It was when they served the curry that I got the point. I was on the bridge of an oil tanker, making its way up the Bosphorus, the spectacular channel that winds through the middle of Istanbul. On board, Turkey disappeared and a strange international world took its place. The 246-metre ship, the Forward Pioneer, had been chartered by the US oil company, Chevron, and was sailing from Rotterdam in Holland to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. There it would fill up with crude oil from Kazakhstan and transport it to Milford Haven in Wales for refining. The fuel would ultimately heat British homes.
The ship had been built in Japan, belonged to a company registered in Singapore and was flying a Panamanian flag. And all 22 members of the crew were Indian. Hence the delicious dhal and Bengali fish curry we were eating for lunch, as the palaces and apartment blocks of Istanbul passed by. The view was magnificent. To our left was the forest of minarets on the European side of Istanbul, to our right the Prussian-built Haydarpasa railway station on the Asian shore. We were almost at the same height as the great dome of Hagia Sophia resting on its warm pink stone.
“I did come here a couple of times before but I didn’t get to see much,” said Rajiv Kumar, the charming captain from Delhi who had invited me on board for this dramatic trip up the Bosphorus.
Istanbul is situated at a point where geography has shaped history. The Bosphorus is thought to have been formed about 7,000 years ago when the Mediterranean overflowed and the Black Sea filled up. Since then the only way to the south for ships from the Black Sea has been through the “Turkish straits” – the 20-mile Bosphorus to the north and the longer Dardanelles to the south.
As a result, in one of nature’s more sophisticated jokes, Russia’s only route to warm seas lies via a narrow passage that runs through the greatest city of its main regional rival. (Winston Churchill called Russia “a giant whose nostrils have been plugged up” because one of its sea routes was blocked by ice every winter and the other lay via the Turkish straits.)
Today Novorossiisk is the main outlet for oil from western Siberia and Kazakhstan, transported down the Caspian Pipeline Consortium network and then to international markets by thousands of oil tankers every year, carrying more than 140 million tonnes of oil products through the middle of Istanbul.
This strategic location once made the city rich, but today it is a curse. “This oil traffic is equivalent to having oil tankers on the River Seine or Thames because the Bosphorus is like a large river,” said Gun Kut, professor of international relations at Bosphorus University, sitting in his office above one of the narrowest points of the channel.
The residents of Istanbul, watching at close proximity as these heavy ships negotiate the twists of the Bosphorus in all weathers, have the same kind of fatalism as residents of Los Angeles’ earthquake zone. Many of them expect there to be a serious accident one day. “It’s inevitable but unacceptable,” said Kut.
Every year the number of ships passing through the Bosphorus increases – the current figure is about 55,000. As the economies of the Black Sea countries begin to flourish, the volume of potentially dangerous shipping will rise yet higher. The Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, inaugurated in 2006, has diverted some of the traffic, but other bypass projects via Turkey or Bulgaria have failed to materialise.
Captain Kjell Landin is marine manager for the Eurasia Business Unit of Chevron, with oversight for the company’s shipping in the Black and Caspian seas. He pointed out that the much-discussed Baku-Ceyhan pipeline had removed the equivalent of just one oil tanker a day from the strait.
Ageing, rusting east European ships and their inexperienced crews still pose a much underrated danger to the city. “The difficult situation in the straits is if ships are required to make a certain speed and can barely do it against the current … there needs to be a high degree of competence on the bridge,” he said.
Modern oil tankers make up only 4 per cent of traffic on the Bosphorus. They have high safety standards, and all take expert maritime pilots on board during their passage through the strait, which greatly reduces the risk of accident. But while pilots are recommended for navigation in the Bosphorus, they are not compulsory. This is due to Istanbul’s maritime regulations, which are – for want of a better word in this city – Byzantine.
The Montreux Convention of 1936 stipulates that the Bosphorus is an international waterway, free of access to international shipping, but it does not constitute international waters. So the Turkish authorities do not have the right to charge tolls, but can recommend that the strait be closed in bad weather. Maritime pilots are optional, and fewer than half of all the ships coming through the Bosphorus take them on board.
It is a wintry morning when I arrive at the pilots’ “south station” on the Asian shore of Istanbul for my final trip on the Forward Pioneer. Sturdy men are drinking glasses of tea at the beginning of a 48-hour shift, sitting on sofas and watching television. Their job is both routine and hugely responsible: they must navigate large ships down the Bosphorus several times a day, managing the currents and avoiding collisions.
My companion for the day, Captain Mete Kocar, sports a trim goatee beard and a black leather jacket. He spends half the week on the strait and the other half tending a smallholding on the Black Sea coast with his family. “I am a country boy,” he says, laughing.
We climb aboard a tiny crimson pilot boat and bob out into the strait, white foam churning behind us. The giant red-and-black Forward Pioneer, empty of cargo, towers out of the water and our tiny boat moves alongside. Kocar goes first; then I step on to the wooden treads of the rope ladder, grip the rungs and slowly climb. At the top, I step into a supremely modern world.
On the bridge, which we reach by a lift, Kocar takes the forward position. Up ahead the first of the two suspension bridges across the Bosphorus spans the channel. There is a problem: a smaller black ship called Pavel has rudder problems and we need to overtake it to starboard. A tug is escorting it to a point where it can drop anchor on the western shore.
