Last weekend we traveled to Constanta, Romania’s oldest and fifth most populous city located on the west coast of the Black Sea. While there, we visited the site of the ancient Greek colony of Histria, located just to the north of Constanta. There we encountered the ruins of the ancient colony, first discovered in 1868 and then excavated after 1918.
Certainly, modern day Romania is not the first place I think of when I think about sites of ancient Greek colonies, perhaps a result of projecting my impressions of the modern day countries surrounding the Black Sea. Indeed, this trip raised a lot of questions surrounding the history of the Black Sea and its role up to the current day. When Histria was founded, it was part of a vast network of Greek trading colonies about the Black Sea and the greater Mediterranean world. These colonies while certainly culturally related were most connected by economic issues, catalyzed by the easily traversed highway the Black Sea offered. This was noticeable in the museum with coins and pottery from places as far away as Rhodos and significant amounts of goods from other Black Sea colonies like Sinope.
This trip bolstered our understanding of the Black Sea as presented by Charles King in The Black Sea. King points out how the Black Sea can itself be thought of as a region established by the natural ease of access given by the water. Indeed, this status of the Black Sea as a region is immediately apparent when considering the conquests of the Pontic king Mithridates, who for a brief time maintained an empire of Asia minor and a long string of lands surrounding the coastline of the Black Sea. In the present day, it is hard to imagine two nations as different as Turkey and Ukraine being so intimately connected, yet when modern day nationalistic conceptions of culture are tossed out it is immediately obvious why Crimea and the areas along the northern coast of Turkey should be so intertwined.
In my mind then, the Black Sea offers a depiction of how nationalist conceptions of statehood and culture disrupt the reality of a more cosmopolitan world. While not nationalist in any real sense, the Roman’s perceived cultural superiority to the Dacian tribes occupying the lands about Histria was shook when the Romans discovered the stone walls and baths present there which demonstrated the Dacian’s Greek connections. No matter how barbaric the Romans may have considered the tribes surrounding the Black Sea, ultimately they shared far more than ever expected. These imagined differences between people continues to the present day, influencing our imagined separations of people despite a far more common reality, falling directly into a discussion surrounding the issues of nationalism, xenophobia, and othering we have approached throughout our studies in Romania.
Classical Origins of Histria
