Around the Black Sea

Part travelogue, part cookbook, Caroline Eden chronicles a 2,200-km journey

Beguiling and intense, the Black Sea has long been a pivotal part of the world. But it’s a region that, unless there’s a direct connection, many in the West have a dim awareness of — occasional news stories detailing conflict notwithstanding. Sitting astride the edge of Eastern Europe and western verge of Asia, it has a fascinating history and rich culture. Essential to trade and an epicentre of migration, it’s bordered by Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. Political boundaries, though, are permeable; ideas have always ebbed and flowed freely along its perimeter.

The foodways encircling the marginal sea were a natural point of entry for travel and food writer Caroline Eden. In her first book, Samarkand (Kyle Books, 2016; with Eleanor Ford), she focused on the food cultures of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Her follow-up, Black Sea (Quadrille, 2019), is a travelogue interwoven with recipes, and lush food and location photography. Through the lens of food, she tells the story of a journey between three legendary cities.

From the relatively new port city of Odessa, Ukraine, which Catherine the Great founded in 1794, to Istanbul — the vibrant city straddling two continents, linked to the Black Sea by the Bosphorus strait — and finally “truly ancient” Trabzon in northeastern Turkey, Eden travelled more than 2,200 km counterclockwise along the coast. In chronicling the modern realities of life on the sea, she intersperses recipes inspired by dishes she ate, people she met, history and literature.

“Food is such an incredible way of talking about almost anything. These books are Trojan horses in a way. They’re a way for me to talk about everything from migration to politics to harvests through food,” says Eden. “I like to use recipes — as we use photography in food books — as another way people can taste the journey … The recipes are a way to understand more about the countries, and the context, history and culture. They’re a tool.”

Notoriously tempestuous and dark, Eden writes, the Greeks first called the Black Sea ‘Pontos Axeinos’ – meaning ’ inhospitable’ or ‘sombre’ sea — but later dubbed it ‘Euxine’ (‘welcoming sea’), which may have been “word play to appease its cruelty, or else it was ironic.” The fact that this forbidding, cliff-lined body of water has been a haven for many over centuries — including refugees from the Balkans and deportees from the Caucasus — carries its own sense of contradiction.

Eden explains that although she had expected to be surprised by the historically volatile region, it was the people — their tales of migration, hardship and resilience — that left the greatest impression. Among them were the bakers of Çamlıhemsin, a small town east of Trabzon set amidst verdant slopes and leafy valleys. For Yunus Tarakçi’s great-grandfather, leaving Turkey for Russia “was a matter of survival.” But the baking tradition he and others began on the south coast of the Crimean Peninsula would last generations.

After an arduous journey across the Black Sea in the 1830s, he and five friends landed in Yalta where they made a living baking bread, ultimately mastering the art of French and Viennese pastry. As they sent money home to their families, word of their success spread. Others left Çamlıhemsin to join them, spurring a legacy of pastry chefs, some of whom would eventually make their way back to the village. Their fortunes built on exquisite Tsarist cakes, the bakers left their mark high up on the hillsides in the form of elaborate Ottoman konaks (mansions).

“That story completely blew my mind. And I had no idea it was there until I got there. I knew it was a beautiful part of Turkey and they had interesting villages and fantastic dairy up in the yaylas (high mountain pastures), but I had no idea about these bakers,” says Eden. “And (I encountered many) people running restaurants and cafés who’d travelled across the Black Sea … In Istanbul, I met a Tatar from Crimea who had fled persecution. You sit with these people for an hour and they tell you amazing stories that are unimaginable to someone like me: My family has only ever lived in England; I don’t have personal stories of migration. And through food, they’ve set up restaurants; they’ve kept their recipes. It’s a way for them to hold on to their heritage.”

Despite their differences, she noted significant commonalities in the cities she visited. There were shared flavours and ingredients, and a frontier-ness. Set apart from their respective countries, borders were seemingly less of a defining factor than the sea. Whether they relied on it for their livelihoods or not, Black Sea-dwellers shared a profound connection to the water. And even when “deeply nationalistic,” as in the case of Trabzon, the communities were still distinct from their host nations. “Looking out to the sea does something to people and I think it connects people from those different countries to one another, which is something I hadn’t predicted. And it’s quite hard to sum up but you feel it,” says Eden.

Over the course of her travels, she was also confronted with the changeability of the region. A frequent traveller to Istanbul, her “favourite place to eat in the world,” in January 2017 she found herself standing in the middle of an “eerily quiet” Grand Bazaar, the sole foreign visitor. Once a bustling attraction, tourists had been dissuaded from visiting following a failed coup attempt in 2016 and the ongoing threat of terrorism. “Life, it all comes in waves, and it comes and goes. And as things are dark, they become light, and again and again,” says Eden. “I suppose it’s that interconnectivity and flow you get with the Black Sea, of people, ideas, trade and geopolitics. It’s such an important part of the world.”

Excerpted from Black Sea by Caroline Eden, published in 2018 by Quadrille, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing. Food photography by Ola O. Smit. Location photography by Theodore Kaye. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher.