Aegean Sea

• 1. Introduction

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  The Aegean Sea sits between two continents, a body of water roughly 215,000 square kilometres in area that has shaped the course of Western civilization. It is the sea where the Minoan palace of Knossos rose to dominate Bronze Age trade, where the Athenian fleet broke the Persian advance on the 20th of September 480 BC, and where the word "archipelago" itself was born. What kind of place produces that many world-altering moments? And why do Greece and Turkey still argue today about who controls the air above it? The answers begin deep in geological time, long before any nation drew a border on the water.

• 2. A Name With Many Ancestors

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  Ancient grammarians could not agree on what to call this sea, or rather, they could not agree on why it bore the name it did. One tradition pointed to Aegeus, the king of Athens who threw himself into the water when he believed his son Theseus had died fighting the Minotaur. Another traced the name to Aegaea, an Amazon queen said to have perished there. A third connected it to the sea deity Aegaeon, while Stephanus of Byzantium recorded a separate claim that a ruler named Aigaion, who once ruled a city formerly called Aigaia, gave both the city and the sea their names.

  The linguistic theories are equally inventive. One reading of the Greek root αἐί γαῖα suggests it simply meant "the land is always in sight," a practical sailor's observation. Another traced it to αἰγίς, meaning a violent squall, pointing to the sea's stormy character. A third connected the word to αἶγες, meaning goats, on the theory that the many scattered islands looked from a distance like a herd of animals rising from the water.

  The Romans called it Mare Aegaeum. Pliny the Elder noted that Romans also used "Macedonian" for the northern portion near Macedonia and Thrace, and "Grecian" for the stretch near Greece itself. By the medieval period, Venetian state papers were writing Ducatus Egeopelagi as late as 1419. A treaty of the 30th of June 1268 between the Venetians and the emperor Michael Palaeologus used another form, Arcipelago, the direct ancestor of the word archipelago used in English and many other European languages today. What began as one sea's proper name eventually became the generic word for any island-studded stretch of water on earth.

• 3. Geology and Water

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  The floor of the Aegean is mainly limestone, though volcanic activity has heavily altered the rock across much of the basin. Near the islands of Santorini and Milos in the south, the sediments run in richly coloured bands, a visible record of eruptions that periodically reshaped the region. The sea reaches its greatest depth, 2,639 metres, at a point west of Karpathos.

  At the peak of the last ice age, roughly 18,000 years ago, sea levels were 130 metres lower than today. Where the northern Aegean now opens into open water, there were large coastal plains. The island of Milos, which was an important source of obsidian for prehistoric toolmakers, was at that time likely still attached to the mainland. The present coastline took shape around 4000 BC, though post-ice-age sea levels continued rising for another 3,000 years after the main arrangement was established.

  The Aegean's surface water circulates in a counterclockwise gyre. Saltier Mediterranean water moves northward along Turkey's west coast before being displaced by fresher outflow from the Black Sea. That denser Mediterranean water sinks to a depth of 23-30 metres, then passes through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara at velocities of 5-15 centimetres per second. Scientific analysis carried out in 1991 and 1992 identified three distinct water masses: a surface layer roughly 40-50 metres thick, with summer temperatures ranging from 19-24 degrees Celsius; an intermediate layer extending to 200-300 metres; and a bottom layer below 500-1000 metres, notable for its very uniform temperature of 13-14 degrees Celsius.

• 4. Bronze Age Civilizations

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  The Minoan civilization flourished on Crete and other Aegean islands from around 3000 to 1450 BC before entering a period of decline and finally ending around 1100 BC. It was the first advanced civilization in Europe, leaving behind large building complexes, artwork, writing systems, and an extensive trade network that connected Crete with settlements across the Aegean and the Near East. The most notable surviving palace is that of Knossos, followed by that of Phaistos.

  On the Greek mainland, the Mycenaeans emerged separately, lasting from approximately 1600 to 1100 BC. The site of Mycenae, close to the Aegean coast, is believed to have been the centre of their world. Their syllabic script, Linear B, contains the oldest written records of the Greek language, and their religion already featured deities that would later appear in the Olympic Pantheon. Mycenaean society was organized around a warrior elite and a network of palace-centred states with rigid hierarchical systems, headed by a ruler called the wanax.

  Both civilizations collapsed with the broader Bronze Age collapse that swept the eastern Mediterranean. The reasons remain undetermined. Writing in Linear B ceased, trade links broke down, and towns and villages were abandoned across the region. What followed was the Greek Dark Ages, a period of reduced complexity before the Archaic period began in the 8th century BC, when Greece reorganized into small self-governing communities and adopted a modified form of the Phoenician alphabet to create the Greek script.

• 5. Empires at the Water's Edge

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  On the 20th of September 480 BC, the Athenian fleet won a decisive victory over the Persian forces of Xerxes II at the Battle of Salamis, ending the Achaemenid Empire's push westward. That battle took place in the Aegean, on waters that would change political hands many more times in the centuries that followed.

  Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great unified the Greek mainland and brought the Aegean under Macedonian control before dismantling the Achaemenid Empire entirely. After Alexander died, his generals divided the territory: Cassander took the Hellenistic kingdom of Macedon along the Aegean's western coast, while Lysimachus controlled the eastern shore. Rome later absorbed all of it through the Macedonian Wars, carving the Aegean coastline into the provinces of Achaea, Macedonia, Thracia, Asia, and Creta et Cyrenaica.

  The Byzantine Empire inherited Roman control, but pressure came from multiple directions. In the 820s, Crete fell to a group of Berber Andalusian exiles led by Abu Hafs Umar al-Iqritishi, who established an independent Islamic emirate. The island commanded the sea lanes of the Eastern Mediterranean and served as a base for corsair fleets attacking Byzantine-held Aegean shores for approximately 135 years. Nikephoros II Phokas finally recovered Crete in a campaign that ran from 960 to 961. The Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan, second Sultan of the Seljuk Empire, invaded Byzantium in 1068 and annexed nearly all of Anatolia. After the Fourth Crusade fractured Byzantine authority, the Venetians created the Duchy of the Archipelago, which held all the Cyclades except Mykonos and Tinos. By the late 14th century, the Byzantines had lost all coastal control and held only Constantinople itself. The Ottoman Empire then absorbed the entire Aegean coast except Crete, which remained a Venetian colony until 1669. The Ottomans kept a presence over the sea for over 500 years, until their dissolution after World War I brought modern Turkey into being.

• 6. Trade, Ports, and Fishing

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  The port of Piraeus, serving Athens, is the largest passenger port in Europe and the third largest in the world, handling roughly 20 million passengers annually. It processes 1.4 million TEUs of container traffic per year, placing it among Europe's top ten container ports and first in the Eastern Mediterranean. Every two years, Piraeus hosts Posidonia, a major international shipping convention. Ferry routes from Piraeus reach nearly every island in eastern Greece, including Crete, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, and much of the northern and eastern Aegean.

  The Port of Thessaloniki was, as of 2007, the second-largest container port in Greece. In that year it handled 14,373,245 tonnes of cargo and 222,824 TEUs. Fish are Greece's second-largest agricultural export, and Greece operates Europe's largest fishing fleet. Species caught in the Aegean include sardines, mackerel, grouper, grey mullets, sea bass, and seabream. Anchovy dominates the northern pelagic catch; horse mackerel the central; and boops the southern. Overfishing and habitat destruction have, however, caused what the source describes as perhaps a 50% decline in fish catch for some species. The Greek government has offered compensation to fishermen affected by these declines, though illegal trade in protected molluscs such as Pinna nobilis, Charonia tritonis, and Lithophaga lithophaga continues at restaurants and fish markets around Greece.

• 7. Tourism and Contested Skies

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  Greece received over 33 million visitors in 2018, with tourism accounting for roughly a quarter of the country's Gross Domestic Product. Five UNESCO World Heritage sites sit within the Aegean Islands alone: the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian and the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos; the Pythagoreion and Heraion on Samos; the Nea Moni on Chios; the island of Delos; and the Medieval City of Rhodes. Santorini draws an estimated 2 million tourists every year, raising concerns about overcrowding and inadequate infrastructure.

  Turkey has also built a significant tourism presence along its Aegean coast. The phrase "Blue Cruise" describes recreational voyages along the Turkish Riviera and across the Aegean. The ancient city of Troy, itself a World Heritage Site, stands on the Turkish Aegean shore. As of 2015, the Blue Flag beach certification had been awarded to 395 beaches and 9 marinas in Greece; on the Turkish side, Muğla alone held 102 Blue Flag beaches, with İzmir adding 49 and Aydın 30 more.

  Yet beneath the tourism industry, the two countries maintain a long-running dispute over sovereignty in the Aegean that intensified from the 1970s onward. The contested points include the size of each nation's territorial waters, the boundary of national airspace, exclusive economic zones, and flight information regions. Two of the main Aegean islands, Bozcaada and Gökçeada, belong to Turkey; the rest belong to Greece. The dispute has had a large effect on Greece-Turkey relations, and the questions it raises have yet to be resolved.