Black Sea
Atlas’ Notebook: Edition LXIV
Welcome to
. The following is part of our Atlas’ Notebook series, featuring art, poetry, literature, cartography, and photography, all centred on a particular place. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.The Black Sea, or Pontus Euxinus as the Greeks knew it, has always been more than just a body of water. For millennia it’s been a frontier between continents, a crossroads for trade, and a waterway of vital geopolitical importance.
Carrying centuries worth of ships from ancient triremes to modern oil tankers, this marginal mediterranean sea has seen civilisations rise and fall along the entire circumference of its edge. Its shores have been walked by Scythian horse-lords, Roman legionaries, Ottoman janissaries, and holidaying Soviet workers alike.
But there’s more to the Black Sea than just its history. It’s a place of scientific curiosity too. Its depths hide a mysterious anoxic layer, a vast expanse of oxygen-free water teeming with strange bacteria. Down there, organic matter doesn’t degrade as normal, so long-wrecked wooden ships of the ancients may be lying at the bottom, waiting to be discovered.
