50 Fun Facts About Black Sea

Which landlocked country swapped land with Ukraine for a route to the Black Sea?

Moldova: it gave up a stretch of road for a strip of riverbank only a few hundred metres long, then built a port there that seagoing ships can reach.

Which strait, lined by Istanbul, connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara?

The Bosporus: it cuts Istanbul in two, so ferries, three bridges and a rail tunnel carry commuters between Europe and Asia every day.

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

The narrowest for shipping: well under a kilometre across at its tightest, it forces tankers through sharp turns in strong currents, which makes it a dangerous and difficult passage for big ships.

Istanbul's strait has a name meaning ox ford, traditionally tied to which mythical woman turned into a cow?

Io: loved by Zeus and turned into a white heifer, she was driven across the world by a gadfly Hera sent, swimming this strait on the way.

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

The Sea of Azov: at most 14 metres deep, it is the world's shallowest sea, and river silt has left parts of its Taganrog Gulf barely a metre deep.

Tradition blames ships of which Italian republic, fleeing its Black Sea colony of Caffa, for bringing the Black Death to Europe?

Genoa: an Italian notary wrote that Mongols besieging Caffa hurled plague-dead bodies over its walls and that fleeing ships carried the disease west, though historians now doubt it reached Europe by that route alone.

The Black Sea's deep water, over 2 km down at its deepest, is laced with which toxic gas?

Hydrogen sulfide: below the top hundred metres or so there is no oxygen at all, leaving a dark dead zone where only specially adapted bacteria can live.

Greek myth chained which Titan to a peak in the Caucasus, above the Black Sea's eastern shore?

Prometheus: in the usual telling Zeus bound him there for giving fire to humans and sent an eagle to eat his liver, which grew back to be eaten again.

A 2,400-year-old Greek ship found intact in the Black Sea resembles one on a vase carrying which hero?

Odysseus: the British Museum's Siren Vase shows him tied to the mast, and the real ship kept its own mast, rudders and rowing benches because no oxygen reaches it two kilometres down.

Which philosopher, said to have hunted by lantern in daylight for an honest man, was born at Sinope on the Black Sea?

Diogenes: tradition has him driven from Sinope in a scandal over debased coins, and he made 'deface the currency' his mission, mocking every convention.

Beneath the surface current carrying Black Sea water out through Istanbul's strait, what flows the other way?

Saltier, heavier seawater: it creeps in along the bottom and sinks, so the sea stays layered, with a surface only about half as salty as the ocean floating on deep water that never mixes.

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

The Danube: it rises in Germany's Black Forest and drains parts of 19 countries, the most international river basin in the world, so rain falling in the Black Forest ends up in the Black Sea.

The delta where the Black Sea's biggest river ends, a World Heritage wetland, lies mostly in which country?

Romania: a small share spills into Ukraine, and UNESCO protects the maze of reed beds and lakes because more than 300 kinds of birds use it.

A 1997 theory says the Black Sea was what before the Mediterranean burst into it?

A freshwater lake: the geologists behind the theory pictured the sea swamping it and its settlements and inspiring the story of Noah's flood, though later studies suggest the water rose far more gently.

Greek myth placed Themiscyra, the capital of which legendary people, on the Black Sea's southern shore?

The Amazons: Heracles's ninth labour was to fetch the belt of their queen Hippolyte, and graves of armed women found on the steppes around the Black Sea suggest the legend had real models.

To Greek ears the Black Sea's early name Pontos Axeinos, later softened to Euxeinos, meant what?

Inhospitable sea: Greeks probably borrowed a Persian word for dark and heard it as their own word for unfriendly, then flipped it to Euxeinos, hospitable, once their colonies lined the shore.

One scholarly theory says the Black Sea was named under an old colour code in which black stood for which direction?

North: in that scheme red meant south and white west, so the Black Sea was simply the northern sea and the Red Sea the southern one, though other scholars dispute the idea.

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

Georgia: to the Greeks Colchis was a land of fabulous wealth and sorcery, and real colonists from Miletus later settled its coast to trade for gold, timber and linen.

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

Mithridates VI: fearing assassins, he is said to have taken small doses of poison for years to build immunity, and so, the story goes, failed when he tried to poison himself in final defeat.

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

Ovid: he blamed 'a poem and a mistake' without ever saying what the mistake was, and years of pleading in verse moved neither Augustus nor his heir Tiberius to let him come home.

Which Black Sea port city was founded as the Greek colony Tomis?

Constanta: under Ottoman rule it shrank to a village of a few thousand people, and only after it changed hands in 1878 did it grow into its country's main seaport.

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

Varna: in 1972 a young excavator driver digging a trench for electric cables fished a gold bracelet out of his bucket, and archaeologists went on to open about 300 graves.

Trebizond, which held out against the Ottomans until 1461, was a breakaway remnant of which empire?

Byzantine: a branch of the empire's old ruling family set up in Trebizond in 1204, as crusaders closed in on Constantinople, and their little state outlasted the capital's fall to the Ottomans by eight years.

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

Catherine II: her statue in the city has come down twice, removed by the Bolsheviks in 1920 and again in December 2022, after residents voted during Russia's invasion to take it away.

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

Duc de Richelieu: after eleven years building up the city he went home to serve twice as France's prime minister, and talked the Allied armies occupying the country into leaving.

