Why would Greek navigators brave a coast ruled by such a wind? The scholar Michael Rostovtzeff gave the answer plainly: between this bay and Batumi far to the south, there simply were no other decent harbors along the whole coastline. So they came anyway, and on the shore of Tsemes Bay they founded the colony of Bata. The geography made the choice for them - an ice-free bay 15 kilometers long and up to 9 wide, deep enough for seagoing ships at 21 to 27 meters, fed by the little Tsemes river that gives it its name. In a region where safe anchorages were precious, this one was indispensable, and its value would draw traders and conquerors for the next two thousand years.

Ambition kept arriving by sea. In the Middle Ages the Ghisolfi, a merchant family from Genoa, controlled this stretch of coast, extending the reach of Italy's great trading republics to the far eastern edge of the Black Sea. Centuries later came the Russians, who in 1838 founded Novorossiysk on the bay as a military facility - a fortified toehold that would grow into the region's chief port. Each power understood the same truth the Greeks had grasped: whoever held Tsemes Bay held the best door onto this part of the sea. The bay's history reads as a long succession of flags, each drawn by the same deep, sheltered water, each leaving its mark on the shore before the next arrived to claim the anchorage for itself.

The same water that shelters ships has swallowed a great many of them. In June 1918, rather than surrender the Black Sea Fleet to the Germans, Soviet crews deliberately scuttled several of their own warships in Tsemes Bay - a fleet sent to the bottom by its own sailors, its hulls still resting in the deep. The bay's most wrenching loss came in peacetime: in 1986 the liner SS Admiral Nakhimov went down here in seven minutes after a collision, and hundreds never surfaced. Between the war graves of the scuttled fleet and the wreck of the Nakhimov, the floor of this harbor is a quiet cemetery. Sun-seekers swim above it in summer, most of them unaware how much history lies sunk beneath the surface they float upon.

Today Tsemes Bay is one of the busiest doorways in the Black Sea. After the Caspian Pipeline Consortium was established in 1992, the commercial seaport at Novorossiysk grew into the sea's busiest oil terminal, tankers filing in and out past the same headlands the Greeks once rounded. The bay's southern reaches, gentler and more genteel, fall under Gelendzhik and its resort coast. And still the bora blows each winter, a reminder that some things here do not change - that this magnificent harbor was, is, and will remain a bargain struck with the wind. To watch a laden tanker slip between the mountains under a clearing sky is to see the newest chapter of the oldest story on this coast: the endless human pull toward the one safe harbor, whatever it costs to reach.