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I As I stood on the flanks of the Kaçkar Mountains where they slope into the Black Sea near the town of Arhavi, the placid horizon of water struck me with a sense of fear It was the same feeling many people get when swimming in the open ocean: you imagine the emptiness stretching for hundreds of metres beneath your kicking legs and experience a kind of vertigo; the blackness below assumes a hostile presence, and you wonder what it might conceal, and shudder at the loneliness of sinking into it   I was visiting the northeast corner of Turkey – a region once known as the Pontos – in pursuit of sparrowhawks I had heard about a local falconry tradition that seemed so unusual as to be scarcely credible As I became more interested in the region, however, and the falconers and their dying pastime, I became ever more fascinated by the Black Sea itself If the Mediterranean has been a canvas for human history, a teeming petri dish in which Western culture evolved, the Black Sea has had a more diffident relationship with the people surrounding it Apart from in the north, the flat curves of its coast are largely bereft of the islands, peninsulas, and natural harbours that have folded the Mediterranean so snugly into the societies that fringe it Before they strung their colonies along its southern shores 2,500 years ago, the Greeks called it Axeinos – the Inhospitable Sea   Perhaps I felt this fear because of what I had read about the flood During the last ice age, when global sea levels were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake disconnected from the Mediterranean As the ice melted and the sea level rose, it remained as much as 90 metres lower than the neighbouring sea, which was separated from it by the sill of land on which Istanbul now lies In 1997, American scientists Walter Pittman and William Ryan published a theory claiming that the waters of the Mediterranean spilled over this sill 7,500 years ago in a cataclysmic