For perhaps four thousand years, perhaps even longer, the Black Sea has been a meeting place. Around its shores, many different peoples with completely different styles of living made contact for the first time. Sometimes the meeting was violent, as new waves of immigrants drove Black Sea inhabitants out of their homes. Often, though, these peoples settled down to live with each other, especially in the ancient cities all round the Black Sea coast. The rivers and the sea swarmed with fish, and the land around the shore was rich and fertile. Craftsmen, merchants, fishermen and farmers with many different religions and customs cooperated to take benefit from the region's wealth in fish, timber, wheat and precious metals.

Most of the immigrants who arrived on the Black Sea coast came from the East – from different regions of central Asia . They were nomadic peoples, who moved across the open grasslands in wagons with great herds of horses and cattle. When they reached the Sea, they could go no further and settled down. The Scythians and the Sarmatians who followed them stayed in the region for almost a thousand years, until new invasions in the 4 th century AD drove them westwards. These people spoke a language related to modern Iranian. Later waves of incomers, such as the Huns and Tartars, had a more Turkic culture and speech. The Goths, who arrived from the Baltic in the 3 rd century AD, spoke an early form of German.

But other settlers reached the Black Sea from the West and South. They came not as conquerors but as merchants. The first were the Greeks, who began to found colonies around the coast 2,700 years ago. The Greeks were town-dwellers and traders, many of whom could read and write. So they were amazed to meet Black Sea nomads such as the Scythians, who seemed to have no settled home and no cities, and who lived on the move with their herds and wagons. This meeting was very important for the future of human thinking. It made the Greeks claim that there were two kinds of human being on earth – the “civilised” who lived in towns and villages and spoke Greek, and the “barbarians”. Soon the Greeks began to use the world “barbarian” to mean everything that was primitive and cruel, and the word “civilised” to exalt their own way of life. This one-eyed way of seeing other peoples still dominates most of the world.

Greek traders bought goods from the Scythians and paid their kings with gold and silver jewellery. Without dried fish and wheat from the Black Sea , the Greek and Roman empires would not have been able to feed themselves. Most of the cities around the Black Sea today were founded as ancient Greek colonies. Later, in the Middle Ages, came colonists from the Italian city-states, Genoa and Venice . They bought luxury goods imported from China down the Silk Road , but also slaves from Russia and the Caucasus to make good the labour shortage in Western Europe . Many other trading peoples, such as Armenians and Jews, also settled in these coastal cities. But Greek merchants and farmers continued to live around the Black Sea for another 2000 years, until in the 20 th century Turkish and Soviet rulers found reasons to expel them.

These were cities with many languages and many religions. In the 6 th century BC, the Greek colony of Dioscurios used nine different languages in its market-place. When that city became Sukhumi , in modern Abkhazia, much the same was true until a few years ago. That rich mix has been the special nature of Black Sea culture. But while life in these multiethnic towns did not change much over the centuries, the big picture of conquest and invasion around the Black Sea changed dramatically.

After the Greek period, the region became part of the Roman Empire , until the Goths and then the Huns conquered the northern shore of the Sea. In the 7 th century AD, Islam arrived on the Black Sea as the Arabs invaded the Caucasus . Eight hundred years later, a section of the Mongol-Tatar “Golden Horde” established its own Moslem “Khanate” in Crimea . Soon afterwards the Byzantine Empire , which had once ruled all the Black Sea shores, was overthrown by the Ottoman Turks who captured Constantinople in 1453. This isolated the Black Sea peoples from their old links with Europe , until – in the 17 th century - a new Power arrived from the North. Russia began to expand southwards until it reached the Black Sea , finally conquering Crimea in 1783. There followed almost two centuries of Black Sea wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, which gave Russia (later the Soviet Union) control of the Caucasus and led to the emergence of independent Bulgaria and Romania.

t is many centuries since a single Power ruled the whole Black Sea shore. Today, after the fall of the Soviet Union , six independent nation-states live around the Sea. Each has a rich culture of its own. But in the 20 th century, a new ethnic nationalism arose. Tolerance for minority cultures in the Black Sea port-cities began to weaken. Greek communities left Trabzon in Turkey and Anapa in Russia , to take two examples, after nearly three thousand years. The Jews, Poles and Italians have almost all left Odessa in Ukraine , the city whose wealth they created in the 19 th century.

