisdom. But it may be that the cause of the Black Sea itself, of its waters and its creatures, is at last beginning to achieve what so many millennia of human activity have failed to achieve: the union of the peoples who live around it.

^Epilogue

THE NAVAL MUSEUM
at Istanbul, a seaside palace in the Besjktas, district, stands next to one of the busy ferry terminals for commuters travelling to work across the Bosporus. The museum has few visitors. Often there is nobody there at all, apart from the man at the ticket desk. But the thump of engines from freighters passing through the Narrows and the whistles of the ferries make its silence companionable.

Huge state galleys are preserved here, with benches for a hundred and forty oarsmen. There is an imperial harem boat, its thirteen banks of oars manned by black-whiskered male dummies in fez, sash and baggy trousers; the kiosk aft for the women of the seraglio is thickly curtained, furnished with upholstered seats piled with cushions. Around the walls of the museum are models of ironclads in glass cabinets, and the garden outside is a park of antique naval guns.

Near the entrance, overshadowed by the galleys and their carved prow-spikes, lies the Chain. Only a few links survive. They are made of black, rough-forged iron, each link a metre long and beaten into a figure-of-eight shape which was then crudely welded together at the waist. This is what is left of the great chain made in the eighth century to the order of the Byzantine emperor Leo III, 'the Isaurian'.

Supported on a string of timber rafts or buoys, the Chain was stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn in times of danger. It kept out the Arabs in the time of Leo III, and a hundred years later blocked the attacking ships of Thomas the Slav, a pretender to the imperial throne. In the eleventh century, the Viking warrior Harald Hardrade, commander of the Empire's 'Varangian Guard', ran his galleys against the Chain during his escape from Byzantine service to claim a kingdom in Norway.

Harald had been forbidden to leave the city by the Empress Zoe, co-ruler with the emperor Michael Kalafates, who ordered his arrest. In revenge, Harald and his men attacked and blinded the emperor and kidnapped Maria, niece of the empress, as a hostage. Then, according to the
Heimskringla
sagas, Harald and his followers went to the Varangians' galleys, of which they took two, and rowed to Saevidarsund [the Golden Horn]. And when they came to the iron chain that lay across the sound, Harald said that the men should fall to their oars on both galleys and that the men who were not rowing should run aft and each should have his sack with him. Thus they ran the galleys onto the iron chain, and as soon as the ships were fast and their movement stopped, he bade all his men run forward again. Then the galley Harald was on plunged forward, and after swinging on the chain slipped off, but the other galley stuck fast to the iron chain and broke its back, and many were drowned, though some were picked up from the water. In this way Harald came out from Micklegarth [Constantinople] and thus went into the Black Sea. But before he sailed away from land he put the girl ashore and gave her a good escort back to Micklegarth . . .
⁵

The Chain was used again in a vain attempt to hold off the attacking Crusaders in
1203,
and it was run out for the last time during the final siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in
1453.
The navy of Mehmet II, 'the Conqueror', failed to break through it by direct assault, and the Sultan, taking over command from his humiliated admiral Baltaoglu, prepared his own plan to outflank the Chain altogether. If the fleet could not enter the Golden Horn by sea, then it would enter it by land. A two-mile track of log rollers laid on brushwood was constructed uphill from the Bosporus at Be§ikta§, and a few days later the Greek defenders of the city saw from the battlements the appalling sight of topmasts slowly appearing over the ridge to the east of the Golden Horn. With sails up and drums beating, more than seventy Turkish warships were dragged up the slope and down the other side until they reached the water of the Golden Horn and moored under the walls of Byzantium. From that moment the fall of Constantinople, the extinction of the Byzantine Empire and the triumph of Islam and the Ottomans were only a matter of time.

Are these dark links really the same Chain which Leo the Isaurian commanded to be forged thirteen hundred years ago, the very metal rammed by Harald's ships on his way back to Norway? It seems unlikely. Chains break, iron rusts, and links require replacement every so often. And yet the thought leads to a familiar philosophical riddle: even though every link may have been renewed over the centuries, yet this is in essence still the Chain itself.

All around the Black Sea, reading its history or climbing through its ruins or talking to its people, I have remembered the old saying: This is my grandfather's axe. My father gave it a new helve, and 1 gave it a new head.' That is the truth about the Chain of Constantinople. But it is also the truth about ethnic identities; the only wise comment on all the claims to 'be' a Pontic Greek, a true Scythian, a Cossack, a Romanian, an Abkhazian, a Ukrainian.