The Tail End Beyond Amasra

Beyond Amasra, the Black Sea gets prosaic. The area of Zonguldak is Turkey's principal coalmining region. The city itself is a surprisingly neat and attractive one, but the only noteworthy feature of the environs is the mines which extend for hundreds of miles into the bowels of the earth. Underneath, thousands of coal-blackened miners work in a night marish setting directly borrowed from 19th century Newcastle. Tours down the mine shafts into the underground tunnels may be arranged through the State Coal Company (TKI) offices in Zonguldak.For those with an even greater interest in the realm of darkness, the region also offers some of the most spectacular natural caves in Turkey. The Cumayanı Cave, near Çatalağzı town, is considered a speleologist's delight. Its ten-kilometer length can be explored by inflatable raft. More accessible for the layman is the Gökgöl Cave, near Üzülmez Village, which has remarkable elephant-tusxstalactites.Eregli is the Heracleia Pontica of antiquity, where the philosopher Heracleides first postulated that the earth revolved around its axis in 24 hours. The name of the town refers to an episode in the Argonaut legend where Heracles cries in anguish over his friend Hylas who has been abducted by lovesick nymphs. So Virgil in the Sixth Georgic:"His adjungit Hylan nautae quo fonte relictumClamassent. ut litus HYLA, HYLA, omne sonare t."Ereğli now boasts the largest steelworks of the whole near east.Further west, at Akçakoca start the endless sandy beaches that attract weekenders and property speculators from Istanbul. There are a few scattered points of interest, but the poetry of the Black Sea is no longer there. The traveler's imagination recoils, and hastens back to the landscape of Trabzon for another excursion into the remote marvels of the Pontic coast

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