City
Melena
Kara Burun
Listen to the story
Melena was never really a town: it was a headland on the Black Sea coast of Bithynia, just east of the Bosporus, which at some point in the map's history slid onto dry land and was turned into a settlement. It even received a pair of towers, though they came out a little lower than usual. The name is Greek for the black cape, and the modern Turkish name, Kara Burun, means exactly the same. The poet Apollonius of Rhodes has the Argonauts sail around it. By the sixth century AD sailors called it the fair cape, a name the map does not yet know.