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Out of the Balkans

Part 1: Out of the Balkans

Chapter 1, continued:
Eleni and Evangelia: Out of Thrace and the Black Sea

Eleni and her family took great pride in being Greeks of the Black Sea, members of a community that for two and one-half thousand years had populated the littoral of what was known as the Pontos Euxeinos, the hospitable sea of late antiquity.

Centuries before colonization of its coasts Greeks named the great body of water Pontos Axeinos, the inhospitable sea. Early Greek explorers were fearful of the water route from the Aegean through the Dardanelles (Hellespont), the Sea of Marmara (Propontis), and the final gauntlet, the Bosphorus.(9) Its narrow, twisting course and treacherous currents, that run from the Pontos(10) to the Aegean, made passage of oar-powered vessels through it to the vast Pontos seem impossible.(11)

The mythological story of Jason's epic search for the Golden Fleece celebrates early Greek penetrations into the Axeinos Pontos. The adventurers sought to open civilizations that surrounded the sea to commerce with the Mycenaean(12) kingdoms. In search of the Golden Fleece,(13) Jason and his Argonauts entered the Black Sea and crossed to its easternmost shore, to the legendary and wealthy land of Colchis.(14)

Accustomed to the Aegean with its myriad sheltering islands and coves, Greeks found the vast Pontos full of natural terrors. "For at that time the sea was called Axine because of its wintry storms and the ferocity of the tribes that lived around it, and particularly the Scythians ... but later it was called Euxine, when the Ionians founded cities on the seaboard ...," wrote the ancient geographer Strabo (64 B.C. to after 24 A.D.).

On entering the Pontos sailors found no islands to assist them in navigation. Increasing their anxiety was the fact that the closest protected landing for their sail and oar-manned ships was more than one day's passage from the Bosphorous' strait. Native peoples, the Thracians and Skythians, were fearsome. They used enemy prisoners and shipwrecked sailors as human sacrifices in ways described in gory detail by Herodotus in his Histories:(15)

What they do is first consecrate the victim, and then they hit him on the head with a club. Some say that they then push the body off the cliff at the top of which their shrine is located, but impale the head on a stake ...

For the sailors of the Aegean the Pontos was a huge, hazardous expanse that challenged them with winds, fog, storms, snow and ice-flows, and with shores populated by savage barbarians.

The war between the ancient Greek kingdoms and Troy reported to us by Homer in his Iliad is probably a composite representation based on Mycenaean conflicts that took place around 1300 B.C.(16) The Trojan War was most likely about control of the trade route through the Hellespont, which Troy and her allies dominated, and from which they gained great wealth.



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