Black Sea (50 page)

Authors: Neal Ascherson

BOOK: Black Sea

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Those who cherish and revive their 'native' language usually have ancestors who spoke a different one. Those who claim 'pure' lineage, in the genetic sense, are all to some degree mongrels. Even a secluded hill people like the Abkhazians might find in their pedigrees - if they could rescue and study the ramifications of each family tree over the centuries - a Greek waitress, a Jewish pedlar, a Mingrelian cattle-dealer, a Russian officer's widow, an Armenian tinker, a Circassian slave-girl, an Eastern Alan bandit, a Persian refugee, an Arab magistrate. Those who claim always to have dwelled in 'our' land can often be shown to have lived somewhere else in the not too distant past, like the Lazi or the Tatars or almost the entire population of the Lower Don.

Even the portrait of a common cultural tradition, as evidence of ethnic identity, all too often dissolves away at the first application of rigorous fact. The sense among the Pontic Greeks that 'home is Hellas' could logically be challenged by pointing out that many of them cannot speak Greek, that their education was Russian, that their biological mingling with Turkic, Iranian, Kartvelian and Slav peoples has been marginal but continuous for more than three thousand years, that most of them were born and brought up not among olive-trees and sea-winds but in Soviet Central Asia.

You could, if you were unwise, walk up to Crimean Tatars as they built their houses on waste lots outside Simferopol and suggest that their burning conviction of homeland and ethnic identity was false. And you could support that with some evidence. You might remind them that the Tatars of the Golden Horde had exchanged their own Mongolian language for the Turkic spoken by the local Kipchaks, that they abandoned shamanism for Islam, that they have interbred continuously with Turks and Russians and that -like the Greeks, and for the same tragic reason of deportation — the land of their birth' is usually not Crimea but Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. But, in both the Greek and the Tatar case, you would have missed the point.

To demonstrate that tradition is wrong or invented does not put an end to this story. A claim to national independence does not fall simply because its legitimising version of national history is partly or wholly untrue - as it often is. The sense of belonging to a distinct cultural tradition, of 'ethnic identity', can be subjectively real to the point at which it becomes an objective social-political fact, no matter what fibs are used for its decoration. Grandfather's axe still lies on the table, gleaming, sharp and very solid.

This is a book about identities, and about the use of mirrors to magnify or to distort identity - the disguises of nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm has warned, most insistently in the years since the
1989
revolutions, that it is the duty of the historian always to denounce the element of myth in the construction of nations or ethnicities, and his hero in that particular struggle - one of mine, too - is T. G. Masaryk. This pedantic, authoritarian, invincibly honest man was the father and first President of independent Czechoslovakia. But Masaryk, facing down a tempest of abuse, was not afraid to proclaim that the 'Libuse Manuscripts', the epic poems which seemed to authenticate an antique and distinct Czech culture, were forgeries.

Hobsbawm fears above all the voice which proclaims: 'We are different from the others — and better.' On the Black Sea, that voice has often been heard in recent years, speaking Russian or Turkish or sometimes Romanian or Georgian. But it is a thought from inland, whose second point about 'superiority' has seldom carried much weight on the coast itself. There, the differences were blatant and numerous, and ethnic tensions were never absent. But it was elsewhere that sweeping moral conclusions were drawn. It was not the Ionian colonists at Olbia or Chersonesus who invented the polarity between 'our civilisation' and 'their barbarism', but wartime intellectuals far away in Athens.

When Adam Mickiewicz came to the Black Sea, once in his youth and the second time to die, he came as a Polish patriot whose supreme purpose was the restoration of Poland's independence and nationhood. But his nationalism, old-fashioned and 'pre-modern', did not assume that Poles were better than others and did not accept that a free Poland required false identity papers to re-enter history.

The human imagination, endlessly boastful and inventive, extends itself over landscapes and seas until its fabric conceals them completely. But at precisely that moment of intellectual conquest the fabric begins to fray, to develop widening holes, to disintegrate until nothing is left of it but hanks of brittle thread blown about by the wind. There reappears a coast inhabited by people who are not the sons and daughters whom their ancestors expected, a Sea whose fish change themselves and alter their paths a little in every season.

In
El Hacedor,
a collection of short pieces published in
1960,
Jorge Luis Borges included a fragment attributed to 'Suarez Miranda:
Viajes de Varones Prudentes;
Lérida
1658'.
Whatever the truth of that attribution, the passage is Borgesian, and - as far as this account of the Black Sea is concerned - leaves no more to be said.

_{OF RIGOUR IN SCIENCE}

... In that Empire, the art of Cartography reached such Perfection, that the map of one single Province covered a whole Town. With time, these excessive Maps ceased to give satisfaction, and the Colleges of Cartography drew up a Map of the Empire which was done to the same scale as the Empire itself, and which coincided with it at every Point. Less absorbed in the Study of Cartography, the following Generations came to conclude that this vast Map was useless and, not without Impiety, abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West, there survive shattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Beasts and by Beggars; in all the Land, no other relic of the Cartographic Disciplines remains.

^Chronology

c.
850—800
BC Early Scythians appear in Black Sea steppes.

c.
750—700
BC First Ionian Greek colonists found trading posts on Black Sea shores.

c.
700
BC Foundation of Greek colony at Olbia.

512
BC First Persian invasion of Europe. Darius crosses the Bosporus and Danube, and (according to Herodotus) pursues the Scythians into the Don steppes.

490
BC Persian Army defeated at Marathon.

480
BC Second major Persian expedition, under Xerxes, defeated by Athens at naval battle of Salamis.

c.
480
BC Greek colonies in Crimea and Taman region combine into Bosporan state.

472
BC First production at Athens of
Persae,
by Aeschylus.

c.
450
BC Herodotus visits Olbia and subsequently begins publication of
Histories.

440-37
BC (?) Pericles sends naval expedition to acquire Greek colonies on the northern Black Sea coast for Athens.

438
BC Spartocid dynasty installed over the Bosporan Kingdom, at Panticapaeum.

432
BC Completion of the Parthenon at Athens.
431
BC First production of
Medea,
by Euripides.
431-404
BC Peloponnesian War.

356
BC Birth of Alexander (the Great) of Macedon.

334
BC Alexander defeats Persia, at battle of Issus.
323
BC Death of Alexander.

Third century BC Sarmatian peoples enter the Black Sea steppes and push the Scythians westwards.

107
BC Death of Peirisades the Last; Mithridates Eupator, King of Pontus, becomes ruler of the Bosporan Kingdom.

63
BC Death of Mithridates at Panticapaeum, after defeat by Roman armies under the command of Pompey. Bosporan Kingdom becomes Roman dependency. Sack of Olbia by Dacian-Getic Army.

55
and
54
BC Julius Caesar takes Roman expeditionary force to Britain.

49
BC Roman conquest of Gaul completed.

44
BC Julius Caesar appointed Roman dictator for life.

27
BC Collapse of Roman Republic; beginning of Roman Empire.

c.
8
AD Ovid exiled from Rome to Tomi (Constanta), by the emperor Augustus.

43
AD Roman invasion of Britain.

70
AD Romans destroy the Temple at Jerusalem.

c.
95
AD Dio Chrysostom visits Olbia.

c.
240
AD Goths arrive on Black Sea, invading Roman possessions there.

313
Christianity granted toleration in Roman Empire.

330
Capital of Roman Empire transferred to Constantinople.

370
Huns enter Black Sea steppe and attack Roman Empire. Destruction of Tanais and Olbia.