The inhabitants of the modern Black Sea region fall into four main groups. These are not “races” in a biological sense. They are defined mostly by their languages, and by their culture. The Black Sea has no “original inhabitants” or natives. Everyone here is a descendent of immigrants – even if they first reached the Sea four thousand years ago.

a) Slav Peoples.

Bulgarians, Russians and Ukrainians all speak closely related Slav languages. The origins of the Slavs seem to lie in the Bronze Age somewhere north of the Black Sea . It is very possible that they all spoke one “proto-Slav” language before they spread out in different directions. But their languages now unite cultures which are often made up of very different elements.

The Russians , as a nation, include not only Slavs but millions of people whose ancestors were Mongol-Tatars, Balts, or Finno-Ugrians related to modern Finns and Estonians. Many city-dwelling Russians have family roots which are Polish, German, Jewish or Caucasian.

The Bulgarians probably originated as a Turkic-speaking people, who entered Europe with Hunnish invaders in the 3 rd century AD. They finally settled in the lands south of the lower Danube in the 7 th century, where they mingled and intermarried with other immigrant peoples, including Slavs whose language they eventually adopted. The Bulgarians were ruled by the Ottoman Empire from 1396 to 1878, but most of them retained their Orthodox Christian religion. The largest minority in Bulgaria is Turkish.

The Ukrainians are a recent nation formed out of several elements, most of them Slav. One element is Cossack, the communities of escaped serfs from Russia , Turkic nomads and other marginalised people who lived in the steppe between the Dnieper and the Don. A second element is ethnically Russian, settled mainly in eastern Ukraine but also forming the main Slav population of port cities like Odessa and Sevastopol . The third component, are non-Russian Slavs speaking the Ukrainian language, have their original homeland is inland in western Ukraine near the Polish borders.

After the Russians, the Crimean Tatars are the most important minority. They were deported to central Asia by Stalin but have now returned to Crimea , and have reoccupied some of their ancestral lands. Until the Second World War, the larger landowners of western Ukraine were almost all Poles, while the small towns and villages were often strongly Jewish. Stalin and Hitler between them destroyed both groups, although a Polish minority still exists in this part of Ukraine . . .

b)  “Dacian” People: Romania .

The Romanian language is the only “Latin” language in the Black Sea region. It is much closer to Italian, Spanish or French than to Turkish, Greek or to any Slav language. But how it came to be spoken by people on the lower Danube is not entirely clear. One traditional and popular explanation claims that Romanians are the descendants of Latin-speaking Roman soldiers settled in the region as colonists after completing military service. Another version suggests that the ancestors of modern Romanians are Thracian and Dacian peoples who inhabited the country 2000 years ago and set up powerful military kingdoms.

Romania 's main national minority is the large Hungarian community living in Transylvania . The ancient German minorities in the same region, the Banat Swabians and the Transylvanian Saxons, have almost all emigrated to Germany in the last decade. There are small Slav communities living in the reeds of the Danube Delta, including a community of Russian “old believers” who took refuge from persecution there. Romania also contains a large Roma population, distributed across the country.

c) Turkic Peoples: Turks and Tatars.

The Turks , another originally nomad group from central Asia , arrived on the south shore of the Black Sea in the 12 th century. A hundred years later, they conquered Anatolia and established what was to be the Moslem " Ottoman Empire " which eventually - after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 - completely encircled the Black Sea . When the Empire collapsed after the First World War, the new Turkish state expelled a number of non-Moslem minorities, above all the large and ancient Greek communities along the north coast of Anatolia .

The Tatars , or Mongol-Tatars, arrived in the Volga river basin from Central Asia in the Middle Ages. The so-called "Golden Horde", the name of the western part of the Mongol-Tatar empire, converted to Islam in the 14 th century. One branch of the Horde moved down to the Black Sea and entered Crimea , where they established the Crimean-Tatar Khanate in 1423. The Crimean Tatars later became part of the Ottoman Empire , until Russia seized Crimea from the Turks in 1783. At the end of the Second World War, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars to central Asia , but they have now returned to Crimea and number about 270,000.

d)  Caucasian Peoples : Georgians and Abkhazians .

The Georgians rightly consider themselves one of the oldest nations in Eurasia . Their language, belonging to the Kartvelian family, is pre-Indo-European and the Georgian people have probably been settled on the Black Sea for some 4000 years. The population along the Black Sea coast is largely Mingrelian, a people often counted as Georgian but who speak a slightly different Kartvelian language. Most Georgians are Orthodox Christians, but there are many Moslems in the province of Ajaria , on the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea next to the Turkish frontier. Georgia regained its independence in 1991.

