Sinop Landscapes – Exploring Connection in a Black Sea Hinterland

The Black Sea coast is different from the rest of Turkey. For more than 5,000 years Sinop, the central point on the Turkish coast, has seemed more remote from the rest of the Anatolian land mass than from Greece, Italy, Africa, the Crimea, Istanbul, and Rome. How was Sinop connected to them? The Black Sea Trade Project explores the perception of connectedness: how connected did people feel to those in other upland villages, coastal villages, ports, the big port of Sinop, and to distant shores? How did economic, infrastructural, and political institutions bind local populations to larger systems, and how were various institutional processes situated in landscapes? In this first volume from the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project, Owen P. Doonan rigorously explores connection through Sinop and its hinterland, from precolonial Greek settlements through ages of empires, Roman, Russian, and Ottoman conquests to the present day.