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Abstract: The introduction first outlines different perspectives on the Black Sea: in history, as a site of imperial conflicts and a buffer zone; in area studies, as a "region"; and in anthropology, as a sea crisscrossed by migration, cultural influences, alternative visions, and often a mutual turning of backs. We then discuss the Black Sea in the context of maritime ethnography and the study of ports, "hero cities", pipelines, and political crises. The following sections consider Smiths notion of the "territorialization of memory" in relation to histories of exile and the more recent interactions brought about by migration and trade. In the concluding section we discuss how the Black Sea has appeared as a "horizon" and imaginary of the beyond for the peoples living around its shores.
Keywords: maritime ethnography, regional study, Russia, trade, Turkey, Ukraine
The Black Sea has long been described as a place of mixed cultures and allegiances.1 For centuries a playground and a battlefield of the Russian and Ottoman Empires, as well as a buffer zone between their successor states, it was a crucible for cosmopolitan practices (Ascherson 2007; King 2011; Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2012). A good example is the continuing presence in Istanbul of the leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church-the ecumenical or "Roman" patriarchate of Constantinople. Yet the Black Sea has at times hampered instead of facilitated the movement of people, goods, ideas, and imaginaries. Like Braudel's (1986) Mediterranean, the Black Sea in the longue durée could be seen not as a single sea but a "complex of seas", where Christian and Muslim civilizations, later socialist and nonsocialist regimes, and currently NATO and non-NATO member states were key adversaries but sometimes also temporary allies.2
There is no single geopolitical definition of the Black Sea region. It ranges from a core comprising the six coastal states (Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria, and Romania) to the so-called wider Black Sea region, which also includes some of their neighbors-Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro. The region is also envisioned differently by the differently positioned political powers. Thus, whereas for Turkey it is the zone that connects the Caspian, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean Seas, for the United States it is the area "stretching from the Caspian Sea to the...