Black Sea Mystery

The Paris Peace Agreement of 1856 that ended the Crimean War¹ declared the waters of the Black Sea to be “neutral,” in other words “international” and open to all states on an equal basis. Surely Poseidon laughed at this pitiful attempt by humans to divide up that which had never belonged to them, and which could at any moment rise up and foil their plans.

Had not the ancient gods, just two years prior, made this very point? In November of 1854, a British flotilla was sailing through the waters of the Black Sea during the siege of Sevastopol, hoping to dock at a place called Balaclava.

Was it the British flotilla’s intent, as some later averred, to deliver to British forces besieging Sevastopol their pay? Or was it just seeking shelter from ill weather? Whatever the case may have been, their plans came undone. The ships not only were unable to enter the bay, but every last one – 34 in all – was destroyed on the cliffs at its entrance. Five hundred souls perished.

Among the flotilla was a screw-driven, iron steamship, the Prince. And its demise that November day gave birth to one of the most enduring legends of the Crimean seacoast.

That dark, winter night, several British ships headed toward Balaclava Bay, seeking refuge from the storm. Among them was the beautiful, three-masted frigate, the Black Prince, laden with money to pay the allied troops. Sixty million rubles worth of pure English gold! The old-timers know the exact figure. And those same old-timers say that we no longer have cyclones here like the one that raged that horrible night! Monstrous waves smashed against the cliffs, splashing all the way up to the Genoese Tower – twenty sazhens² above the sea! – washing its ancient walls. The squadron was unable to find the bay’s narrow entrance, or perhaps it did find it, but simply could not get through. It was entirely smashed against the rocks, including the splendid ship, the Black Prince, and the English gold sunk to the bottom near White Rock, which still rises up threateningly out of the sea where the narrow mouth opens seaward, on the right as you leave Balaclava.

— Alexander Kuprin, The Laestrygonians³

According to a different version of the story, the Prince was carrying thirty barrels of gold in English and Turkish currency totalling two million rubles. Five hundred thousand pounds sterling is yet another oft-cited figure, and still a rather notable sum. A more plebeian interpretation of the legend has it that “black prince” was the name not of a ship, but of the world’s largest black pearl, which for some reason was in the possession of the crew and to this day is sought after by every Balaclava diver.

Whether all these legends arose out of the ship’s romantic name (which was actually just the Prince, the modifier “Black” having been added as a later embellishment), or whether they are merely due to the tradition of mythologizing everything associated with sea adventures and elemental disasters, is not really important. This was not the case of a local fairy tale. The story of the Prince introduced a new era in the life of the city, and more.

Beginning in the 1870s, the Prince’s treasure was not only sought after by legendary local divers, but also by foreigners who traveled to the Crimea – Germans, French, Norwegians, Italians, Japanese and even Americans. None of the attempts resulted in even the smallest success. The 60-meter depths at the mouth of the bay were unattainable given the technology of the day.

The invention of diving suits at the end of the nineteenth century gave the treasure hunters new hope. In the fall of 1905, Balaclava society was again stirred by the arrival of foreigners – this time from Italy. They sought to locate the English gold with the help of a special underwater device invented by engineer Giuseppe Restucci, who himself came to Balaclava to oversee the dive. But even this expedition left empty-handed. The diver reported that the ships had been crushed by rocks and were buried by the seabed, their masts protruding from the silt. Poseidon firmly held his ground, and as a consolation prize, an ironical one at that, only showed the brave Italian a section of the stern, with the remnants of an inscription: “…ck Pr….”⁵

As for the locals, they long ago decided that a curse hangs over the Prince. It should be added that Balaclava is a Tatar name, the indigenous population is Greek, and the history is Russian. Well, Russian to the extent possible in a port where the nineteenth century embankment was laid by the English, the main tourist sites are from the Middle Ages and Italian, and where today the new Ukrainian masters are seeking to turn the area into a Crimean Riviera. One hundred years ago, this town had a culture and traditions unlike anywhere else, centering on an Orthodox God and reverence for the master of the seas.

“On the River Jordan…” the priest sang in a delicate falsetto, as he raised high the cross, its white metal glimmering in his hands… The most serious moment had arrived. The young fishermen all stood at the prows of their rowboats, all half-naked, bowing forward in impatient expectation.

The priest again chanted, and the choir joined in harmoniously and joyously, “On the River Jordan.” Finally, he raised the cross a third time over the crowd and suddenly it flew, tossed from the priest’s hand and carving a brilliant arc in the sky, landing in the sea with a splash.

At that moment, dozens of strong, muscular men dove head first from their rowboats into the water, splashing and screaming. Three or four seconds passed. The empty boats rocked and swayed. The churning water splashed back and forth… Then, one after the other, they began to surface, hanging their heads, with hair in their eyes. Last of all Yani Lipiadi surfaced with the cross in his hand.

– Alexander Kuprin, The Laestrygonians

In Balaclava, underwater diving attained a status bordering on the sacred. In 1922, a diver found a few gold coins at the mouth of the bay. Interest in the treasure was resurrected. Shortly afterward, 70 years after the English frigates perished here, Balaclava gave birth to a legendary organization, a true pearl of the Crimea.

On March 13, 1923, Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD’s State Political Directorate, decreed the creation in Balaclava of EPRON (Экспедиция Подводных Работ Особого Назначения – Underwater Expeditionary Force for Special Operations), after a meeting with Vladimir Yazykov, who had been trying to salvage the Prince since 1908. The young Soviet state was especially strapped for hard currency, so the first operation of this secret force was to be none other than raising the Prince and all its treasure from the ocean floor.

  The leadership of the Soviet Union, cut off from all of Europe’s scientific achievements, set out to independently develop its own science of modern diving. Engineer Yevgeny Grigoryevich Danilenko (one of EPRON’s first three employees, along with Yazykov and D. A. Karpovich) developed a plan for a deep water diving apparatus. It was a 10-ton steel chamber that could hold three people and descend to a depth of 72 meters. The chamber was constructed in just three months at a Moscow factory, and had a life support system, telephone, illumination, mechanical arm for grasping items on the seabed, and a system for emergency ascent in the event its cable to the surface was severed. Needless to say, the chamber was an object of great pride for the EPRON bosses, all three of whom descended in the chamber during the search, which covered a very large area.

Military trawlers and metal detectors were enlisted in the effort; a hydroplane and dirigible were used to photograph the seabed. Yet the further the search proceeded, throughout the spring, summer and fall of 1924, the more illusory seemed the hope of finding the treasure or the Prince itself. Finally, in October 1924, divers located the remains of an old steamship. The following summer, a number of items were raised to the surface that certainly would have been aboard a British ship during the Crimean War: pieces of iron, boot soles, lead bullets, a piece of a teak mast, and small objects with English writing… But the ship itself, whether it was the Prince or some other, had been crushed by the rocks. There was nothing left for the EPRON engineers to do but carve a chess set out of the mast and present this souvenir to the Museum for the Heroic Defense of Sevastopol.

EPRON had spent hundreds of thousands of rubles on this operation and it had turned up nothing like what had been expected. The search was put on hold as the leadership considered its options. Years later, the first chief of EPRON, Lev Zakharov-Meyer, wrote: “My conclusion is the following: there is no firm certainty that the legendary ship has gold, so the decision to halt the operation was correct. However, this does not mean that the entire operation should be permanently set aside.”

Meanwhile, the Black Sea concealed many other shipwrecks in its depths, and EPRON was called upon to wrest the remains of other known ships from their watery graves. In just the first two years of its existence, EPRON raised several destroyers, submarines, pontoons and barges. It became apparent that the sunk costs of searching for the Prince could be amortized by allowing EPRON to continue its rescue and salvage efforts elsewhere.

A source of special pride to EPRON in its early days was its operation, from June to October of 1925, to salvage the destroyer Kaliakriya, which had been purposely sunk by the Soviet navy in 1918, to avoid its capture by German forces. The ship was refitted and brought back into service as the Felix Dzerzhinsky, which served in the Soviet Navy until May of 1942, when it blundered into a Soviet defensive mine, again sinking to the bottom of the Black Sea, taking with it over 200 sailors.

Enduring various political and financial difficulties, by the 1930s EPRON had become the de facto Stalin era monopolist in diving and marine salvage. During these years, EPRON performed a number of successful and rather unusual tasks: saving the ice-breaker Malygin, which was trapped in the Arctic; raising the ice-breaker Sadko from a depth of 25 meters; and raising submarine Number 9 from a depth of 81 meters. In fact, these successes brought EPRON international acclaim, and by the 1930s it was widely considered to be the world’s leading organization for the raising or rescue of ships. And it should be noted that EPRON’s dives to 95 and 123 meters, both in 1923, were records in their day.

In its heyday, EPRON had a staff of approximately 50, and by the start of the Second World War it was a massive, multi-divisional organization with affiliates in many corners of the country, including the North and the Far East. When war arrived in 1941, the elite members of EPRON were immediately evacuated from Balaclava. Its diving school was moved to Lake Baikal, and just seven technical workers were left behind. All of the organization’s inventory and materiel was transported under military escort on board an old ship, the Chernomor, first to Poti, Georgia, then to Baku, Azerbaijan, and finally to Astrakhan via freight train. After spending a year in Astrakhan, EPRON continued further inland by train.

Our departure from Astrakhan had to be quick, since we had to cross a huge bridge across the Volga, and there was the danger of German bombing raids. We left the city and sat for many days just before the bridge, living in the train cars. The EPRON echelon was comprised of 100 cars. Sailors, officers, wives, supplies, boats, diving equipment... Finally, we crossed the bridge, and no sooner had we reached the steppe than seven Messerschmitts appeared. Back then, there were very few anti-aircraft guns, and they didn’t think that we had any, but Stalin had allocated one anti-aircraft gun to EPRON, and so the planes were forced to drop their bombs onto the steppe and not a single one hit us. They did destroy the train tracks in front of us – if they couldn’t hit us, at least they could get the tracks. But they were quickly repaired and we traveled on. There were many bomber attacks, and as soon as they started, we would all pour out of the train cars and run in terror to take whatever shelter we could alongside the tracks, not that this shelter could do anything for us, but it was just too terrifying in the cars. I remember I jumped out once and papa cried out, “Alla, did you take your passport?” What passport? I was carrying my bundle of pebbles from Balaclava – that was the thing I valued most – wrapped in a rag and a fishing net...
I had gathered them on Bolshoi Beach...

  – Alla Loyko⁶

After the war was over, the EPRON divers raised sunken military ships from rivers, lakes and oceans where fighting had taken place and restored destroyed bridges and dams. They became national heroes, risking their lives performing the extremely difficult work of clearing channels, ports and harbors of mines.

In the totalitarian era, EPRON enjoyed a special status not only as an organization connected to defense, but also as one ready to take on the most unexpected operations. In the winter of 1937, for example, the EPRON divers undertook a top secret operation: searching the bed of the Moscow River in a location where, according to the confession of someone identified only as “R.,” he had tossed bombs and a loaded pistol through a hole in the ice – weapons which were to be used in a terrorist plot against comrade Stalin.

Meanwhile, Balaclava, previously an unknown fishing village, became a town of All-Union significance. Yet it remained a small town, every aspect of its life revolving around this mysterious, powerful organization.

In Balaclava’s central square there is a 1920s constructivist building, EPRON’s headquarters. Somewhat later the Stalinist Gothic EPRON Club was built nearby. People come here to dance and watch films on the weekends.

That was something. Polished pine parquet, flowers everywhere, the hall, the stage, a separate dance hall, downstairs a gym, and upstairs rooms with all kinds of chess boards. No one could believe that such a miracle had appeared in Balaclava. And the stairs! But we rarely used them. People who worked there had round-the-clock access, but they used a different entrance that had a guard.

The EPRONers lived in a building specially built for them, and also had the use of pre-war cottages that stood picturesquely along the water, at the very entrance to the bay.

We lived on the waterfront, in an old stone house, at the entrance to the narrow Balaclava Bay, and from my window I could watch the boats and ships sail in. And the seagulls, they cried constantly, without pause, as if complaining, so that it was impossible to sleep. You would toss out a bit of bread to quiet them down, then try to fall asleep while they were eating. And I would play there, next to the house, on the cliff, and it was such a beautiful home, with turrets. It was such a heavenly little corner that if they ever take down that house after I die, I will sense it and die a second time.

The EPRONers and the members of their families were special wards of the state, as it were. The children were given free music lessons by a conductor from Sevastopol. In the hills they established a special EPRON Subsistence Farm, which included an apiary and a barnyard, vineyards and gardens – all for the needs of EPRON. Against a national backdrop of poverty and want, the members of the organization and their families became princes and princesses.

A diver’s rations were enough to feed an entire family. I went to EPRON with stacks of pots for the first course, the second course, the third course, and how many times I hauled macaroni cooked sailor-style in these pots! And tasty! Two brothers, the Lednyovs, cooked for all of EPRON. These famous cooks of ours, the bosses valued them very highly; one of the brothers even bought himself a Moskvich car after the war. Unfortunately, his car was crushed at a crossing by a train going for a load of Balaclava marble. Lednyov survived, but was so devastated by the fact that the car he had invested his entire life savings in had been destroyed that he hung himself.

In its first years, EPRON was dominated by characters straight out of Kuprin’s story The Laestrygonians – local fishermen, the legendary descendants of ancient pirates. Most had Greek surnames like Spai, Klidzio, Kapitanaki.

When they retired, they became engineers and metalworkers, everyone called them “EPRON’s bolts,” because they could make anything – whether to repair an old caboose or to weld a vase out of a piece of metal. We ran to them with all sorts of errands – they were good people. Many Greeks, with souls open like Russians, threw a party after each successful catch. One, Pavlik Spai, kept diving after he retired, and when his people came from sea I would always know, because I would hear his favorite saying “Full speed ahead!” (аллюр, три креста) from my balcony.

But that was before the war, after – everyone disappeared somewhere.

But what about that treasure buried in the neutral waters of the Black Sea? Even after EPRON’s failure, other countries did not want to give up hope on the Prince. In 1927, one more sea power – Japan – decided to do battle with Poseidon. So much did they crave this treasure that they offered to compensate EPRON 110,000 rubles for its initial research and investigations, to split the takings of the gold 60:40, and to leave behind for EPRON the equipment used for the job, including a very significant national invention – a deepwater diving mask. And what do you think? Those tenacious Japanese found gold!

From the summer of 1927 through November, the Japanese uncovered seven gold coins, some English, some Turkish, and some French. Among the other finds: two silver forks and one spoon, part of a shovel, a wheel hub, horseshoes, horse bones, an officer’s saber, a spatula, a lock, galoshes bearing the date 1848, several leather soles and a huge quantity of lead bullets, among other things. The Japanese kept just three of the gold coins for themselves, and left four with Russia.

The Japanese were certain that the ship they salvaged was indeed the Prince, even though they only found its fore and aft portions. As a result, they left convinced that the English had themselves salvaged their gold before they left Balaclava. Another version has it that the EPRONers actually found gold, but kept their discovery secret.

In the second half of the twentieth century, experts began to believe that the treasure was simply a banal invention, that it had never in fact existed. On the one hand, it would be strange for so many foreign powers to waste so much money searching for something which they were not certain existed. But on the other hand, there are these two important facts: First, the “lost gold” was sought by many powers, but never Great Britain, the state which surely had most knowledge about its presence or absence on board the Prince. Second, nowhere in any contemporaneous historical documents about the Crimean War is there any information stating that there was gold on board the Prince as it approached Balaclava. All the sources that refer to the gold are from a later era, when the Prince was colored Black.   RL

Last August Moscow artist Leonid Tishkov came to Balaclava with a design for a new statue he proposes for the town, by way of realizing an artistic vision of the famous sculptor Vera Mukhina (creator of the iconic, oversized Worker and Kolkhoz Woman sculpture). “I found this avant-garde idea in a book of letters by Vera Mukhina,” Tishkov said. “In 1937 she wrote to the head of EPRON, Fyodor Krylov, that it would be good to build a 30-40 meter high statue of a diver made of stainless steel (which would require some 100 tons of steel!).”

This plan was never realized, and the statue now proposed is much smaller, but even the fact that Mukhina came up with the idea is testimony to the importance of EPRON and its value in Soviet society.

Balaclava — today a quiet, picturesque seaside town — is in fact far more ancient than the peninsula’s main city of Sevastopol. While the first stones of this hallowed Russian outpost⁴ were set under Catherine the Great, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Balaclava in fact sits on foundations that were laid in distant antiquity. What is more, that same Catherine resettled Russian Greeks here, who quickly secured glory for their descendants, whose melting-pot included Tauris, Romans, Turks and Genoese. This wide, comfortable bay — tucked away in a mountainous vale, with an extraordinarily narrow entrance that is practically invisible from the sea — has always been a haven for sea wolves of all stripes, beginning with the Tauri pirates, who would set false signal fires on the shores before attacking Greek galleys, and ending with a secret facility for the repair of Soviet submarines.

1. The Crimean War, fought from 1853-1856, was between Russian and a coalition of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Sardinian monarchy for control over the Near East. Most of the fighting took place in the Crimea, with the defense of Sevastopol from the allied forces (see Russian Life, May/June 2010). The British army and fleet was based at Balaclava.

2. 1 sazhen = 2.13 meters, thus over 40 meters.

3. Alexander Kuprin was a well-known Russian writer and publicist. He became the main chronicler of Balaclava and titled his portrait The Laestrygonians, drawing a comparison between its inhabitants and the mythical people who lived by the banks of a narrow-necked Black Sea bay described by Homer in his Odyssey.

4. Balaclava and indeed all of Crimea are today on Ukrainian territory.

5. This according to Kuprin. Kuprin was not the only one to write about the Prince. S. N. Sergiyev-Tsensky, Mikhail Zoshchenko, E.V. Tarle and T. Bobritsky also wrote of the legend.

6. Alla Petrovna Loyko was the daughter of EPRON’S warrant officer (and the author’s great grandmother). She was a teenager at the time of the events described, and her recollections inform the descriptions of Balaclava that follow.