Black Sea: Did you mean...?

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914) in the Balkans in the summer of 1914 set off a chain of events that led to the First World War (1914-18). For over a decade before, imperialistic...

Tigranes II or Tigranes the Great ruled as the king of Armenia from c. 95 to c. 56 BCE. Expanding in all directions, at its peak, Tigranes' Armenian Empire stretched from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Not before or since...

Hippolyta, or Hippolyte, was a queen of the Amazons in Greek mythology. A daughter of Ares, the Greek god of war, and Otrera, queen of the Amazons, she is a significant figure in the legends of Hercules and Theseus. In the present...

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was a French modernist painter whose work is celebrated for its candid realism. Works like Olympia, an entirely modern nude, broke the artistic convention that great art should not concern itself with contemporary...

The ancient city of Byzantium was founded by Greek colonists from Megara around 657 BCE. According to the historian Tacitus, it was built on the European side of the Strait of Bosporus on the order of the “god of Delphi” who said to...

Cerberus (also spelt Kerberos) is a vicious three-headed dog in Greek mythology, who guards the entrance to the underworld. He allowed the souls of the dead to enter Hades but prevented the living (except for a few exceptions) from...

The Artaxiad (Artashesian) dynasty ruled ancient Armenia from c. 200 BCE to the first decade of the 1st century CE. Founded by Artaxias I, the dynasty would ensure Armenia enjoyed a sustained period of prosperity and regional...

The Ostrogoths were the eastern tribe of the Goths (a Germanic people) who rose in power in the area north of the Black Sea. The designation, Ostrogoth, taken to mean 'Eastern Goth', actually means 'Goths glorified by the rising sun'...

Urartu, also known as the Kingdom of Urartu or the Kingdom of Van, was a civilization which developed in the Bronze and Iron Age of ancient Armenia, eastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran from the 9th century BCE. Controlling...

Captain Samuel Bellamy, aka 'Black Sam' Bellamy (d. 1717), was a British pirate active during the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730). Bellamy’s final ship Whydah was wrecked off Cape Cod in a storm, and the pirate captain drowned...