Black Sea Quotes

“Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal.

And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia.”
― Paul Christensen, The Heretic Emperor

“One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear...
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here?”
― Mark Strand

“Pentru tinerii bărbați și tinerele femei din Balcani, stepa eurasiatică și Caucaz, sclavia putea astfel constitui o cale de acces la un statut privigeliat în statul otoman. Mulți o preferau pentru a ajunge în vârful administrației și societății imperiale ca mari viziri, comandanți militari ori soții ale sultanului.”
― Charles King

“And as if blowing it up, flooding it, and keeping it behind the klyon wasn't enough, State Security special forces patrolled the area until 1989. Some locals say there was an additional 'live fence' of thousands of vipers specially bred for this purpose by Uzbeks along the southern Black Sea, under something called decree number 56. Why Uzbeks? Why vipers? Did decree 56 read: 'Let us fulfil the five-year snake plan in one year'?”
― Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe