At the end of March, Cleveland MetroParks – a 100-mile network of recreation areas, golf courses, trails, learning centers, etc. – invited the Ukrainian Museum-Archives (UMA) to be part of World Water Day. We didn’t even know there was such a celebration, but sure enough there is, sponsored by the United Nations, the World Wildlife Federation and other organizations. We readily agreed: UMA Curator Aniza Kraus prepared an exhibit and I, as “resident scholar,” prepared a PowerPoint presentation. That got me thinking about water in general, but also how it relates to Ukraine and its commonalities with Ohio and the Great Lakes – more than we realize, I discovered.
Unless there’s too little of it in a drought or too much in a flood, we take water for granted. And yet, water is the most prevalent feature of our planet, two-thirds of it covered by oceans. Plus, there are rivers, lakes, seas, wetlands and millions of square miles of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions; clouds cover the skies; we pump water from the aquifer. Indeed, more than half of the human body is water. It’s the most prominent feature that astronauts looking toward Earth see from orbit or the moon.
My family lives two blocks from Lake Erie. It’s vast – you can’t see the other shore north in Canada. And yet, it’s the second smallest of the five Great Lakes of North America, which together contain 20 percent of the world’s fresh water supply.
But water is not just for drinking, washing and agriculture. It’s provided transportation and facilitated trade for millennia. Four of the Great Lakes flow eastward to Niagara Falls, emptying into Lake Ontario, then to the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. From there, ships navigate to every continent, including Europe. Entering the Mediterranean Sea at the Strait of Gibraltar you can sail past Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Turkey and, upon arriving at the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, move into the Black Sea and Ukrainian ports like Odesa, Mykolayiv and Sevastopol. The journey, of course, goes both ways. Over the years, I’ve seen a number of Ukrainian ships at the port of Cleveland. So there’s a connection right away. But there’s more.
Ten thousand years ago – a blink of an eye in geologic time – neither the Great Lakes nor the Black Sea existed. A mile-thick and continent-wide glacier covered North America. The same glacier extended over Ukraine to the shores of what many scholars believe was a freshwater lake at the edge of the Crimean Peninsula. According to the theory, 7,000-8,000 years ago melting glaciers contributed to a precipitous global sea level rise, generating enormous floods and inspiring different cultures to create compelling stories involving water-borne catastrophes. There’s Noah and the Ark; the ancient Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh; Greek myths about the Titans; native American oral tradition. Could these be accounts of actual historical events? And if so, was there once a land bridge between Asia Minor and Europe at what is today the Bosporus?
In their book “Noah’s Flood” (1998), William Ryan and Walter Pittman from Columbia University postulate that the sea level rise in the Mediterranean basin eventually led to vast amounts of seawater breaking through at the Bosporus and with the force of several Niagara Falls, transforming the existing freshwater lake into the saltwater Black Sea. Freshwater fossils from 6,000-7,000 years ago confirm an ancient shoreline and suggest an abrupt change from fresh water to salt. Interesting and compelling.
What is indisputable is the trade between Greeks and the steppe dwellers of Ukraine, going back at least to the legendary Jason and the Argonauts, whose story recounts ancient sailors navigating the Black Sea as far as the Caucasus, where they put sheep skins in mountain streams and coming back later found embedded flakes of gold, hence the “Golden Fleece.” Ukraine’s rivers also facilitated transportation. None more so than the Dnipro. Greek historian Herodotus called it the most productive river in the world with the sole exception of the Nile. A thousand years later, Scandinavian Vikings used the same river to trade with Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire. In the process they organized the tribes, founded the city of Kyiv and, assuming the Slavic identity of their new realm, created the empire history remembers as Kyivan Rus’. The same trade routes prevail to this day; as do the conflicts over Ukraine’s bountiful resources. Hence, a major Ukrainian export: people – those forced into slavery, fleeing oppression or looking for jobs overseas.
Which brings us back to the Great Lakes. The unfathomable force of the ice sheets gouged deep trenches, which then filled with water as the glaciers melted and receded, creating Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario, as well as myriad smaller ones. This natural wonder helped develop America. At the western end of Lake Superior, there are enormous deposits of iron ore. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia literally have mountains of coal. Put those together and you have a steel industry that needed a massive influx of immigrants, including Ukrainians, to places like Cleveland and Pittsburgh and created ancillary economies for the army of laborers during the Industrial Revolution. To this day, giant boats carry iron ore from Minnesota to Great Lakes ports.
Nearly 60 years ago, in 1959, Queen Elizabeth and President Dwight D. Eisenhower opened the St. Lawrence Seaway that enabled maritime travel between midland America and the Black Sea, creating trade opportunities but also problems. Ships take on seawater as ballast to steady them for their trans-Atlantic passage. Once in the lakes, they would release the water they had carried from half a world away with plant and animal species the Great Lakes had never had before. That practice is now managed more responsibly, but the damage has been done. When you go to the shores of Lake Erie, you see big mounds of tiny shells – zebra mussels brought to Canada and the U.S. from the Black Sea. There are other invasive species: gobies, sea lampreys, etc – nearly 200 from ports worldwide. The Black Sea suffers from the same problem.
I’m glad the UMA took part in World Water Day. It’s given me a deeper appreciation of global interconnectedness and the challenge we face to maintain the magnificent gift God gave us: Planet Earth and H2O.