"Troubled Water" by Jens Mühling

 Troubled Water proved a pleasant surprise. It is short (299 pages), highly readable and packed with information.

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

Troubled Water, Jens Mühling

June 25, 2022

 

“I’ve seen the Black Sea from all sides,

and from none of them was it black.”

                                                                                                                                Jens Mühling

                                                                                                                                Troubled Water

 

This book is timely. It was access to the Black Sea that was behind Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. It is control of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports that is a goal today. Ukraine is the world’s largest producer of grains, almost all of which is shipped across the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, to the Mediterranean and beyond. The Ukrainian economy depends on access to its largest ports, and the world depends on its grain.

 

The Black Sea is an unknown region to most of us in the west. We associate it with the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade, with the World War II conference in Yalta in February 1945. We learn that it is fed by the Bosporus, which divides Istanbul into a city that bridges two continents. Two other rivers that feed the Sea are the Danube whose delta separates Romania from Ukraine and the Dnieper, which rises in Russia, flows through Kyiv and enters the Black Sea near Kherson.  We learn that the Sea dates back eight thousand years, and that all life lives near its surface, as 90% of the water volume is clinically dead, because no oxygen percolates down.

 

Jens Mühling takes the reader on a 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) one-year trip around the Black Sea. He begins in the Russian community of Taman on the northeast coast and travels clockwise through six countries. He visits small towns and often stays with families he meets. He travels simply, mostly by bus but sometimes by thumb. He converses with ordinary people. He writes of ancient myths, of Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, and of the Amazons whom Jason feared – “…bogeywomen galloping through the world of Greek myth.” We read of Ovid’s exile to what is today Constanta, Romania. He writes of the empires that included the Black Sea within their confines – Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Imperialist Russia. Over millennia, distant rulers governed this region, and we read of more recent life under Nazi and Communist rule. For example, while crossing the Turkey-Bulgaria border near Rezovo, he is told of how hundreds of East German and Hungarian vacationers tried futilely to cross the border into Turkey during Soviet domination: “Very few made it across, and not all of them were captured alive,” he is told.

 

In Crimea, he speaks with a man named Ruzhdi, a man “in his mid-fifties with a charismatically greying beard and barely suppressed rage in his eyes. He was born in Uzbekistan, in a camp settlement near Samarkand. His parents had lived through the 1944 deportations when Stalin had carted the entire population of Tartars – just under 200,000 people – to Central Asia after accusing them of collectively collaborating with the Germans. Many hadn’t survived the journey…”

 

Disparate People along the Black Sea are matched by the variety of its topography. “In Yalta,” he writes, “there was a huge Lenin memorial, which was ringed with palm trees and overshadowed by snow-capped peaks.” Russia’s Caucuses – which include Mt. Elbrus, Europe’s highest peak – descend to tropical vegetation along the Black Sea’s southeast coast. 

 

Jens Mühling leaves us with a sense for the Black Sea – its place, history, beauty and people. He provides, in the frontispiece, a self-drawn map, which allows the reader to follow the author on his journey. 

 

This is a book you will be glad you picked up.