Black Sea – an Important Place in History and Exiting Place to Visit Now
The Black Sea region is like a good classical music composition, it has a framework consisting of spectacular shorelines and mountain ranges, it contains marine life forms from the oldest found on earth to the most intelligent lifeform ever found. You can explore its content by a wide range of opportunities and only the visitor himself can describe its beauty from his or hers standpoint of view. Everyone experience the Black Sea region differently, depdenant upon your interests and angle of approach. In this article I try to give some history of the black sea, as well as describing some of the features in and around it. You will find details about various places and activities in other articles I have written about the Crimea, but hopefully I will convince you to one thing only, visiting the area and give your own story about the place. It is a memory for life, but not least important, the place is unique in history and at present time.
Looking across the Black Sea from the Ai-Petri Mountain, you may ask yourself why such an sparkling blue sea is called the black sea. The reason is unknown why it’s called black sea. The sea can be pretty stormy in winter, however some believe that the name was given to it by sailors and pirates who discovered its dark appearance when the sky turned gloomy with storm clouds.
The ancient Greeks knew the black sea as the Scythian Sea, called after the tribes who held its shores at that time. Shipwrecked sailors would expect no mercy from the Scythians, who plundered the wrecks and made wine goblets out of sailors’ skulls. The Greeks also called it Pontos Axenos, which means the inhospitable se. When the Greeks settled in Crimea, they called it Pontos Euxenos, which means the hospitable sea.
Crimea has 517 km of clean beaches – mostly consist of small pebbles although in the east there is black volcanic sand at Morskoye and Sudak and in the west we find silver sand at Yevpatoria. Many beaches are public, and the private ones owned by hotels and resorts/spa centers are usually open to non-patrons at a low fee per day. If you are a naturist, you can find naturist beaches near Koktebel in the east.
The main tourist beaches have opportunities for pedal boats, jet-skiing, yachting and speed-boating, sea fishing, para-gliding, flights in micro planes and a range of other opportunities, in addition to sea cruises along the coast. Wind-surfing is also possible but good quality boards and sails may not be easily available, however a windsurfing club in Feodosia at the eastern end of the peninsula can be recommended.
The scenic and windy road running along the coast from Feodosia in east to Sevastopol in the west is a spectacular drive, and easily classify as one of the most beautiful drives in the world. For much of the journey you’re looking out over the sea from the mountains which slope down to the shoreline and the views are spectacular.
The rocky Black Sea bays are ideal for scuba diving, and there are many canters along the coast. Balaklava is a favorite, where there is a large underwater reef. From there you can also dive to the underwater ruins of Khersoness, where part of the Byzantine city was swamped by rising sea levels.
Playwright Anton Chekhov’s dacha at Gursuf looks out over a small bay where he used to watch the dolphins. Apart from Bottlenose and other species of dolphin, the sea has about 180 species of fish, including tuna, anchovy, herring, grey mullet, mackerel, and the famous white sturgeon, which you will find on the menu of most good Crimean restaurants.
There are also some seals in the Black Sea, but their numbers are declining rapidly. Bottlenose dolphins are in demand from amusement parks and dolphinaria because of their playful acrobatics and receptivity to training, and about 120 live Black Sea dolphins were traded internationally between 1990 and 2001.
If you swim in the Black Sea at night, especially in August, you may notice that the waves have a strange luminous quality. This is phosphorescence of the sea, caused by plankton interacting in the water.
The Black Sea is very deep (1,271m at the centre) but it’s less salty than most oceans.
It began life as a fresh water lake about 22000 years ago. About seven to nine 1000 years ago, melted glaciers and the polar ice-caps, made sea levels rise and eventually the Mediterranean overflowed through the Bosporus straight, turning the lake into the Black Sea. Many archeologists think that this catastrophic event was in fact the Noah’s Flood of the Bible.
The sea is unique in having two layers, an oxygenated upper layer, about 200m deep, teeming with life, and a `dead’ lower layer, where until recently nothing was thought to be able to survive. The lower layer may have formed when the Mediterranean salt-water flooded in. Denser than the fresh lake water it displaced, it would have plunged straight to the bottom, leaving a diluted mix of fresh and salt water at the top. Over thousands of years the great rivers like the Danube and the Dnipro poured organic material into the new sea. Due to a lack of vertical currents, the inrush of organic matter was too much for the bacteria that would normally have decomposed it aerobically, and the result was a loss of oxygen in favor of hydrogen sulphide. This means that the lower layer, 87% of the Black Sea’s volume, is an almost sterile zone of water impregnated with hydrogen sulphide.
Another peculiarity of the Black Sea is the bi-directional current where it flows through the Bosporus straits on its way to the Mediterranean. The surface current flows westwards through the straits into the Sea of Marmaris, but there is a deep current which flows simultaneously in the opposite direction, back into the Black Sea.
Recently, German scientists have discovered corals made by micro-organisms processing methane and sulphates in total darkness at the bottom of the Black Sea. These corals are now believed to be the world’s oldest life form. Traditional views of early life on earth have centered on plants which began converting carbon dioxide into oxygen some three billion years ago. The newly discovered organisms live on methane and are thought to have originated four billion years ago. The German scientists believe they could prove useful in ridding the earth of excess methane, the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide.
