Black Sea Quotes

“All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one’s home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession – to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership – is a joke.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“History — the product, not the raw material — is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“To reach the country of the Lazi, you have to drive about fifty miles eastwards from Trabzon. It is a fast, dangerous road, a new coastal highway along the entire southern shore of the Black Sea which cuts off every town and village from the sea with a barrier of concrete.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin

“For the first time, intellectuals set out to give the Pontians an ethnic national consciousness. That required ‘origins’ and ‘roots’. Anthony Bryer relates how ‘Triantaphyllides, a Chaldian schoolmaster … christened his son Pericles and sent him to Athens, whence he returned after 1842 to teach Xenophon and classical Greek at the Trebizond Phrontisterion … By 1846, schoolmasters had renamed Gümüshane a fancy “Argyropolis”.’ In a typical example of cultural nation-invention, the teachers proceeded to graft the Pontos onto the stock not just of Byzantium but of Periclean Athens itself. All round the Greek world of the Black Sea, the same process was going on. The teachers and the school curricula came from Athens, bringing with them a new concept of Greekness which linked the Greek Orthodox communities of the Black Sea and the ‘nation’ of Greece.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin

“Politically, Cossack unity was never more than a matter of short episodes in history. Nothing emerged with the stability and complexity of the Scythian kingdoms, or of the Crimean Tatar Khanate. When commercial port-cities revived again along the Black Sea coast after the Russian conquests of Peter and Catherine, the Cossacks were not capable of acting as partners and protectors, as the Scythian steppe lords had been to the Greek cities and the Tatar khans to the Italians, but fell instead into subjection. Compared to the Indo-Iranian peoples of antiquity, and to some of the Turkic peoples who followed them, the Cossacks were primitive. Force, race and maleness are seldom the values of a stable and traditional society, but rather of bandits.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin

“But nomadic pastoralism was not a ‘primitive’ condition. It was, on the contrary, a specialisation which developed out of settled agricultural communities. To move large herds of domesticated animals hundreds of miles twice a year, north into summer pastures and south again in winter, requires, above all, horses and high skill at riding them. It requires the wheel, if the population is to migrate with its herds by cart or wagon. This way of life needs many kinds of craftsman or specialist, far more than family subsistence farming. And it cannot be carried on without a central leadership able to take rapid and effective decisions in emergency. That emergency could be economic – a traditional pasture destroyed by drought or flooding – or it could be military. The power to ride a horse created armed elites, who were now able to lead their followers out to plunder farming communities or to migrate and conquer distant regions of grassland.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin