50 Fun Facts About Black Sea

How many countries have a coastline on the Black Sea?

Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine share the shore, but the drainage basin takes in parts of 24 countries.

Which strait connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara?

From Marmara the Dardanelles lead on to the Aegean; together the two are the Turkish Straits.

The strait through Istanbul holds which distinction among the world's straits?

Istanbul's 17 million people spread inland from both banks of it.

Istanbul's strait has a name meaning cattle passage, after the myth of which woman turned into a cow?

She supposedly came ashore near present-day Uskudar, which was named Bous, the Cow.

The Kerch Strait links the Black Sea to which smaller sea?

The strait is only 3.1 km across at its narrowest and was known in antiquity as the Cimmerian Bosporus.

The Sea of Azov holds which world record?

Its depth ranges from under a metre to just 14 metres, and the ancients called it the Maeotian Swamp.

What is the maximum depth of the Black Sea?

The deepest point lies in the Euxine abyssal plain just south of Yalta.

The Black Sea is the world's largest body of water with what kind of non-mixing basin?

Bacteria eating sunken biomass use up all the free oxygen below the mixed layer.

Roughly what share of the Black Sea's deep-water volume is anoxic, containing no oxygen?

That lifeless layer is why boat hulls and other organic material survive on the seabed for centuries.

The well-preserved Byzantine shipwreck Sinop D lies in the anoxic layer off which country?

The lack of oxygen keeps wood-boring organisms out, which has made the sea a magnet for marine archaeologists.

Surface water leaves the Black Sea at a salinity of 17 PSU. What is the Mediterranean's, by comparison?

Denser Aegean water flows in along the bottom of the Bosporus beneath the fresher water flowing out.

Which is the principal river feeding the Black Sea, along with the Dnieper and Dniester?

The river rises in Germany's Black Forest and passes four national capitals before reaching its delta.

Where does the delta of the sea's principal river, mostly in Romania, rank among Europe's river deltas by size?

Only the Volga Delta is bigger, and the Danube's is the best preserved on the continent.

The Black Sea deluge hypothesis dates the catastrophic Mediterranean flooding of a freshwater lake to when?

William Ryan, Walter Pitman and Petko Dimitrov published it in 1997, and some link the event to the myth of Noah's flood.

The Black Sea's earliest known name, the Sea of Zalpa, was used by the Hittites and which earlier Anatolian people?

The city of Zalpa probably stood near the mouth of the modern Kizil Irmak.

The Greek name Pontos Axeinos, later softened to Euxeinos, originally meant what?

The name is thought to render an Iranian word for dark-coloured, which Greeks heard as their word for unfriendly, then flipped to hospitable after colonising it.

Which of these is NOT one of the four seas named in English after colours?

The White Sea is an inlet of the Barents Sea in northern Russia.

Colchis, where the Argonauts sailed, is in which modern country?

For the ancient Greeks it marked the edge of the known world; it was also home to Medea and the Golden Fleece.

Under which king, who fought three wars against Rome, did the Kingdom of Pontus reach its greatest extent?

The kingdom was proclaimed in 281 BC and fell to the Roman Republic in 63 BC; the name Mithridates means given by Mithras.

Which Roman poet was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he spent his last years?

He blamed a poem and a mistake but never said what the mistake was; the city is now Constanta in Romania.

Which city, founded as the Greek colony Tomis, is Romania's oldest and the Black Sea's largest port?

It only became Romanian after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, when it had barely 5,000 inhabitants.

The world's oldest gold treasure, dated 4600-4200 BC, was found in a necropolis at which Bulgarian city?

Since the site's discovery in 1974, 294 graves have yielded more than 3,000 gold objects.

In which year did the Ottomans take Trebizond, the last Byzantine successor state?

The city was founded in 756 BC by colonists from Miletus and its little empire was a splinter of Byzantium after the Fourth Crusade.

Odesa was founded in 1794 by decree of which Russian ruler?

The site was the fortress of Khadjibey; the city's main street is named after the Spanish-born general Jose de Ribas.

Which famous title did the French aristocrat who governed Odesa from 1803 to 1814 bear?

He fought the plague of 1812 in the city and was later prime minister of France under Louis XVIII.

The 1905 workers' uprising in Odesa was famously supported by the crew of which Russian battleship?

Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film about the mutiny made the city's great staircase world-famous.

Odesa ranks where by population among Ukraine's cities?

It is also the country's major seaport, on the north-western shore of the sea.

Sevastopol was founded in 1783 near the ruins of which ancient Greek city?

The Greek port had been settled in the 5th century BC by colonists from Heraclea Pontica.

The 1854-55 siege of Sevastopol was the central struggle of which war?

Russia lost to a French-led alliance after the allies won the Battle of the Alma and settled in for a brutal siege.

The February 1945 Roosevelt–Churchill–Stalin conference was held near which Black Sea resort?

The Big Three met in the Livadia, Yusupov and Vorontsov palaces after Stalin refused to travel far on doctors' orders.

Which Black Sea city hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics?

The alpine events were held up at Krasnaya Polyana; the resort city stretches 145 km along the coast, the longest in Europe.

Batumi, a major port of the country at the sea's eastern end, is capital of which autonomous republic?

It sits on the site of the Greek colony Bathys, just 20 km from the Turkish border, and is Georgia's second-largest city.

The 1936 convention on warship passage through the Turkish Straits was signed in which Swiss town?

When Turkey is at war or feels threatened, it may decide on warship passage as it sees fit, a power it invoked in 2022.

The bridge across the Kerch Strait opened in 2018 is the longest in Europe, at about how long?

That makes it the longest bridge in Europe; explosions damaged it in October 2022 and July 2023.

Snake Island, off Ukraine's south-western coast, was known in antiquity for a Greek temple to which hero?

Pindar called it the shining island of Achilles; a lighthouse now stands where the temple was.

Roughly what share of the disputed continental shelf around Snake Island did the ICJ award Romania in 2009?

The island itself stayed Ukrainian; a 1997 treaty had already obliged Ukraine to demilitarise it.

The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, sunk by Ukrainian missiles on 14 April 2022, was named what?

The cruiser had been launched as Slava in 1979 and hosted the 1989 Malta Summit between Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush.

The Black Sea Fleet's flagship was hit in 2022 by sea-skimming missiles of which Ukrainian type?

Russia insisted an onboard fire had set off munitions instead.

The Turkish commercial fleet catches around 300,000 tons a year of which fish in the Black Sea?

Most of the catch is landed in November and December.

The beluga sturgeon of the Black and Caspian basins, prized for its caviar, holds what record?

A female taken in the Volga estuary in 1827 weighed 1,571 kg and measured 7.2 metres; the species is now critically endangered.

Which marine mammal survived on Snake Island until the 1950s?

The sea's dolphins and harbour porpoises are all endangered subspecies found nowhere else.

An invasive comb jelly that crashed the Black Sea's zooplankton in the late 1980s belongs to which genus?

It arrived in ships' ballast water on top of decades of overfishing and Danube pollution.

The Black Sea's net outflow of about 300 cubic km a year passes through the straits into which sea?

The sea ultimately drains all the way to the Atlantic through the Mediterranean and the Strait of Gibraltar.

The Black Sea's longest east-west extent is roughly how far?

The sea covers about 436,400 square kilometres, not counting the Sea of Azov.

Who joined Petko Dimitrov and Walter Pitman in proposing the Black Sea deluge hypothesis in 1997?

In 2003 the same team revised the date of the flood to about 8,800 years ago.

What is the Turkish name for the Black Sea?

The Ottomans used both Karadeniz and the Perso-Arabic Bahr-i Siyah, both meaning 'Black Sea'; 18th-century English writers preferred 'Euxine Sea'.

The Black Sea's drainage basin, about 2 million square km, covers all or part of how many countries?

Only six countries actually touch the coast, but rivers such as the Danube pull water from deep inside central Europe.

Which two rivers supply more than 90% of the water flowing into the Sea of Azov?

The Don contributes roughly twice as much as the Kuban; more than 20 rivers reach the sea in total, mostly from the north.

What is the name of the large complex of shallow lagoons on the Sea of Azov nicknamed the 'Rotten Sea'?

The lagoons are typically only half a metre to a metre deep and cover some 2,560 square kilometres.

Which three marine mammals live in the Black Sea, all of them endangered?

Subspecies of the common and bottlenose dolphins share the basin with the harbour porpoise, all under pressure from human activity.