Собирающимся в бархатный сезон на Черное море российские издатели подготовили правильный подарок. За исключением побережья Румынии и Болгарии охвачен весь его периметр и историческая глубина, а время написания — до 2014 года — милосердно избавляет от обсуждения самых последних событий региона. Впрочем, Крыму и без этого отводится немало места: отсюда в Европу прокралась «черная смерть» XIV века, выкосившая до трети ее населения, тут проходили эпические сражения и тут же располагалось государство-долгожитель региона — Боспорское царство. Помимо полуострова автору есть что рассказать интересного о казаках и амазонках, скифах и греках, лазах с убыхами и Пушкине с медузоподобными существами. Главный шок, однако, подстерегает отдыхающих в начале книги — оказывается, Черное море, в отличие ото всех прочих морей, практически целиком мертво: ниже 150 м там залежи сероводорода. И самое, извиняюсь, тухлое — существует отнюдь не гипотетическая угроза того, что эти пласты могут поменяться местами.

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

The Black Sea has a fascinating history and this book does a good job of providing an overview of that history ( )