'List of maritime incidents in the Turkish Straits'

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The Bosphorus is a narrow "S-shaped" channel of complex nature with several sharp turns and headlands, which prevent a proper look-out, and with changing currents. Such geographical and oceanographic conditions make the navigation, open to international shipping, very difficult and risky.

The density of maritime traffic in Bosphorus, which link Black Sea to Marmara Sea, has increased elevenfold from around 4,400 ships passing annually in 1936, when Montreux Convention was signed to regulate transit and navigation in the Straits, to an average of 48,000 vessels per year recently. With 132 vessels transit daily, not including local traffic, it ranks second to Malacca Straits in density.

During the period from 1953 to 2002, 461 maritime incidents occurred in the Istanbul Strait or in its southern entrance at the Marmara Sea. The majority were collisions.[1]

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"In fact I'd been counting the ships going up and down the Bosphorus for some time. I'd been counting the Romanian tankers, the Soviet warships, the fishing boats coming in from Trabzon, the Bulgarian passenger ships, the Turkish Maritime passenger lines heading into the Black Sea, the Soviet meteorological vessels, the elegant Italian ocean liners, the coal boats, the frigates, the rusting, unpainted, neglected Varna-registered cargo ships, and the decaying vessels who kept their flags and countries of origin under the cover of darkness."
Pamuk, em Istanbul.

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e ainda a criança que se deslumbra a meio da noite:
"On one such morning, when I was shivering and memorising poetry under the blankets as usual, my eyes lit on an amazing sight, the likes of which I'd never seen. I remember well how I just sat there, frozen, my forgotten book in hand. A great hulk growing larger and larger as it rose from the pitch-dark sea, rising out of the water and approaching the closest hill - the hill from where I was watching: this was a colossus, a leviathan, in shape and size a spectre from my worst nightmares: a Soviet warship! Rosing out of the night and the mist as if in a fairy tale, a vast floating fortress! Its engine was running low, passing silently, sluggishly, but so powerfully that it made the windowpanes, the woodwork and the furniture tremble; the tongs that someone had hung wrongly next to the stove, the pots and saucepans lined up in the dark kitchen, the windows in the bedrooms where my mother, my father and my brother were sleeping were all trembling, too,  and so was the cobblestone alley that went down to the sea; even the rubish bins in front of the houses were making such a clatter you might have thought this peaceful neihbourhood was suffering a minor earthquake. It meant that what Istanbullus had been discussing in whispers since the Cold War began was actually true: the biggest Russian warships passed through the Bosphorus aftef midnight, under cover of darkness.

For a moment I panicked, thinking I should do something. The rest of the city was asleep and I was the only one to have seen this Soviet vessel heading who knew where to commit who knew what terrible act. I had to spring into action, to warn Istanbul, to warn the entire world. This was the sort of thing I'd seen so many brave child heroes do in magazines - stir cities from their sleep to save them from floods, fires and invading armies. But I could not find the will to leave my warm bed."

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"Counting ships passing through the Bosphorus might be a strange habit, but since I began discussing it with others, I've discovered that it's common among Istanbullus of all ages: in he course of a normal day, a large number of us make regular trips to our windows and balconies to take account, and we do so to get some sense of the disasters, deaths and catastrophes that might or might not be heading down the straits to turn our lives upside down. In Beşiktaş, where we would move when I was an adolescent, there lived, in a house in Serencebey on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus, a distant relation who took notes about every passing ship so diligently you might have thought it was his job. And there was a lycée classmate of mine who was sure that every suspicious-looking ship - anything that was old, rusty, in poor repair, or of unknown origin - was either smuggling Soviet arms to insurgents in such and such a country or carrying petrol to some other country to wreak havoc on the world markets."