How crazy is this! A huge great whopping oil tanker, 250,000 tons of rust-red steel, sails through one of the narrowest, most beautiful and most populated sea straits on the planet. And it’s not the only one. There are 50,000 of them every year. Not quinqueremes these, or even stately galleons. But eyeless giants, lumbering their way through the sea channel that links the silvery Black Sea with the dazzling blue Mediterranean. Bosphorus Battles on Sunday night (Radio Three) took us through these straits (which curve and wind their way through the Turkish capital, Istanbul) as if we were standing on the bridge of one of these maritime monsters, looking out from on high to that haunting cityscape of domes and minarets. Travelling empty, it was sailing (or rather pounding) from Rotterdam to Novorossiysk to pick up a cargo of benzine from oil-rich Kazakhstan and transport it back to Milford Haven (on the Pembrokeshire coast) where it would be refined for use as airbus fuel.
You only have to glance at an atlas (or Google maps) to see how mad this is.
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