In a crowded marine environment, the Forward Pioneer is the whale. The smaller fish getting out of our way include the commuter ferries that take about 300,000 Istanbul residents a day from shore to shore; fishing boats; tourist boats with megaphone guides and tiny motor boats.
Captain Kumar has been here before and sailed most of the world’s straits – Dover, Singapore, Suez – but he still says laconically: “I think this strait is dangerous for this size of ship.”
We pass under the drumming noise of road traffic on the first suspension bridge and approach an S-shaped curve known as the Kandilli bend, which is both the deepest and narrowest point in the Bosphorus. The waterway is just 700 metres wide – it feels as if I could reach out and touch the houses on the shore.
“I have to keep the current on my starboard side and I have to swing nicely to starboard,” Kocar explains as we enter the bend. “After that I have to stop coming in and have to steady the course towards the west tower of the north bridge and to swing in to port.”
“And if you don’t do those things?”
“If I don’t do that, definitely the vessel will swing to port naturally with the force of the current,” he says with a nod to the Ottoman castle on the left-hand shore where our ship could all too easily end up aground.
“There are guys that get pleasure from the adrenalin,” he says.
The tanker shudders as we move sharply to starboard against the current, then moments later Kocar says, “port five”, “port 10” and we steer towards the other shore. “Steady as she goes,” says Kocar in his best sailor’s English.
The concrete city begins to dwindle, the number of fishing boats increases and the Black Sea opens out ahead of us. When Kocar is confident that no fishing boat will end up under our bows, we make our way along the deck and begin our descent to another crimson pilot boat. It looks a very long way down.
The Bosphorus, with its green hills, waterside villages and breathtaking views, has a gentler side. For many Istanbullers it is a childhood idyll. Zeynep Fadillioglu, now one of Turkey’s most successful designers, was raised in the shore-side village of Yenikoy in one of the old Ottoman wooden villas known as yalis. She and her friends used to swim to each others’ houses.
“I used to swim across the Bosphorus,” she says. “You don’t end up just across the other side – we have seven or eight different currents. You end up diagonally, you could end up somewhere completely else. We used to use the water more than the road.”
The great Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk tells me how his father, brother and he all used to be fanatical boat-spotters, watching the different ferries come to and fro.
Each of them had their favourite boat, like a football team, and cheered it whenever it came over the horizon. Pamuk’s father could tell which ferry was coming along the Bosphorus from the most distant of silhouettes, while Orhan and his brother loved to imitate the sounds of the boats’ horns.
Once, the young Orhan’s uncle met the captain of his nephew’s “lucky boat” and persuaded the skipper to sound its horn just as the boat was passing the Pamuk house. The boy waited on the shore and sure enough the ferry hooted for him. “This immense boat full of people around seven o’clock in the evening in 1958 as the sun was setting – that particular boat used its horn to salute me!” Fifty years later, the novelist still laughs with delight at the memory. “It was one of the most unforgettable moments of my life!”
But another childhood memory of the Bosphorus is less blissful. Pamuk recalls being taken out one night by his uncle to join a crowd watching a spectacular blaze that erupted after two tankers collided.
Accidents occur with deadly regularity. In 1979, a Romanian oil tanker called the Independenta burned for weeks at the southern end of the strait. Forty three people died, although the wind blew the worst of the fire away from the city.
In 1994 a Cypriot-flagged tanker called Nassia collided with another vessel and spilled thousands of tonnes of oil into the water. This time the wind was coming from the south and again the city was spared.
“One day a big tanker will have an accident in the straits,” Cahit Istikbal, president of the Istanbul Pilots Association, tells me. “What we are doing today is extending the time and minimising the risk.”
“Last year there was an accident just in front of the Dolmabahce Palace in the heart of the city,” he says.
“A tanker laden with aviation fuel – a very inflammable and dangerous cargo – lost engine power just under the bridge [across the Bosphorus] and started drifting. There was a pilot aboard and he asked for the assistance of tug boats. The tugs arrived. The ship had speed but no steerage. It was very difficult to handle the tug boats, so the ship dropped both anchors and stopped only metres from the palace.”
On my last day in Istanbul the weather turns bad. A fierce lodos wind blows from the south and all ferries across the Bosphorus are cancelled. Big tankers halt at the mouth of the strait and the water is too choppy for pilots to board.
Yet, because of the oddities of international maritime law, several heavy cargo ships exercise their right of free passage and steam down the strait.
“One day we will not be so lucky, there will be a catastrophic accident,” warns Captain Istikbal, another fatalist in this ancient city.
When Istikbal is not steering ships, he guides tourists around Istanbul in his spare time. As if I were part of one of his tour groups, he points out that another great city once stood at the southern end of the Dardanelles: Troy.
“The Trojan war was not a love story, it was the world war of ancient times with two big powers fighting for the control of the straits,” he says.
“Behind the Trojan war was the Greeks’ desire to capture the Black Sea area and its gold. That is the case today. Only there isn’t gold there today, but there is oil.”
Thomas de Waal presents ‘Bosphorus Battles’ on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, January 6 at 9.30pm
