Black Sea coasts and conquests : from Pericles to Putin

by Neal Ascherson

Ebook, 2015

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

E-Books

Publication

London Vintage Books 2015

Description

Black Seais a homage to an ocean and its shores and a meditation on Eurasian history, from the earliest times to the present. It explores the culture, history and politics of the volatile region which surrounds the Black Sea. Ascherson recalls the world of Herodotus and Aeschylus; Ovid's place of exile on what is now the coast of Romania; the decline and fall of Byzantium; the mysterious Christian Goths; the Tatar Khanates; the growth of Russian power across the grasslands, and the centuries of war between Ottoman and Russian Empires around the Black Sea. He examines the terrors of Stalinism and its fascist enemy, both striving for mastery of these endlessly colourful and complex shores, and investigates the turbulent history of modern Ukraine. This is a story of Greeks, Scythians, Samatians, Huns, Goths, Turks, Russians, Ukrainians and Poles. This is the sea where Europe ended. It is the place where 'barbarism' was born. UPDATED WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR… (more)

Media reviews

Enotes Review for Teachers

Although geographically centered, Neal Ascherson’s BLACK SEA is not primarily about geography; rather, it concerns the people who, over the centuries, migrated to the shores of this inland sea that separates East from West, “the largest mass of lifeless water in the world,” extending 144

miles from the Crimean peninsula to the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. There is life at the top, schools of dolphin and porpoise, the once- abundant Black Sea anchovy, and a kind of mackerel called the bonito, but 150 meters below the surface of the Black Sea “is the world’s biggest single reservoir of hydrogen sulphide,” and the deeper waters are therefore sterile.

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London Review of Books

To unlock the mystery of creativity, cultural confluence and violent conflict associated with the Black Sea, Ascherson has eschewed conventional history. In its place, he trudges gamely around archaeological sites, some famous, some profoundly obscure. His ruminations on the bones and artefacts of

long-extinct peoples drift effortlessly from their ancient history into our millennium and back, from Herodotus to Lermontov, and from the Zaporozhe Sich of the Cossacks to the loners on the Oregon trail.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member vguy

Best history book I've read this year (and the last, as it happens). Brilliant range of references covering 3000 years and more of history. Umpteen people, peoples, and places I've never or scarcely heard of as well as some good ecoscience thrown in. E.g. the Abkhazians who I proudly thought i knew

included the charming Beria, but no, he was a Mingrelian. We get deep insights into Polish nationalism (its founding poet father Minkiewicz was exiled to the Black Sea). Ovid gets a mention (knew he was there but he springs to life in this account). the Pontic Greeks i'd heard of but here we get their whole flourish and fade and how they nurse their traditions still. Golden Horde and Mongol, Cossack, Kazakh and Tatar ride across the pages and seem to be different names for more or less one thing.(Side shots touch on Scottish nationalism, the Gaelic revival, the invention of the knight at arms, perestroika, Near the end we learn of Harald Hardrade (know him from Stamford Bridge at the margins of English history but hey! he was a commander of mercenaries for the Byzantine emperor and rammed his way out through the chain over the Bosporus. Here and there his first hand travel experiences: meetings with sad librarians, unfunded scientists, selfless archaeologists, a museum of sycophantic tributes to Brezhnev, a disabled girl's death on a bus. The book appears structureless; not a travelogue, nor a chronology, with so much going on and most of it new to me it should have been confusing, but themes are interwoven, sometimes reappearing, sewn together with such weightless scholarshop and seamless style, I was sorry to finish it.

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LibraryThing member neurodrew

Interesting, a description of recent tours along the black sea coast leavened with fascinating but unsatisfyingly brief historical vignettes, of Greek, Roman, Scythian and other times. His main journalistic concern seemed to be description of the fragmented Soviet Union.

LibraryThing member timspalding

Interesting, synthetic account. I would have preferred more on the Anatolian piece.

LibraryThing member MiaCulpa

A fine travelogue covering thousands of kilometres and years around the Black Sea region of Asia Minor. Ascherson is renowned as a leading historian and mixes history with his own impressions while travelling around the Black Sea.

Ascherson touches on the Ilyrians, Abhkazia, the Pontic Greeks and a

range of other topics, all in an entertaining, page turning style.

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LibraryThing member heggiep

I reached for this at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in order to get some historic insight into the region. Ascherson roams around the shore (and often well inland) to highlight the peoples and settlements of significance. He doesn't spend much time on Constantinople/Istanbul,

though. I have more sympathy now for the Abkhazians and South Ossetians but can report (as if it needed saying) that Stalin was awful - and so is Putin.

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LibraryThing member thorold

This is a thoughtful, complicated book, an amalgam of travel-writing, history, journalism, cultural studies, and all kinds of other stuff. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive history of the Black Sea region, Ascherson pursues a small set of topics that particularly interest him from

the footprints they left in archaeology and classical literature right through to his own subjective experiences in Crimea, the northern Caucasus and and the Turkish Black Sea coast in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We read about the complicated ecology of the sea itself and how that has been and is being studied, about the region as the most intensively-documented point of interaction between the settled urban culture of the Pontic Greeks ("civilisation") and the nomadic culture of the Scythians, Sarmatians and other "barbarian" steppe peoples. But also about how the "fanciful" stuff about Amazons in Herodotus has turned out not to be so fanciful at all ... now that archaeologists have finally bothered to ask themselves whether the warrior skeletons they found in ancient burial mounds were those of men or women. And about the wonderfully multi-culti Bosporan Kingdom, based at Panticapaeum (up the hill from modern Kerch), the real identity of the Tatars and Cossacks, and the peculiar 17th century Polish aristocratic fancy of "Sarmatian" descent. And fascinating stuff about Adam Mickiewicz in Odesa, Harold Hardrade in Micklegarth, and all sorts of other things...

If there's an underlying theme, it seems to be about how different cultures/ethnicities/languages/religions have often been able to cohabit successfully in the region for long periods, but only until their equilibrium is displaced by some set of events which allows one or more parties to believe that there's something to be gained by driving out their neighbours. More often than not, the process turns out to be horribly destructive to all parties (e.g. the Abkhazian war in the early 1990s), but somehow the knowledge of the likelihood of that kind of outcome never entirely stops humans from stirring up distrust and violence.

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