Angelopolis(49)

“I assume that almost anything with Dr. Azov behind it would be of that nature,” she said.

Sveti smiled, as if pleased to have found a fellow Azov admirer. “I don’t have to tell you, then, that

Azov is doing something that no one in the history of our field has done before. This center was

founded so that we could conduct on-site exploration of artifacts pertaining to Noah and the Flood.”

Vera looked past Sveti to the island. She could make out the details of the lighthouse, its smooth

stone spiraling around and around until it reached a series of windows at the top. Looking back

toward the shore, she saw the village rising in the distance, as if emerging from the sea.

“So this is where the Nephilim got their second start,” Vera said.

“Over the years there have been many conjectures about what might lie underneath our waters—the

lost civilization of Atlantis being one of them—but the most interesting theory, popular since the

fourth century, is that Noah’s Ark landed on Mount Ararat, on what used to be the coast of Turkey.”

“But that’s a thousand miles away from here,” Vera said.

“True,” Sveti said. “And it’s no longer even close to the edge of the Black Sea. Scholars have

always believed the actual recovery of objects from the ark to be impossible for this reason. A little

over a decade ago, however, academics at Columbia University, William Ryan and Walter Pitman,

published a book that changed the nature of investigations about the Flood. They believed that the

myth of the Flood—which can be found in nearly every major mythological system, from the Greek to

the Irish—had originated from a cataclysmic event that occurred roughly seventy-six hundred years

ago. They posited that, as glaciers melted, water from the Mediterranean breached the sill of the

Bosporus, and a deluge of water gushed over the land, wiping out ancient civilizations and creating

what is now the Black Sea.”

Vera remembered when the book was published. Azov had mailed her articles about the

controversy. “Serious scholars of the region agreed that the Bosporus had been breached, but they

thought the scale that Ryan and Pitman proposed was completely off the mark. If I recall correctly,”

she added, “their theories were attacked as unsubstantiated.”

“They were at the time. But then Robert Ballard, the American oceanographer and nautical

explorer who’d made his name by discovering the Titanic, began to explore the Black Sea with

submarines and advanced equipment. Even skeptics had to wonder if they weren’t onto something.

What the world at large did not know was that Ballard was actually working under the advisement of

Dr. Azov. And, as it turns out,” Sveti said, handing Vera a finely wrought topographical map, “there

is something much, much better than the ark below the Black Sea.”

“So the Ryan-Pitman theory of the Flood is correct,” Vera said. “The land under the Black Sea was

once inhabited.”

“Exactly,” Sveti replied. “Only, after years of research, we now believe that the Flood did not

occur in one grand cataclysmic deluge, as the mythology from the Bible to Gilgamesh describe.

Rather the water rose in small increments over a vast span of time. The Bosporus broke bit by bit and

the waters flowed into the basin over a period of decades, subsuming the villages as it rose.”

“Forty days and forty nights were more like forty years,” Vera said.

“Or even longer,” Sveti said. “In our explorations we’ve discovered that the first wave of flooding

caused a massive migration from here to here.” Sveti moved her finger along the map in Vera’s hand.

“You can see the present-day shoreline of the Black Sea drawn in a solid red line. The dotted line

you see about two inches inside—and then the next dotted line you see two inches from that, and the

third three inches from that—these are ancient shorelines.” Sveti pointed to the innermost dotted line,

then the middle one. “The second wave of the Flood caused another migration—and the construction

of new villages—and so the pattern continued over the course of many decades. Many of the oldest

villages on the Black Sea coast, such as Sozopol and Nessebar to the north, were built generations

after the settlement of the present shoreline. The villages under the sea are, obviously, ancient.

Thousands of years older than anything we can find above water.”

“I see the scholarly significance of this discovery,” Vera said. “But what does it have to do with

Noah and his sons?”

Sveti smiled, as if she had been waiting for that precise question. “It has everything to do with