Ancient cities of the Black Sea coast

(ORDO NEWS) — In the annals of antiquity, there is a lot of information about cities on the Black Sea coast, and some of the cities are described with very precise coordinates.

But nowadays there are practically none of them left on land. For a long time, researchers believed that these were just fairy tales and inaccuracies, first by the ancient Greeks, and then by the Romans.

However, every year they fished out more and more remains of ancient amphorae from the sea, and later they began to notice many ruins of ancient cities on the seabed. So scientists came to the conclusion that all these cities for some reason were flooded.

Do you know that in the west of the Black Sea, a decent part of the cities were built on the site of older settlements from the times of antiquity? This is quite logical, because people are used to choosing geographically advantageous places for their settlements.

For example, the Bulgarian city of Varna is located on the site of the ancient city of Odessa, Sozopol – on the site of Apollonia, Nessebar – on the site of Mesimvria.

There are many examples of such. But even more ancient cities in our time are on the seabed. Here, at a depth of up to ten meters or more, you can find many such ruins – the remains of an ancient port and fortresses.

It is known that at the mouth of the Southern Bug around the 6th century BC, the colony of Olbia was founded. In our time, the city of Nikolaev was built next to it, but it is located much higher upstream.

It is known that ancient Olbia was a developed city for a thousand years – until the moment when the Hun tribes attacked it.

For this reason, almost no ancient artifacts were found here – there is little left of the city. Back in the middle of the 19th century, one of the Russian archaeologists (Count A.S. Uvarov) announced that this city should be looked for at the bottom of the Bug Estuary, at the bottom of which (in good weather) you can see many stone slabs.

In the 1930s, they did just that – they began to explore that place. The excavations were interrupted by the Great Patriotic War, but continued after it. It was only in the 60s of the last century that the remains of many ancient buildings in that area were discovered.

Also in the ancient writings there is information about another city – Odessa. It was located at the mouth of the Tiligula River. There is also mention of the ancient city of the Kreminski, located at the mouth of the Dniester.

Scientists began underwater studies of these territories and came to the conclusion that even 2 thousand years ago there was no water here – there were ordinary river mouths on which these settlements stood. Researchers continue their work, hoping to find in this territory the remains of another ancient city – Tyra.

There were also unexpected finds. In 1953, one of the staff at the sanatorium in Sukhumi was swimming in the sea and saw a large stone slab at the bottom, which he later reported to archaeologists.

They called divers, who managed to pull her to the coast. It turned out to be not a simple slab – it was an ancient Greek tombstone. Scientists still cannot understand how it got there.

It is possible that one of the ancient ships carrying such plates could have crashed here.

But then it turned out that at the end of the 19th century (in 1877), a Russian scientist described the remains of stone slabs he discovered at the bottom of the sea. According to the scientist, they stood on the seabed and it was possible to stand on them calmly and then the head was above sea level.

At that time, his story was considered a fairy tale. However, in the 20th century, after the discovery of the tombstone on this territory, archaeological work began, as a result of which it was possible to establish that the ancient Greek city of Dioscuria was located here earlier, which later became part of the Roman Empire and changed its name to Sevastopolis.

Some of these cities have been found tens of meters under water. Researchers have not been able to understand what the catastrophe happened here and why all these cities went under water in such a short time.

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