Crosscurrents in the Black Sea : History and time and place flow together in a superb, encompassing story of a volatile region : BLACK SEA, <i> By Neal Acherson (Hill and Wang</i> /<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $23; 304 pp.)</i>

In 1680, a young Italian named Luigi Fernando Marsigli dropped a weighted line into the Bosphorus at Istanbul. The corks attached to the line flowed west to the Mediterranean. Then, when the line sank deeper, the corks changed course. He had found that the waters of the Bosphorus flow both ways, east to the Black Sea, and, deeper, west into the Mediterranean.

This double flow, east and west, of waters and populations and cultures and legends, the differences and the fusions, informs Neal Acherson’s superb, encompassing story of the Black Sea region. History and time and place flow together, not as disciplines, but as true time and place, where the past, the languages, the customs and even those deep imitations of power that we call cultural change are a part of the present.

The heart of his story is the Black Sea itself, not as a ring of shore inhabited by strange people, but as a volatile, life-forming, death-dealing body of water.

That region that we know, in our Eurocentric language, as the Middle East has been discovered, lost and rediscovered more often and longer than any polyglot of cultures on Earth. If you were a Crusader or, today a politician or an oil magnate from the West, it is the eccentric East. If you came from the East with your flocks in your search for grass or culture, the Black Sea region is the gateway to the civilized West. Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, all in their time and for their immigrants, were and still are centers of the civilized world. To the Victorian English travelers, it was exotic; its inhabitants were lesser breeds beyond the law, charming and dangerous--in a word, strangers. Acherson sees it as the center it has been for centuries.

There the present reflects the past. The past is a map of the present. Acherson is on a bus going through the late night from Sevastopol to Yalta in Crimea. He is the only passenger awake. He sees a small light in the distant darkness at the turnoff for Foros, a resort on the Black Sea. The time is Aug. 18, 1991. The bus sweeps by. There has been no road accident but there is an ambulance with its revolving lights and a tangle of men standing at the side of the road. It is only a glimpse, and then the darkness returns.

What he has seen is the capture of Gorbachev at Foros, and the light in the distance has signaled the end of the Soviet Union. Once again, as it has for so long on that sea coast, waves of change flow west and east into a future that changes the international landscape. Another empire has fallen--not the first, and, as the past there reflects the future, not the last.

Change, pausing for centuries, and then volatile again, has made the Black Sea a crossroad in time. There have been crosscurrents of language since the capital of the Roman Empire was moved from Rome to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, to be nearer the center of the empire. From the name of the czar, an echo of Caesar, to the modern icons whose great eyes reflect ancient icons from Cappadocia or Sumela, the more it changes the more it is the same. Nothing dies there. It only seems to.

In language, the tangle of place-names reflects this. Mount Mithradates, reflected in the Sea of Azov, is from the ancient ruler of the Pointus at Amasya on the river Halys, now called the Kisilirmak. This is the river that the Argonauts thought flowed out of Hades in the ancient Greek legend of the first voyage into the Black Sea, seeking the Golden Fleece in Colchis, in the adventures turned legends of the Aegean fishermen who sailed beyond the Bosphorus into the strange new sea.

There are Turkish names from the old language that came to Anatolia with the Asian invasions. A mountain on the Russian side of the Black Sea has a Turkish name, Shatir Dagh. A castle is a kale. There is Eskikrim, from the Turkish words for old and noble, perhaps the source of the name Crimea. There are still the ancient Greek names of cities that have been modified into the modern language of today. And there is always the shadow of Rome, Rum, Romania, and still the pride of Trabzon, Trebizond, the last capital of that 1,000-year-old empire.

It was on the shore of the Black Sea that Rome finally died, not the Eurocentric Rome of Italy, but the strong world of Byzantium, resurrected wherever Orthodox Christians and the children of the eastern tribes--half-animistic, half-Muslim--meet, live together for centuries, then explode with ancient hatreds. All of them receive legends of their pasts, sometimes replacing the true past, and as false as the burial of the Piltdown man. Nowhere was it more evident than the Nazi fake revival of a history of the Black Sea. We have learned, or we should have, to beware of herenfolk .

Acherson defines that center of the world, where the past is as hoped for as the future, and long-exiled people look back on homelands handed down in legend and religion and find them changed when they return, over and over, to legendary places turned modern, real and volatile.

The Black Sea is central, not peripheral to either Europe or Asia. It has never been homogenous. There is the rift as deep as the great African rift that marks the volcanic regions through the sea, and the earth-quaking regions of the Taurus, the Caucasus. It is a rift of land, of culture and of memory, between East and West, and all the modern states of the region that we have thought of from time to time as permanent are split by it--pride in their Eastern origins, and the imitation of the West that is inherited from the half-remembered power of Rome. It is there in Russia, in Turkey, in the half-imagined, half-remembered past of Poland, with the legends of its Sarmatian inheritance.

The rift has been plunged over, galloped over, pastured over, for long periods even healed over. The East and the West meet in their brotherly misunderstandings, their trade in language, customs and past. All attempts to wipe out the rift have failed and have succeeded. They have come up against the walls of paranoiac pride of the mountain people. Here they are still, in hints and residues--mythical Scythians, Sarmatians, Circassians, Laz (pronounced Lahz), Amazons and more, all of them feeding the present, all of them clinging to the legends of their source.

The passage to the Black Sea has always been mysterious, and feared, from the time of the Greek fishermen who made colonies there and fed the legend of the Argonauts. It is still mysterious. There is no more haunted shore than that from Trabzon to beyond the late Russian, then Soviet, now Georgian border.

“Black Sea” reflects the sense of darkness, where the mountains and their steep dark forests lean toward the sea, on the way to the land of Medea. She, the witch, and the Amazons from the same shores are still alive and still beautiful in the faces of girls in Trabzon with their icon eyes. This is a shore where the Amazons had to kill an enemy before they might marry. It is from these shores that the Circassian women came, who were so famous for their beauty that they were the pride of the sultans’ harems.

The pride, the warrior stance, is still there in the Laz people. I wish that Acherson had been able to know the people of the south shore of the Black Sea as well as he has the north, the Russian shore. But always in Turkey, a thick crust of officialdom and written history, always partisan on both sides, has to be plowed through to get to people. It takes patience. The Laz, he would have found, are not neglected people. Mustapha Kemal Ataturk had a bodyguard of Laz. I have seen them dance the slow decisive dance of warriors in their black clothes, their Scythian trousers, with their daggers and their silver chains.

The modern Anatolian Turks are a fusion of the blood of Greek, Carian, Byzantine, Seljuk, Mongolian, Galatian, Hittite and Tartar. Their heroes are Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame, and above all, Ataturk, who declared them Turks and brought them into the West, but their polyglot past is a mirror reflection of the true and false past of the north and eastern shores of the sea that Acherson knows so well.

“Black Sea” calls forth this strong font of origins, true and false, mixed cultures, mixed blood, mixed languages, and constant returns to a past that exists in legend, religion, pride and almost nonsensical killing prejudice. This book ought to be read by anyone dealing with the twists and turns, the hatreds, and the mixtures, of the region of Eastern Europe and the shores of the Black Sea, whether Caucasian, Serbian, Croatian, Semitic, Scythian, Laz or Turkish, before they make decisions that affect a people they hardly understand. The abandoned tractors and guns of a broken Russia, the ships that rust in the ports of Georgia, the snaggled ruins of Byzantine Sumela have more in common than they would admit. They are the detritus of the fall of empires.