united colours of the Black Sea

Some thoughts on

Black Sea
Coasts and conquests: from Pericles to Putin
Neal Ascherson
Vintage Paperback 2015

When I suggested writing the feature that came out this week, on the Scythians, the editor recommended the book Black Sea, and I managed to read most of it in time for the feature and the rest shortly after. While it was very instructive on the Scythians and their role as “barbarians” in the eyes of the Ancient Greeks, their history (which I’ve written about in the feature) is just one of many slightly crazy things that have been going on around the Black Sea over the last 3000 years.

In ten chapters (untitled, keeping the suspense as to what they may be about) Neal Ascherson covers the cultures that have lived around the Black Sea, rounding the book off with a chapter about the water body itself as an ecosystem. Apart from the Scythians, Cossacks and Sarmatians of the northern shore, we get to know Pontic Greeks in today’s Turkey, many of whom decided to return to their homeland in the 1920s, after 3000 years of absence, and then wondered why people in Greece weren’t quite like their idea of Greekness.

We get insights into the birth of Polish nationalism, dreamed up at the sea port of Odessa (run by French aristos who fled the Revolution), at a time when Poland didn’t exist. Ascherson, who has also written a history of Poland, is very engaging on the weird and wonderful ways in which groups of people conjure up a national identity when they don’t have a country and perhaps no more than a shared language and/or religion to support the idea of “nation”. In some of the smaller groups scattered around the area, even the language is in need of saving, and some appear to have adjusted their religion flexibly to whoever ruled the land.

Alternative models to the modern nation state have worked around the Black Sea, such as the Greek trading ports that coexisted peacefully with Scythians and Sarmatians in the hinterland. The multi-national empires of the Ottomans and Russian Tsars, and then the Soviet Union, suppressed the regional nationalisms, which then came back with a vengeance. After the demise of the Soviet Union, nations around the Black Sea engaged in regional wars, including the 1992 war between Georgia and Abkhazia, and the current conflict in Ukraine.

All in all a rich tapestry of cultural diversity and historical ironies, also reflected in the light of recent events – this edition was updated in 2015. Sadly, not much is said about the German settlers in the Odessa region, whose number included two of my ancestors (see the legendary Klundt clan blog entry). I suppose these people were just too normal and boring compared with the likes of Pontic Greeks and Scythians.

whatever happened to the Orient Express?

The EuCheMS chemistry congress will take place in Istanbul next year, so I was wondering whether I could go there by train. The SNCF website says it doesn’t sell tickets to that destination. Deutsche Bahn can’t tell the price, but at least it gives me a connection.

Travelling from Frankfurt, it would take three nights, two days (55 h 50 mins total duration), and five changes to get there:

• Night train Frankfurt to Vienna (EN421)
• Vienna to Budapest
• Budapest to Beograd
• Night train Beograd to Sofia
• 10 hours wait in Sofia
• Sofia to Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria
• Night train Dimitrovgrad to Istanbul

The first train, EN421 comes from Cologne, so the connection also works from there, as well as from other German stations including Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz, Würzburg, Nürnberg, Regensburg, Passau.

Deutsche Bahn very kindly gives me a connection from Paris as well, although it doesn’t even cross German territory. I could take a TGV Paris to Zurich, direct night train Zurich to Budapest, and then it’s the same as above for the rest of the journey (total: 60 hours). From London it recommends going via Brussels and Cologne, 63 hours.

I think the last change in Dimitrovgrad is where they lost me. I wouldn’t actually mind travelling three nights in a row and having some time to look at the cities in between. But Dimitrovgrad, population 38,015, not to be confused with the eponymous town in Russia, sounds random and a bit scary.

Whatever happened to the Orient Express? (I looked it up, the short answer is, it ceased to exist, the long answer is on Wikipedia.) Shouldn’t there be a direct line across Europe, linking all those new member states?

So, well, maybe I’ll skip this conference. Unless somebody has a bright idea? Are there any prospects for improvements in Bulgarian railways?

image source: wikipedia

ant orientation

In a feature that was a bit off the beaten track for me, I've covered the orientation of desert ants, which can make use of a wide range of tools from step counter to vibration sensing. One of the interesting questions in the field is how the ants compute the information coming from their various navigation tools and how they eventually decide where to go.

My feature is out in Current Biology today:

How ants find their way
Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 16, R615-R618, 21 August 2012
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.08.004

Read the story in HTML and PDF format.

(free access)

Photo: Kathrin Steck.

Turkey's biodiversity

My feature on biodiversity in Turkey came out last week while I was away:

Turkey's biodiversity at the crossroads

Current Biology, Volume 22, Issue 13, R503-R505, 10 July 2012 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.06.051

Read the story in HTML and PDF format. (NB: my features remain on free access only until the next issue appears, i.e. normally 2 weeks, sometimes 3, and they return to free access a year after publication)

Note that the captions of the second and the third region contain an error - the area where the photos were taken is called the Kars region (not Kagas). The region is correctly identified in the main text.

Map from Wikipedia - love this map a lot, as it shows immediately the reasons why Turkey has such interesting biodiversity ...