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

Potemkin: Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin made the city's great staircase famous with a massacre scene that never happened there, though troops did shoot civilians elsewhere in town.

Turkey's Black Sea coast is the world's biggest source of which nut?

Hazelnuts: Turkey grows more than half the world's crop, mostly along that coast, where the harvest comes in each August, and Ferrero is a leading buyer, so much of the world's Nutella starts there.

Which garment is named after a Black Sea port where British troops froze in the 1850s?

Balaclava: the name, first recorded decades later, is thought to recall British troops shivering through a winter at the port of Balaklava, and the cardigan and raglan honour two of their generals.

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

The Crimean War: a young Leo Tolstoy served as an artillery officer inside the besieged city and turned what he saw into his Sevastopol Sketches.

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

Yalta: there Stalin agreed to join the war against Japan once Germany was beaten, and in return Roosevelt and Churchill promised the Soviets a sphere of influence in Manchuria.

Which Black Sea city hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics?

Sochi: a humid subtropical beach resort, it staged the ice events beside the sea and the snow events up at Krasnaya Polyana in the Caucasus.

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

Adjara: its people converted to Islam during two centuries of Ottoman rule yet kept their own language, and the Ottomans were only forced to hand the region over in 1878.

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

Montreux: the treaty lets Turkey shut the straits to warships in wartime, and it did so days after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 by formally calling the fighting a war.

The 19 km Kerch Strait bridge, opened in 2018, took the title of Europe's longest from a bridge in which country?

Portugal: Lisbon's Vasco da Gama Bridge had held the record for twenty years when Vladimir Putin opened its successor by driving an orange truck across at the head of a convoy.

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

Achilles: the Greek traveller Pausanias describes a wooded White Island with the hero's temple and statue, where one wounded visitor claimed to have met Achilles himself.

Which nomadic horse archers ruled the Black Sea steppe when Greeks first colonised its shores?

The Scythians: by Herodotus's account they saw off Darius of Persia without a pitched battle, retreating across the steppe and harrying his huge army until it turned back.

The flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which sank in April 2022 after a reported Ukrainian missile strike, was named what?

Moskva: seven weeks earlier it had radioed the border guards on Snake Island to surrender and received a famously rude refusal instead.

Ukraine says it sank the Black Sea Fleet's flagship in 2022 with two of which home-built anti-ship missiles?

Neptune: Ukraine and US officials said two of the missiles struck the cruiser, while Russia blamed an unexplained fire on board and rough seas as the ship was towed.

Which small fish, caught mainly in winter, makes up the largest share of Turkey's Black Sea catch?

Anchovies: known locally as hamsi, they are netted through the winter, so cold-weather cooking on Turkey's Black Sea coast is built around them, from fried fish to anchovy pilaf.

Which sturgeon of the Black and Caspian seas, now critically endangered, yields the world's most expensive caviar?

Beluga: its roe is so prized that overfishing pushed the fish to the brink, and in 2006 the international trade in wild caviar was suspended to save the sturgeon.

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

Monk seal: fishermen long killed the Mediterranean monk seal as a net-raiding pest, and after the island's colony went, the last sighting anywhere in the Black Sea came in 1997.

Which invader, carried from the Americas in ships' ballast, wrecked the Black Sea's food web in the 1980s?

Comb jelly: with nothing there to eat it, Mnemiopsis devoured the plankton and fish eggs until a second newcomer, a comb jelly that preys on it, arrived and helped rein it in.

Water leaving the Black Sea through the Turkish Straits flows out into which sea?

The Aegean: rivers and rain pour in more water than evaporation removes, so the surplus spills out through the straits, crossing the little Sea of Marmara on the way.

The Black Sea, about 1,175 km from west to east, covers roughly the same area as which US state?

California: the match is close, at well over 400,000 square kilometres each, yet below the sea's thin top layer nearly all of that water holds no oxygen and no fish.

Which discoverer of the Titanic's wreck later searched the Black Sea floor for a drowned ancient shoreline?

Robert Ballard: in 2000 his robot submarines filmed what looked like the remains of a wooden building about 100 metres down, on land he believed the sea had swallowed some 7,000 years ago.

What is the Turkish name for the Black Sea?

Karadeniz: kara means black, and although such names are not recorded before the 13th century, it was the Turks who spread 'Black Sea' in place of the Greeks' 'Euxine'.

Which landlocked country lies entirely inside the Black Sea's drainage basin, which reaches into 24 countries?

Hungary: rivers enter it on three sides and all flow out to the south, so every drop of rain that falls there is bound for the Black Sea.

Which two rivers supply most of the water flowing into the Sea of Azov?

Don and Kuban: they pour in so much fresh water and silt that parts of the sea are almost fresh, and its Taganrog Gulf is a metre deep or less.

Which shellfish, native to the Black Sea region, invaded the Great Lakes in the 1980s?

The zebra mussel: it is thought to have crossed the Atlantic as larvae in the ballast water of cargo ships, and it now grows so thickly inside pipes that it chokes the water intakes of power plants.

The Black Sea has its own subspecies of common dolphin, bottlenose dolphin and which other cetacean?

Harbour porpoise: one of the smallest cetaceans, it otherwise keeps to cool Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which is why the cut-off Black Sea population counts as a subspecies of its own.