Eden - Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes - Through Darkness and Light

From lands the rising crescent lights:
O blessed ships, from what seas are ye come?

Yahya Kemal Beyatl

The waters of the world are sovereign Powers.

Jan Morris, Travels

For Dad, and in memory of Mum, in gratitude.

On a map, the Black Sea looks like a lake. Broken only by small islands and thin sandbars, its expanse stretches out to meet the countries that share it: Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia and Russia.

On paper, it is easy to picture these places as closely connected, just water between them, not hard-edged at all, a region of connectivity, mobility and interdependence. But just as shared identity, cooperation and cohabitation flow across the water, so do conflict, wariness and division.

Over centuries, the trade of empires large and small has passed across the waves, as has much migration: Russian migrs, deportees from the Caucasus and refugees from the Balkans. In hope, and in fear, thousands have crossed this sea. This, too, was where Jason, the ancient Greek mythological hero and leader of the Argonauts, came to claim the Golden Fleece and where Xenophon soldier, historian and student of Socrates and his army witnessed the ill effects of mind-bending rhododendron honey. It is also where northerly winds blow strong, enormous cherry orchards bloom and where most of the worlds hazelnuts are harvested. The Dnieper, Rioni, Southern Bug and Dniester rivers pour into the Black Sea, as does the Danube, which once carried sturgeon and catfish so enormous that fishermen used oxen to drag them ashore.

I first glimpsed the Black Sea through the grubby window of a Turkish bus in 2013. My summer holiday that year was a six-week overland journey, from London to Georgias capital, Tbilisi. On trains and buses I travelled to Munich, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia and Istanbul, then across Turkeys Black Sea coast. Close to the Turkish city of Samsun, a road accident on a sharp bend ahead had shaken us. Once clear of the crash, there was a cautious rush to the bus windows. Mobile phones were taken out and passengers began photographing the waves. The seas reassuring strength, its sink and rise bleeding out to the farthest reaches of the horizon, lifted the mood and relaxed nerves. Combined with the revolution of the bus wheels, its drift hypnotised.

That simple moment of first seeing the Black Sea, likely intensified by the traffic drama, would become my sharpest memory of the entire trip. Years later, I can remember the scene precisely while only photographs can bring back the details of Munich beer halls, gritty Serbian trains and Georgian cafs. The reoccurring picture in my mind of faces pressed to the grimy windows, and the steady blue-grey waves, triggers the same feeling, then and now: an almost spiritual heaviness. Shortly after I returned home, that same memory started interrupting my thoughts and daydreams, kick-starting a Black Sea obsession, sending me first to libraries and then on trips to Istanbul and Odessa, looking to answer questions by speaking to historians, curators and visiting archives. How can history books claim the Black Sea to be both the birthplace of barbarism and the sea that welcomes strangers? Is anything left of the seas historic trade routes? What connects its towns and cities today? What lies hidden? And what can its foodways tell us about the back story of the Black Seas communities and landscape?

For this book, I first thought about circumnavigating the entire coast. But it felt more natural to bookend the journey with two of the Black Sea regions most interesting and lyrical cities: Odessa in southern Ukraine and Trabzon in northeast Turkey. Both mythical, multi-layered places ultimately shaped by their maritime positions. One relatively new (Odessa was established in 1794) and one truly ancient (Trabzon, formerly Trapezous and Trebizond, has Greek trading roots dating back to 7th century BC). The third key city in this book, forming a neat centre point, is Istanbul. Not on, but satisfyingly close to the Black Sea, connected to it by the throat of the Bosphorus, just beyond Giants Grave, a landmark hill for boats coming in from the sea. This multi-layered city, one that can feel like a conservative village one moment and a cosmopolitan megacity the next, is full of people from the Black Sea: cooks, fishermen, hamam owners, bakers, musicians and taxi drivers. It is the ultimate Black Sea diaspora. It is also, arguably, the worlds greatest kitchen. Of course, there are plenty of places of interest and remarkable traditions lying between Odessa, Istanbul and Trabzon. Not only cities but also smaller towns and settlements, all with very different atmospheres but connected to one another by the sea. We will stop at many of these, too. During my travels to this trio of cities, including one summer-long journey doing the whole stretch, which is recounted in full within these pages, a curious group portrait of eastern Europe and Anatolia began to form.

Wedged between ocean and land, all of these Black Sea destinations have something of the frontier about them. Something setting them apart from their host countries. Odessa, on the Slavic fringes of the former Soviet Union, is part of Ukraine yet distinct from it, with a cuisine influenced by Jewish and Italian traditions and a spoken language that is often not Ukrainian, but Russian inflected with Yiddish. Constanta, on Romanias Black Sea coast, was Tomis to the ancient Greeks and today is home to one of the Black Seas largest ports. Varna, Bulgarias third city, has a glorious Roman baths complex and a grand museum housing the worlds oldest gold, while the cuisine of Turkeys huge Black Sea region, I found out, has a geography all of its own, full of smoky and buttery flavours, quite unlike anywhere else. The Black Sea offers waterways and land routes leading east to China; south, to the Middle East and the Mediterranean; west, to eastern Europe, and north, to the Baltic Sea. However you look at the Black Sea on the map, its strategic importance cannot be denied.

This book has been written to be read as a journey, ideally from beginning to end, though some of the essays happily stand alone. Turkey has the biggest slice of the book as it covers the largest swathe of my journey. Odessa, Bessarabia, Romania and Bulgaria, by no means less interesting, have fewer pages accordingly. The chapters are arranged by stops along the coastline, with the narrative driving the recipes.

Just as the location photography showcases the destinations, the recipes are intended to enrich the stories, offering another dimension to the travel writing: a way to eat the culture and taste the journey. Therefore, with this in mind and because I am a journalist and writer who loves food, not a chef the recipes included here are simple. Some are spiced with a sprinkling of imagination, though most reflect local ingredients, people I met and flavours that I researched and experienced. Naturally they also echo my own eating habits, which lean heavily towards fish, dairy, pulses, herbs and vegetables and, generally, away from meat. Essentially, my aim in writing this was to produce a transporting and multi-sensory piece of travel writing one that you can read, see and eat.

Edinburgh, 2018