Twitter discussion of anchovies

This opens with my response to comments on the Mediterranean & the Black
Sea...

Dan

Who among us has been to Unye on the Black Sea.  It seems paradisal in a
Seinfeldian sort of way ...

*Chasing Anchovies on Turkey’s Black Sea Coast *
By ROBYN ECKHARDT DEC. 14, 2012

NYT


“SO you’re here for anchovies,” said the bartender at Sehrazade, a shadowy
spot in Unye, Turkey, a smile playing at
the corners of his mouth.
With his boxer’s nose and stern mien, the beefy man looked more gangster
than barkeep. But when I told him why I’d come to this small town on
Turkey’s Black Sea coast, he showed a softer side. He nodded slowly and
reached into his pocket for a phone.

Twenty minutes later a uniformed schoolboy burst into the bar (397A Hukumet
Caddesi) with an aluminum baking pan. My new friend took the pan and placed
it before me, removing its lid with a flourish and releasing a plume of
steam. Inside was a little over a pound of lightly  charred anchovies, each
no longer than my pinkie, stacked dorsal fin to belly along wooden skewers.
“Eat, eat!” he urged, squeezing a wedge of lemon over the fish and
dislodging them with a  knife into juices pooling at the pan’s bottom.  I
never did learn where they came from (“a kitchen nearby” was all that he
would reveal), but they were spectacular: fresh and firm, briny and
pleasingly oily....

In the mid-1600s, the Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi wrote that in the port
of Trabzon, on the coast’s eastern half, “fishmongers at the wharf have
special trumpets made of elder-tree wood. They only have to blow on these
trumpets once and, by God’s dispensation, if people praying in the mosque
hear it, they will immediately leave their prayer and come running for the
hamsi.”

Full article is delightful.

Edith Hall
@edithmayhall

No but I've been to the modern towns near Heraclea Pontica, to Sinope, to
Georgian Greek settlements, Taman peninsula, Kerch, Nympaion, Chersonesos,
Olivia and that's just the eastern end.

Dan Tompkins
@dan_pericles

I bet people in Unye would say, Our hamsi are _completely_ different.