Mercantile madness
Bosphorus Battles (Radio Three), Desert Island Discs (Radio 4)
How crazy is this! A huge great whopping oil tanker, 250,000 tons of rust-red steel, sails through one of the narrowest, most beautiful and most populated sea straits on the planet. And it’s not the only one. There are 50,000 of them every year. Not quinqueremes these, or even stately galleons. But eyeless giants, lumbering their way through the sea channel that links the silvery Black Sea with the dazzling blue Mediterranean. Bosphorus Battles on Sunday night (Radio Three) took us through these straits (which curve and wind their way through the Turkish capital, Istanbul) as if we were standing on the bridge of one of these maritime monsters, looking out from on high to that haunting cityscape of domes and minarets. Travelling empty, it was sailing (or rather pounding) from Rotterdam to Novorossiysk to pick up a cargo of benzine from oil-rich Kazakhstan and transport it back to Milford Haven (on the Pembrokeshire coast) where it would be refined for use as airbus fuel.
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Neil Hart
January 22nd, 2008 11:59amRe: Kate Chisholm's article "Bosphorus Battles". I enjoy the column, but have to point out, in a private capacity, that the Bosphorus along which my wife and I strolled on Sunday had plenty of fish left to catch, judging by the piles of silver-scaled creatures heaped up on the shore... The regurgitation of an argument without reference to (visually) obvious facts is risky, particularly as it may well be that a decline in fish stocks owes more to the trawlers and thousands of amateur fishermen lining the banks than to tankers, which are, after all, a more efficient form of the trading vessels which have plied this waterway for centuries? Nevertheless, the volume of traffic is of concern to the Turkish authorities and the oil industry alike - and accidents have happened in the past - which is one reason why the latter is investing so much in by-pass pipelines for this critical and sensitive area, as pointed out in a recent Spectator article by Richard Orange. Incidentally, raki is clear, and only goes (visually) milky with the addition of water... Sincerely, Neil Hart, Istanbul.