The Abkhazians are a tiny people belonging to the north-west Caucasian language family. They inhabit the foothills of the western Caucasus and the coastal strip, between the Russian border near Sochi and the current demarcation line with Georgia on the Inguri river in the south. Many of them emigrated to Turkey when Russia conquered the Caucasus 140 years ago, but the remaining Abkhazians were eventually given a form of autonomy within the Soviet Union . After Georgia became independent in 1991, Abkhazia was claimed as an integral part of Georgian territory. War broke out in 1992, ending with the flight of the Georgian and Mingrelian population. Abkhazia declared independence, but remains unrecognised by Georgia or other states. Most of the Greek and Jewish communities left at the time of the war. Large Russian and Armenian minorities remain, and many Mingrelians have returned to the southern province of Gali .

Until now, the special quality of the Black Sea region has been its mixture of many peoples living together as neighbours. This mixture used to exist not only in the big cosmopolitan ports, like Odessa , Constanta , Trabzon or Batumi , but often in small farming villages as well.

These mixtures have been ethnic, religious and social - in the sense that different ethnic groups often specialised in different trades. They have given Black Sea region its variety of different life-styles, cooking and language.

But over the last hundred years, this diversity has been badly reduced. This is partly because of the coming of new nationalist ideologies ("one race, one language, one state"). It is also because liberation from oppressive regimes seems, for reasons we don't really understand, to melt the cement which holds old multi-ethnic communities together.

The main minority losses are:

•  The Pontic Greeks, who are descended from 7 th century BC Greek colonists. After the new Turkish Republic was established, the Greek population of Turkey was expelled in 1923. Some went to Greece ; others moved to the Caucasus and south Russia . But in 1949 Stalin deported all Greeks in the southern USSR to Asia . Most survivors have now moved to Greece .

•  The Jews, who formed large and often wealthy communities in coastal cities around the Black Sea , especially in Odessa and other Ukrainian ports. Most of them were murdered by the Nazis. The majority of the survivors left for Israel or the United States as soon as emigration from the Soviet Union became possible in the 1980s.

•  The German and Swiss communities. As mentioned above, the old German settlements in Romania have been almost abandoned in the last 20 years. The big German and Swiss colonies planted in Ukraine , south Russia and Crimea by several Russian Tsars were mostly abolished after the Bolshevik Revolution.

•  The Italians. In the 19 th century, Italians and Greeks dominated the Black Sea shipping trade, and Italian was the main commercial language of Odessa . Much earlier, Italian trading colonies existed around the Crimean coast and the Sea of Azov up to the Don delta. None of this remains.

•  The Turks. Outside Turkey itself, Turkish minorities lived in towns and villages alongside Christian neighbours in almost every Black Sea country. Most have now left. Stalin deported Turkish populations from the Caucasus in the 1950s, while much of Bulgaria 's large Turkish community left in the 1980s.

In spite of these great changes, many ethnic minorities can still be found around the Black Sea . A few Pontic Greeks still live around the northern and eastern coasts. Some Jewish people, missing the city they loved, are beginning to return to Odessa , mostly from America and Israel . The Crimean Tatars are back in their own homeland. There are large, flourishing Armenian communities throughout the eastern Black Sea region, especially in Georgia , Abkhazia and southern Russia (the exception is Turkey , where much of the Armenian nation was massacred in 1915-18). North Caucasian peoples, still speaking their own languages, live around the Russian resort of Sochi .

In northern Turkey , a large number of non-Turkish groups still exist along the Black Sea shore. Among these are the Lazi, a Kartvelian-speaking people who fled into Turkey to escape the Russians in the 19 th century, the Hemsinli, probably descended from Armenians who converted to Islam, and an Abkhaz population numbering several thousands. On the Asian shore of the Bosporus , a few miles from the Black Sea , there is a Polish village established by political exiles in 1842.

And Russians are to be found in almost every Black Sea country outside their own. They are the majority population in Crimea ; they exist as "Old Believer" religious exiles in the Danube Delta, or as retired pensioners along the Abkhazian or Georgian coast, or as the descendants of many waves of political refugees who found shelter in Bulgaria . Once Greek was the world-language used around the Black Sea . Today, in spite of all the upheavals of the last few years, the most-used language along all but the Sea's southern shore is still Russian.