The Sea of Marmara

Propontís (Προποντίς) is the Greek name of the Sea of Marmara, a transparent compound: pro-, “before,” on the name of the Pontos, the Black Sea. Herodotus, describing Darius’s crossing into Europe, pauses to give its measurements, five hundred stades wide and fourteen hundred long, between the Bosporus and the Hellespont; the name is standard across the geographers and stays in Greek use through the whole Byzantine millennium, naming the water outside Constantinople’s own sea walls. It is attested from the era when Greek colonists from Megara and Miletus ringed these shores with cities, Byzantion among them.

The name’s interest is its grammar of direction. Propontís only makes sense sailing north: the fore-sea is “before” the Pontos for a ship coming up from the Aegean, so the name preserves the approach route of the Greek colonization it dates from, an itinerary hardened into a toponym. It thus completes a set with the atlas’s two strait-pages, the Hellespont and the Bosporus, the doors on either side of this room; all three are named from the traveler’s experience of passing through rather than from anything the places contain. Greek named this whole seascape the way a pilot describes it, and Propontís is the pilot’s word for the stretch where one sea is behind you and the greater one not yet begun.

Propontis is the Latin form of the Greek name, borrowed whole; Pliny’s geography walks the reader up the same corridor as the Greek pilots, Hellespont, Propontis, Bosporus, Pontus, and the poets use the word for the sea of the Argonauts’ outbound voyage, since the epic route to Colchis ran through it. Latin never translated the name, though it easily could have; pro and pontus were both at home in Latin, and the loan arrived almost pre-parsed, a Greek compound a Roman reader could read.

That untranslatability-by-neglect is the entry’s small distinction. Elsewhere on the atlas Latin translates Greek sea-names or replaces them; here it kept a name whose meaning depends on another sea’s name, because Propontis only works if Pontus stands behind it, and Latin had adopted that too. The pair travelled together, a name and its reference point, one of the few cases where borrowing one toponym obliged a language to borrow a second. When the Latin west later needed the sea in crusading itineraries, the old borrowed name was still there, doing what it had always done: telling the traveler what came next.

Marmara (مرمره) is the Turkish name of the sea, taken from its largest island. The island is ancient Prokonnesos, whose quarries of white-veined marble supplied Constantinople for a thousand years, Hagia Sophia’s columns and pavements among the results, and whose Greek name had already yielded in the Middle Ages to Marmarás, from mármaros, “marble,” the island called simply after its stone. Ottoman usage extended the island’s name to the water around it, Marmara denizi, the sea of Marmara, and the name belongs to this atlas under the continuity clause, the early Ottoman renaming that displaced the twenty-century-old Propontis; it remains the sea’s name in Turkish and, through it, in every modern language.

The renaming is a complete inversion of the name it replaced, which is the entry’s point. Propontís defined the sea relationally, by where it led; Marmara defines it materially, by what it contains, and what it contains is a quarry. There is a quiet historical circle in that: the marble of Prokonnesos built the city that made this sea the center of the world, and when the city’s builders’ language gave way, the sea took the quarry’s name, as if the stone had outlasted every empire that shipped it. The Greeks named the water for the journey; the Turks named it for the cargo, and the cargo, fittingly for this shore, was the ruins’ own raw material.