Family Portrait
How many beautiful words have poets dedicated to the sea, how much watercolor and oil have artists spent on its portraits! The symbol of summer, the symbol of happiness, romance, love – all this is the sea. To children of the land, it most often appears warm, gentle, azure. And only sailors and fishermen, inhabitants of islands and shores, know how changeable its appearance and temper are.
Many tourists, returning from seaside resorts, bring with them an incredible number of photographs. Others act more wisely and order paintings of their hot vacation at www.mportret.ru (there, by the way, you can order them directly from photographs). Let us also try to write a portrait of the sea.
Let's start with the 'Encyclopedic Dictionary.' That thick pedant asserts that the sea is merely 'a part of the world ocean, separated by land or elevations of the underwater relief. The more enclosed a sea is by land, the more it differs from the ocean.' Therefore, seas can be internal, marginal, and inter-island. And upon closer examination and a strict look, it turns out that what we are used to calling a sea is not always a sea. For example, the Dead Sea, as well as the Aral and Caspian Seas, are actually lakes. And the Sargasso Sea is just a part of the Atlantic Ocean.
The seas have their own flora and fauna, their own birds and even their own people. Warm seas are inhabited by a special people – sea gypsies, 'children of the shell', eternal wanderers who do not recognize the reliability of solid ground. Some of these nomads were born in boats and have never set foot on land. They live, of course, in warm seas, in Southeast Asia, in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand.
There is a great multitude of seas in the world. According to the 'World Atlas' – 49. The Pacific Ocean has the most seas – 20. The Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean have 10 each, and the miniature Indian Ocean has only 5. If you count all the seas that are named after islands, you get 78 seas and even one additional ocean – the Southern. So on the map appear the Bali Sea and Visayan Sea, New Guinea Sea, Irish Sea, Balearic Sea, Cretan Sea, and even the Chukchi Sea.
The most complex sea is the Mediterranean. It consists of as many as 5 seas: the Mediterranean proper, the Adriatic, Ionian, Tyrrhenian, and Aegean. The practical Italians also distinguish the Sardinian and Ligurian Seas within it, the Greeks the Cretan, and the Spanish the Balearic. But no matter how these waves and shores are divided, the essence of the Mediterranean is unchanged: it is the best place on Earth. It is the ephemerality and transparency of everything above and below, it is old crooked olive trees and prickly cactus pads, it is blueness, blue, aquamarine green – the color of eternity, muted by healthy optimism. It is thousand-year-old elders herding sheep, cheese, wine and olive oil, and fish on the grill grate, and woven lobster traps, and spaghetti marinara, of course, and octopuses drying on strings like kitchen towels. In short, the Mediterranean is life.
Our most vacation seas – the Black, Azov, Mediterranean, and Baltic – belong to the Atlantic Ocean. That is, of course, there are fans of relaxing on the White Sea (Arctic Ocean), but there are few. There are also few fans of Far Eastern exoticism on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, Bering Sea, or Sea of Japan (all these are the Pacific Ocean) – those shores are just too far.
The deepest sea on Earth is the Philippine Sea. Its depth reaches 10.265 m. The shallowest is the Sea of Azov, where bottom fish swim at a depth of 15 m. But it is not the smallest! The real dwarf is the Sea of Marmara, whose area is only 12 sq km with a depth of up to 1.273 m. The Sea of Marmara is considered something like a resort zone of Istanbul – city residents go there to relax on weekends.
And actually, all the seas in the world are divided into tourist and non-tourist. What attracts people to tourist seas first and foremost is their shores. For example, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, three continents meet: Europe, Asia, and Africa, and twenty countries. From the African side, it is surrounded by the tales of the Maghreb – Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; from the Asian side, Egypt and Israel with its resort of Eilat. The European Mediterranean is beautiful France, fiery Spain, sunny Italy, and homey Croatia and Montenegro... Even on sea cruises, people go not for the water, but for the shores: a sea cruise is a wonderful opportunity to see several countries in one trip without unpacking suitcases.
THE MOST MARITIME COUNTRY »»»
MIRROR OF THE SEA »»»
THE OTHER ADRIATIC »»»
MY BLACK SEA »»»
AEGEAN TRILOGY »»»