The mysteries of the Black Sea

Today my ramblings will be about something that quite unexpectedly came up on a vacation. Vacation is not my favorite passing of time. I get very bored very fast after two days of hotel, swimming pool, the standard visit of the local villages, and jeep safari #375 . But this time to my pleasant surprise I discovered a little museum with a little room full of neolithic pottery that sends me on an amazing research trip on the coast of bulgaria… Well on a pool chair browsing the internet mostly… With a cocktail, but you get the picture.

So what did I find… sluurp!

In mounds all across the coast of Bulgaria I discovered there is a lot of pottery found. The pottery in itself wasn't anything special but the drawings on them got my attention. The drawings reminded me of the geometric shapes you get in school. You know, the ones you measure and calculate and phi and ohw my god headaches and sleepless nights and dreams of protractors chasing me trying to stick sharp pointy things inside me. Anyway after a long hot day searching for souvenirs, I got in the hotel and hit the web and discovered…!

The Varna Culture:
I found an interesting article and a video clip of Hristo Smolenov who wrote the book “Zagora-Varna: The Hidden Superculture”. This culture which thrived 3000 years before the egyptians build pyramids, stands out for its advanced metallurgical and mathematical qualities. He shows in this video the gold artifacts that were found in several graves located in Varna. He says the artifacts show signs of an advanced calculating and measurement system, with dots and lines and shapes, and everything fits so nicely together and the editing is nicely done,... Oh and there’s also a nice little music playing on the background. Anyway i don't want to spoil so just watch the clip.

Boring! What else you got?

Well the Black Sea is actually full of legend and mystery. Any of you know why the Black Sea is called The Black Sea? Well, legend goes that one day a fleet of fishing ships went out to sea to fish. It was a nice day, the sun was out and there was a slight gust of wind, the sea was nice and calm and the fisherman got a lot of fish. Since the fishing went so well the fisherman kept fishing until it got dark and suddenly the weather changed. The wind got really strong, rain started pouring down and the entire fleet sank and every last fisherman drowned on the spot. The poor woman kept waiting for the fisherman to return but they didn't and after a while they griefed and decided to wear black clothes for a very long time. This is the story I heard from a fun jeep safari driver.

Did u do any serious research:
Yes of course I did. What does Atlantis, Noah’s flood, and the Gilgamesj Epos have in common… that's right! A flood! The theorie is called “The Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis”. The hypothesis goes that the Black Sea was a large freshwater lake with water levels much lower than today around the time of the last glacial “the weichselian”. First, water levels around the globe where much 120m lower because of the water that was saved in large landicemasses, second The Black Sea itself was 75m to 150m lower because of the increased evaporation en less fresh water coming in from rivers. So The Black Sea was basically a lush valley with no connection to the Mediterranean.

There are two versions, Geologist William Ryan states that the flooding was fast 1-3 years max. Imagine a gigantic waterfall bigger than Niagra, filling the lake with several centimeters a day. On the other hand there’s Candace O. Mayor who says the flooding was rather slow and took several decades to a century. Whatever the truth of the matter is all parties agree on the impact it had on the Neolithic humans and the spreading over europe it sped up. Some even say it was the birth of the great flood stories we find in The Gilgamesj Epos, Noah’s Flood and maybe even the Atlantis story. The subject is heavily debated though with dates, ages, and the full hypothesis being changed on regular bases.

So did you get to the bottom of it:
Well I didn't go diving, but Robert Ballard did in cooperation with national geographic he discovered lots of shipwrecks at the bottom. Greek, Roman even Thracian ships and artifacts like amphora’s where found. Since there is little to no oxygen on the bottom the wrecks are all well preserved and point out that there were trade routes between asia and europe. Robert Ballard also discovered what appeared to be a coastline and remains of what looked like a farmhouse.

Samplings of sediments in the Black Sea by a series of expeditions carried out between 1998 and 2005 in the frame of a European Project ASSEMBLAGE and coordinated by a French oceanographer, Gilles Lericolais, brought some new inputs to the hypothesis. The Noah Project led by Petko Dimitrov from the Bulgarian Institute of Oceanology (IO-BAS) completed the results. Mark Siddall made calculations predicting an underwater canyon that was actually found. A five-year cross-disciplinary research project under the sponsorship of UNESCO and the International Union of Geological Sciences was conducted 2005–9.

Yes, yes… But nothing out of the ordinary?:
Ofcourse… turns out under the Black Sea there’s a vast network of tunnels, which event may connect Romania and turkey. Nobody knows who created the tunnels but chisel marks are well detecteble. Drawings on the wall that date back as far as the first Millenium B.C. decorate the walls. Locals tell great stories about the cave’s, there's one about a herder searching a sheep going in the tunnels and coming out in some peasants wine sellar, drinks his wine and returns. Wails, strange and frightening come out of the depths of the tunnels. Who hears them it is said gets mesmerized, try to find them and get lost forever. It is said that the voice would be the voice of the entrance guardian who wants to lure in the profane and make them blasphemously tread on the sacred earth of Zamolxis.

And supernatural?:
Kinda, there’s something of a bermuda triangle style thingy going on. The Turks call it the whirlpool of death the russians of the white whirlpool. Fisherman speak of a wild whirlpool that appears without warning, taking entire flocks of birds, ships and even small islands to the depths. Whether the whirlpool is reel or a figment of a drunken fishermans imagination isn't quite clear. Whatever the case may be there have been numerous disappearances in the area. The Soviet battleship Tsiolkovsky wich under strange conditions disappeared on May 31, 1944, in the vicinity of the Crimean peninsula in daylight under clear conditions when another ship reported that it had suddenly been enveloped by a black fog with green flashing sparkles, after which it faded out of existence, maybe the russians did experiment with radar invisibility.

So what’s your conclusion:
So what is my conclusion on this one? hmm I had a fairly good vacation I saw some nice places and heard some interesting stories. My favorites are legend and folklore and I don't mind paying some money to get entertained. The dead moments I spend searching the web and writing this article. The things of the varna culture I have some mixed feelings about, at first I thought wow superculture drawing patterns with mathematical patterns, but then I figured it out you could use all kinds of formulas to find connections between objects. Anyway I’m not a mathematician watch the film draw your own conclusion. I was especially fond of writing about structures on the bottom of The Black Sea. It was weird though that the article’s dind open on my computer but did on my cell phone, maybe later I will do a full article about it. The tunnels turned out to be what is known to be the limano cave’s. If you dig a little deeper you find a vast amount of articles about all kinds of tunnels that even go from scotland to the mediterranean, I think this tingle’s my interest gland.

So to summarize it all, nothing special to write about really, but like I said I get really bored really fast.