PERSPECTIVES: The great museum we call the Black Sea (06/25/06)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The great museum we call the Black Sea

Penetrating the perpetual darkness, powerful lights on the deep-diving ROV (remotely operated vehicle) Hercules illuminated the way for the high definition camera as it closed in on dozens of ancient amphora scattered 180 meters below the surface of the Black Sea. Once filled with olive oil, wine, honey or other valuable commodities, they'd been hidden for a thousand years, ever since going down a dozen miles off Crimea, probably in a storm several degrees worse than the one that was rocking the ship where I sat comfortably, albeit uneasily, watching a plasma TV monitor as the remains of another ship - one that had once sailed between Byzantium and Kyivan Rus' - came into focus.

For years, Dr. Robert Ballard, best known for finding the wreckage of the HMS Titanic, had looked to the Black Sea as the most promising repository of ancient history anywhere, not only because of the 3,000 years that humans have been sailing there, but also because of its unique waters - anoxic below 200 meters. That means there's no decay; whatever's at the bottom is fully preserved.

Dr. Serhiy Voronov, head of the Department of Underwater Heritage at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, often refers to "The Great Museum we call the Black Sea." He and Dr. Ballard first met in Kyiv in August 2005 and agreed to form a joint U.S.-Ukraine oceanographic team to search for archeological sites in the Black Sea, i.e. shipwrecks. With President Viktor Yushchenko taking special interest in the project, the expedition came together in record time and, by May of this year, an American-Ukrainian team of scientists and scholars was exploring off the coast of Crimea.

There's a lot to explore. According to legend, Jason and his Argonauts sailed the Black Sea before the time of Homer. In the 5th century B.C., Herodotus, "The Father of History," visited present-day Ukraine and described the many interactions between the Greeks and the Scythians, Amazons and other peoples who lived there. The spectacular ruins at Chersonesos in present-day Sevastopol - depicted on the 1-hryvnia note - bear witness to the 2,500 years that the Greeks maintained a presence in Crimea, lasting to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in the 1400s. After the Greeks, many others sailed the Black Sea: Romans, Byzantines, Vikings, the Rus', Genoans, Venetians, Ottoman Turks, Zaporozhian Kozaks, Russians, Germans, British, etc. And many a ship now lies in its depths.

Indeed, I saw several on the screen, including a World War II Soviet cruiser sunk by the Nazis - "sleeping with Neptune," as the young Ukrainian scientists on board put it. One of them, sporting a yellow Pora T-shirt, told fascinating stories about how he and other activists occupied the (Independence Square) during the Orange Revolution in the student-led campaign to save Ukrainian democracy.

One of the older scientists, commenting during dinner on the excellent meals, offered perspective when he reminded his younger colleagues and American guests how different everything had been before independence - how you waited in line for food of dubious quality, how you had to know somebody with connections to get decent meat and produce, and how you paid a bribe to get that.

As for a joint U.S.-Ukraine expedition, that would have been impossible. For 75 years, Sevastopol, home to the Soviet Black Sea fleet and the wondrous ruins of Chersonesos, was closed; Black Sea waters were restricted; Ukraine was not free.

Soon after independence in 1991, University of Texas archeologist Dr. Joseph Carter showed up in Chersonesos to offer his services to make that treasure accessible to scholars and tourists. Also a member of the Ballard-Voronov team, Dr. Carter was at the same TV monitor I was at and immediately identified the provenance of the ancient amphora the camera exposed after a millennium under the sea.

This was the first of what Dr. Ballard expects to be an annual expedition. Indeed, preliminary discussions have been held about a museum to showcase the artifacts that will inevitably be discovered when the team goes back in 2007 and in years hence.

Dr. Ballard, however, is not content to merely find shipwrecks and artifacts and then put them in a museum or publish a coffee table book with photographs of his findings. He wants to share the experience, as well as the outcome. What the ROV saw and then displayed on the ship board monitor was beamed to a satellite a hundred miles overhead, which relayed the images to Immersion Presents in Mystic, Conn. - Dr. Ballard's home base. There an audience, which included members of Dr. Voronov's team from the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, saw what all of us aboard the ship did, just a split second later and seven time zones away.

Dr. Ballard calls this "telepresence." It can be applied anywhere there's a satellite dish and Internet2. He sees the day when wide-eyed children in classrooms throughout Ukraine will be able to watch the rich history of the Black Sea basin unfold in living color. It's already happening in the United States through Dr. Ballard's distance learning program, JASON. He's wants to apply the same concept to Greece, where he's exploring the Sea of Crete for evidence of the vanished Minoan civilization. Significantly, the program he's designing doesn't have to be confined to archeology. The young Ukrainian oceanographers on board, for example, were researching Black Sea ecology. Using "telepresence," students anywhere, joining Drs. Ballard, Voronov, Carter and others on expeditions to the past (and present), can learn science, math, language, history, whatever.

Looking back on my Black Sea adventure, I'm struck by the inexplicable directions life can take you. I got my political feet wet lobbying for human rights in Ukraine. I was the same age then that the young oceanographer wearing the yellow Pora T-shirt is now. I never dreamed a direct thread from the mid-1970s would take me from the lobbying I did then to the job I have now: lobbying for one of the world's premier oceanographers; or that his vision would bring me to Kyiv last August and onto a ship off the shores of Crimea the following May.

The sea bottom holds many mysteries. Life itself has many more. If all goes well, the 2006 Black Sea expedition will be just the beginning of many fascinating new chapters.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: fedynsky@stratos.net.

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