Around the Black Sea

In the twilight of empires, an American journalist traverses the rim of the Black Sea, sending dispatches home from a world about to vanish. William Eleroy Curtis journeys through Ottoman Asia Minor, the Crimean peninsula, and the contested coasts where East meets West in ways that feel ancient and urgent simultaneously. His observations capture the customs of Greek fishermen, the grandeur of Byzantine ruins, the tension between old-world traditions and the inexorable march of modernity. Written as newspaper letters in the early twentieth century, this travel narrative offers an invaluable snapshot of a region that would be utterly transformed by the Great War and its aftermath. Curtis writes with the keen eye of a correspondent and the curiosity of a scholar, documenting peoples, landscapes, and ways of life that have largely disappeared. For readers who cherish vintage travel literature, this is a time capsule of the Black Sea's forgotten shores.