The Black Sea, lying along the northern border of present-day Turkey, was the end of the world for the ancient seafaring Greeks. This was where Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, and when the Greeks first began exploring this area they were surprised to find humans, not gods, staring back at them.
During the last ice age the Black Sea was a low-lying body of freshwater, cut off from the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean and the Mediterranean, by a narrow land mass called the Bosporus. When the ice age ended the Black Sea remained protected as ocean levels rose, but when the water finally breached the Bosporus valley the incoming deluge was similar to ten Niagara falls. Stories of people …
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