What a cool post: Thanks for sharing! I love this mix of history, culture and mythology. Many people in the West do not appreciate that this region was a meeting ground for peoples of Classical Antiquity (including, later, the Roman and Byzantine worlds) and the peoples of the steppes beyond the coastline, like the Scythians and their successors (like the Turks, Slavs and Mongols, plus various transitory Goths, Celts and other “barbarian” ancestors of what became modern European peoples). The defiance of those sailors has quite a pedigree.