Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 313, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1918 — The GATES to the BLACK SEA [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The GATES to the BLACK SEA

WITH the northwestern battle theater of the Turks proclaimed by the war prophets as that where the deciding master strokes in this most titan-like of all struggles are to be delivered, a sketch of this remarkable region’s past, prepared by Harry Griswold Dwight for the National Geographic society, is of more than usual interest. Here the West won its selfconfidence, and this confidence has borne fruits with splendid richness for longer than 2,000 years. Here the course of civilization has been changed and modified several times, and here, again, the attention of the world has been in the belief of many that the future of Europe will once more be determined by events there. There is something alluring in the very shape and position of these lakes —the Black sea and the Sea of Marmora—separating as they do the two most historic continents of our globe, and communicating with each other and with the outer seas by openings that seem miraculous. And those landlocked waters have been from earliest times the theater of epic events. For us of the West no legends are older than those of Zeus and 10, of Phryxus and Helle, of the Trojan was”, of Jason and the Argo, which commemorate the earliest Voyages into the Great Hakes of the Levant. Black Sea a Vast Body of Water. * Of the two, the Marmora—the Propontis, if you prefer to be classical —■ is by far the smaller. Not much more than 100 miles long and some forty miles across at its broadest part, it is about the same size as Lake Champlain. The Marmora has much of the softness of air, vividness of color, and beauty of scenery that we associate with the Aegean and lonia seas. Thread the narrow slit of the Bosphorus, however, and you pass into an entirely* different world sterner, barer, rockier, colder. If the Marmora may be compared to Lake Champlain, the Black sea is about four times the size of our greatest lake. Lake Superior is 412 mjles long by 167 wide, while the Black sea has a length of 750 miles 1 and breadth

of 385. That there is something dark and unfriendly about it is more than a legend. The Bosphorus is 20 miles long, and at one point of its tortuous course the hills of Europe and Asia come wijhin 550 yards of each other. The Dardanelles is twice as long and nearly twice as wide, varying from 1,400 yards to five miles. Its European shore, Gallipoli peninsula, is the Thracian Chersonese of the ancients, and its steep ridge overlooks the plain of Troy on the Asiatic. bank and the broken foothills of Mount-Idu —^ Sea of Marmora Is Delightfuli While its two historic gateways are strategically the most Important features of Marmora, that picturesque little sea has a character all its own. In any other part of the world it would long: ago have become a place of sojourn for yachtsmen and summerers, so happily is it treated by sun and wind, so amply provided with boys, capes, islands, mountains, forests and all other accidents of nature that make glad the heart of the amateur explorer. As it is, the Marmora remains strangely wild for a sea that has knowh so much of life. More numerous than the settlements of today are the ruins of yesterday. About no body of water in the world, of equal size, have stood so many stately cities. It Is almost impossible, indeed, to give any coherent account of the story of Marmora, so much history and legend have crowded its shores. The true question of the straits arose as early as the fifth century B. C., when Alciblades of Athens counseled the people of Chrysopolis, the modern Scutari, at the southeastern ’extremity of the Bosphorus, to take toll of passing ships. But the Ottoman regulation of the straits has been far more jealous than anything attempted by the ancients. The Turks have allowed no foreign men-of-war to enter -the Marmora unless under rare and special circumstances; and not only do they.exercise surveillance over the traffic in the straits, but twice during the four years preceding i the war they closed the Dardanelles | to navigation of any kind.

Island of Prinkipo in Sea of Mamora.