Destinations: Swimming the Hellespont

For years I have been fascinated by the Hellespont, the dangerous strait in northwestern Turkey that joins the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara and separates Europe from Asia. There, so the story goes, a Greek princess named Helle, trying to escape her stepmother aboard a flying ram with golden fleece, slipped and plunged into the salty channel that has ever since borne her name.

Young Helle probably had little chance of swimming to safety, even had she survived her fall. An overwhelming southwest current flows from the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean—treacherous going for any boat, let alone a lonely swimmer.

Ovid, in the Heroides, immortalized the first legendary swimmer of the Hellespont: Leander, a passionate youth from Abydos, an Asiatic city on the southwestern side of the strait. His beloved, a priestess of Aphrodite named Hero, lives on the opposite shore in the city of Sestos. In the dead of night, Leander braves the chilly waters of the Hellespont to visit Hero, whose lamp guides him to safety (see the engraving by Bernard Picart at the end of this article). One stormy night, however, Hero’s lamp fails to shine, and Leander drowns. Devastated, Hero plunges into the Hellespont to join her lover.