An island-studded sea that ferried Greece into Asia
The Aegean Sea, a 215,000-square-kilometre Mediterranean embayment between the Balkans and Anatolia, links to the Black Sea via the Dardanelles and Marmara. Its island chains, the drowned tips of mainland mountains, made contact between Europe and Asia feel almost inevitable for ancient sailors, and even lent the world the word archipelago.
Crete anchors the south; Rhodes, Kos, and Patmos sit among the Dodecanese, beside Cyclades, Sporades, Saronic, and North Aegean clusters. Limestone floors twisted by recent volcanism yield coloured sediments around Santorini and Milos. Greeks and Thracians peopled the coasts; the islands were stepping-stones of Classical civilisation.
Since the 1970s Greece and Turkey have disputed territorial waters, airspace, exclusive economic zones, and flight information regions across these same narrow waters—the Aegean dispute that still colours diplomacy.
The sea stretches about 670 kilometres north to south and 390 across, and plunges to 2,639 metres west of Karpathos. Many islands are drowned continuations of mainland mountains: one chain runs out to Chios, another through Euboea to Samos, and a third across the Peloponnese and Crete to Rhodes, fencing the Aegean off from the open Mediterranean. Surface water turns in a counterclockwise gyre, as salty Mediterranean water pushes north along Turkey's coast and sinks beneath lighter Black Sea outflow before creeping through the Dardanelles toward Marmara.
Ancient writers offered a crowd of explanations for the name: King Aegeus, who leapt to his death thinking Theseus had died; an Amazon queen; Poseidon's epithet Aigaios; or the Greek word for goats, because the islands looked like a herd rising from the water or the big waves seemed to leap like goats. Medieval Venetians called it Egeopelagus and Arcipelago, the root of archipelago, a word that once meant this sea alone. Turks know it as Ege Denizi or the Sea of Islands, and several South Slavic languages call it the White Sea.
Source: Aegean Sea
