Black Sea Hellenism to 1900

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When we speak of Greece today, we generally associate her with the Aegean archipelago, and the various peninsulas of the southern Balkans, a Mediterranean country. The Greek state of today is just that, quintessentially Mediterranean, but much of its soul and many of its lost children lived (and live) on the littoral of another, neighboring sea, the Black Sea.

There is something so organic about the Greeks’ connection with the sea. From time immemorial, Greek speech and Greek consciousness—Classical, Byzantine, and Modern—has always been associated with the sea. It is probably a virtuous cycle of geography reinforcing predisposition and when Greeks founded settlements, generally they were seaborne.

Greek association with, and settlement in, the Black Sea basin also has ancient roots. The Mycenaean Greeks sailed there; every child knows of Jason and his Argonauts sailing to distant Colchis (now Georgia) to find the Golden Fleece. Greek settlements soon dotted the entire Black Sea littoral, though rarely did the Greeks venture far from the coasts. These Greek settlements, as often happens with colonies, grew wealthy and independent, maintaining their Greek culture while often having a symbiotic relationship with the peoples inland. Roman and Byzantine rule resulted in the reunion of these far-flung Greeks with the rest of the Greco-Roman world.

The establishment of Constantinople as the Byzantine capital brought the Black Sea from the periphery to the center of the Greek world. The Black Sea was a veritable El Dorado of raw materials, particularly fish, gold, timber, wheat, and slaves, which powered the most advanced empire of medieval Europe, Byzantium, until the empire, assaulted by the Roman Catholic West and the Muslim East, finally succumbed. The last outpost of Byzantium to fall to the Turks was neither Constantinople in 1453, nor Mystra in 1460, but the Black Sea port of Trebizond in 1461.

Though the Turks decapitated the Byzantine state, in some ways they continued it under new management. Byzantine Orthodox Christians existed as a parallel, though conquered, society. At once brutal and easygoing, the Ottomans did not overly interfere with Byzantine society, which continued to flourish in the Black Sea under a negligent though at times vicious Sultan.

Speaking a number of Greek dialects, Turkish, or another local language, these Romioi continued in their maritime and mercantile activities. When Russia began to expel the Turks from the north shore of the Black Sea, many more Greeks accepted the Tsars’ invitation to immigrate and to live under an Orthodox sovereign.

The Greeks who immigrated to the Russian and Ukrainian shores to some extent were bolstering communities that had existed in the area since antiquity. The century of seesaw, no-quarter warfare between Russia and Turkey, resulted in severe depopulation and the Russians sought to repopulate this incredibly fertile and strategic area with loyal and hardworking settlers. Tsarina Catherine the Great, of German birth, brought in German craftsmen and administrators but she also sought the Orthodox populations of the Ottoman Empire, Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians, who could be counted on for loyalty to an Orthodox sovereign, and they had an axe to grind against the Turks. The Greeks, too, were the region’s finest merchants and seafarers, and Greek colonies, in some cases whole villages, sprang up throughout the Black Sea coast under Russian control.

Not for the first time (or the last time), Greek naval capabilities and Russian raw materials formed a profitable alliance. After one of several Russo-Turkish wars in 1774, the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire received the right to sail under the Russian flag and this spurred the rapid development of the Greek merchant fleets, particularly those of my island, Hydra, neighboring Spetses, and the eastern Aegean island of Psara.

While merchant and naval activities flourished, in the bustling boomtown port of Odessa in today’s Ukraine, three obscure Greek merchants founded the Filike Etairia in 1814, dedicated to Greece’s liberation. The Etairia spread through the Greek commercial network, gaining followers, and the first shot in the Greek War of Independence was fired, not in Greece, but in what is now Romania, not far from the Black Sea coast, where Russian-based Greeks under Yspilantis made an ill-fated attempt to start a pan-Balkan war of liberation against the Ottomans.

The Greek merchant fleet, having grown rich on the Black Sea-Mediterranean trade, now fought for Greece’s freedom. A tiny kingdom emerged, though most of Hydra’s and Spetses’ fleets were at the bottom of the Aegean. Other fleets, from other islands soon emerged and once again plied the waters between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and beyond.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Greek commercial colonies ringing the Black Sea continued to thrive. In every Black Sea port, Greeks formed a key shipping and commercial element, and in some areas, such as Pontus, the settlement was ancient and in depth. Greek was the region’s commercial language.

Times were good. Notwithstanding the extreme autocracy of both Russian and Ottoman empires, and their penchant for state violence, the end of the nineteenth century was one of considerable prosperity for the Greek merchant communities in both countries. Whether loyal subjects of the Tsar or the opportunistic and only partially willing subjects of Sultan, these Greeks remained Greeks first and foremost, but the tiny kingdom at the bottom of the Balkan Peninsula was too constrained for their broad horizons. Indeed far more Greeks left for either the Ottoman or Russian Empires than returned to Greece. Then as now, these “Hellenes without Borders” loved Greece, but felt the same frustration as we often do with a country that simply could not seem to “get it together.” The broad imperial systems of that period created large markets and a degree of stability for commerce that has only recently, fitfully, reemerged.

By the turn of the last century, Greek communities were to be found in every Black Sea port, including newly independent Bulgaria and Romania. Some were relatively new communities but the vast majority particularly on the Bulgarian and Turkish coasts, were autochthonous Byzantine communities often with roots stretching back millennia. Though Greece’s borders did not (and only briefly, for about three years, ever did) reach the Black Sea, in many ways the Black Sea was as Greek as the Aegean. The next century would change that.

Next Month: Hellenism in the Black Sea, what remains?

Alexander Billinis has spent a decade in international banking in the US and Europe, most recently in London. He is particularly interested in Greece's economic and cultural position in the Balkans. He has worked with companies invested in the Balkans, and is writing a travel-historical book about the post-Byzantine states of modern Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania.
©2010 NEOCORP MEDIA









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