HAVANA, Cuba. – Of the several tragic naval accidents caused by Soviet ships passing through the Bosphorus Strait, the most spectacular occurred in the early morning of September 4, 1963, when the Arkhangelsk, a 5,500-ton cargo ship, penetrated more than 10 meters into land in the Turkish city of Istanbul, demolished two buildings and caused the death of three people.
The Arkhangelsk, which from Novorosisk, on the Black Sea, was heading to Cuba, was loaded with weapons and military material for the regime of Fidel Castro, which less than a year before, in October 1962, during the so-called Missile Crisishad put the world on the brink of nuclear war.
The accident occurred when the sailors of the Soviet ship, despite having a visual field of only 10 meters or less due to the fog, stubbornly and irresponsibly tried to continue their route, entering land and hitting buildings (one of them three floors) that stood near the Bosphorus.
The Turkish writer Orham Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, dedicates a chapter of his book Istanbul to the accidents that occurred in the Bosphorus in the 1960s and 1970s, which, he claims, “reached legendary dimensions.”
Regarding the dramatic case of Arkhangelsk, Pamuk wrote:
“Along with the statements of the survivors of the accident, the newspapers published photos of the boat stuck in the living room of the mansion. A ship whose deadly prow could be seen among photographs of Grandfather Pasha hanging on the walls, bunches of grapes that waited calmly in their plate on a sideboard, rugs and dressing tables that hung in the void and fluttered in the wind like curtains because the other half of the room had disappeared.”
After remembering those photos from the newspapers of the time, which he describes as “unbearably terrible,” Pamuk says that nothing else was talked about in Istanbul for several days: “The beautiful young woman from the institute who died in the accident who had recently been engaged to marry some time before, what those who would die had talked about the night before with those who would survive, the pain of the young man from the neighborhood who found his fiancee’s body among the rubble.
