Geography... (With the North Sea...)
View of Yalta and the Black Sea from Ai Petri.
Yalta! this city name is known to everyone for sure, as it is associated with the February 1945 conference bringing together Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill... Conference "on the partition of the world", in anticipation of victory (Between who was the partition of the world negotiated? Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Note that Europe has no place there. Prefiguration of what is happening today in Ukraine, with the same protagonists ? What do you think ?...)
Yalta is the Russian "Riviera"...
Aï Petri (= Saint Peter in Greek) is a peak in the mountain range which runs along the southern coast of Crimea; at an altitude of 1200 and a few meters, its particularity is that it is accessible by cable car from the park which borders the beach of a small seaside resort on the outskirts of Yalta. That's what you can call combining the sea and the mountains !
As you can see... the Black Sea is blue, as well as most of the time, with variations of green depending on the weather. But then...
Why is she called "Black"?
In fact, when they began to explore it, the Greeks first called it Skythikos Pontos, the sea of the Scythians, who populated its shores. The Scythians themselves called it Axaina (Indigo in Iranian, which was their language), a word that the Greeks took for Axeinos = Inhospitable in Greek - I will come back to this in a future note on Crimea in mythology. Pontos Axeinos, the inhospitable sea.
We can assume that once they knew its geography, and established a number of colonies there, they transformed Axeinos into Euxeinos = Welcoming - by euphemism? Bravado? Or because all things considered... The name is latinized into "Pont-Euxine" which is in use throughout Roman antiquity and the Byzantine period.
Some people think that when the name Black Sea appears, it is in reference to the Iranian original (Axaïna) which designates a (more or less) dark shade (Indigo)... Which doesn't really seem convincing...
More interesting, it seems that the Turkic peoples who settled in Anatolia from the 11th century in fact associated colors with the cardinal directions. Black being associated with the North, White with the South, Red with the West and Green/Yellow with the East. They called, therefore, the Pont-Euxine Karadeniz, and the Mediterranean Akdeniz...
Karadeniz (from Kara = Black, which I have already talked about in the note on "Karandash" of 07/18/2023), therefore literally "Black Sea", but actually meaning "North Sea"...
Other Intercultural Notes...
"Si vis pacem..." the article, some kind of manifesto of our association.
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