Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea

By Jens Mühling

 A history of the countries bordering the Black Sea told through the stories of the people who live there.
 
Fringing the Black Sea is a diverse array of countries, some centuries old and others emerging only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Jens Mühling travels through this region, telling the stories of the people he meets along the way in order to paint a picture of the mix of cultures found here and to understand the present against a history stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond.

A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Mühling brings together a cast of characters as diverse as the stories he hears, all of whom are willing to tell him their complex, contradictory, and often fantastical tales full of grief and legend. He meets descendants of the so-called Pontic Greeks, whom Stalin deported to Central Asia and who have now returned; Circassians who fled to Syria a century ago and whose great-great-grandchildren have returned to Abkhazia; and members of ethnic minorities like the Georgian Mingrelians or Bulgarian Muslims, expelled to Turkey in the summer of 1989. Mühling captures the region’s uneasy alliance of tradition and modernity and the diverse humanity of those who live there.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781909961777

Book preview

The Flood

Prologue

It seemed to him that the Black Sea

had risen to the skies, to come

pouring down on the earth

for forty days and forty nights.

Konstantin Paustovsky, ‘The Colchis’, 1934

We saw them coming towards us as we travelled the last few miles to Mount Ararat, in eastern Anatolia, where Turkey borders Armenia and Iran amid endless slopes of scree. They were walking along the sides of the road in small groups – men, most of them young with dark beards and nothing in their hands, except for a few carrying small plastic bags. It was March, and snow still lay on the winding pass roads. I wondered how fast you would have to walk in these men’s thin jackets if you didn’t want to freeze.

Mustafa, whose taxi I’d got into in Agri because the next bus to Dogubayazit left only the following day, motioned with his chin to the walkers beyond the windscreen.

‘Pasaport yok, para yok.’

No passport, no money.

I looked at him quizzically. ‘Syrians?’

He shook his head. ‘Afganlar.’

They must have come to Turkey via Iran, I thought.

Mustafa nodded as if he could read my mind. ‘Afghanistan – Iran – Istanbul.’ He was silent for a moment before a grin splayed his moustache. ‘Istanbul – Almanya!’ he said, suggesting that the Afghans’ intended destination was my home country.

The moustache hardened into a line when I tried to persuade Mustafa to stop the car. I wanted to talk to the refugees and ask them what they needed, even if I’d almost certainly be unable to provide it. Forget it, said Mustafa’s frozen moustache. Not for all the lira in the world.

We drove on towards Mount Ararat, which has an ancient and enigmatic bond with the Black Sea. Again and again, men would come around a bend in the road, in twos, five at once, then none for a long time, then suddenly a dozen followed by another dozen – and for a moment I was convinced that the road beyond the next bend would be black with people. But then no one else appeared for ages.

Every time a bunch of men approached us out of the distance, Mustafa would briefly take his hands off the steering wheel, turn his palms to the sky, and shake his head in silent bemusement, as if he were asking himself, or me, or maybe God, what on earth was to be done with all these people who could not stay where they were.

* * *

I’ve seen the Black Sea from all sides, and from none of them was it black.

It was silvery as I drove along the deserted beaches of the Russian Caucasus coast in the spring, as silvery as the skin of the dolphins hugging the shore as they pursued shoals of fish northwards.

It turned blue in May as I reached Georgia, the ancient Colchis of Greek legend, where the beaches are black but not the water.

In Turkey it seemed to take on the green of the tea plantations and hazelnut groves along its shores, and it was still green when I reached the Bosporus in late summer.

The first storms of autumn coloured it brown as the birds headed south and the tourists headed home over the Bulgarian coast.

In Romania’s Danube delta the sky seemed to hang so low over the sea that its lead-grey colour rubbed off on the water.

When I reached Ukraine, the waves scraped dirt-grey ice along the beaches.

Only in Crimea did the winter sun brighten the sea again, and here it assumed the hue it will forever have in my memory – a cloudy, milky green, like a soup of algae and sun cream.

* * *

Journeys seldom start where we remember their starting. This one may well have begun under my blind grandmother’s dining table.

Occasionally, as the grown-ups traded their grown-up stories, my sister and I would crawl between their legs to the end of the table, where Grandma sat. We would creep up quietly behind her chair. The back was wickerwork, the holes big enough for us to poke our fingertips through. We would prod Grandma in her bony back and, although she had heard rather than seen us coming, she never failed to greet our recurring prank with an indulgent, horrified