Despair Around the Navel of the Earth

That whirlpool of land and water, central in maritime and land-empire epochs and somehow, through momentum or inertia or the very pattern of events, still central in this time of air superiority and tactical use of space, that ampersand of land and sea where asia minor fails to overlap the balkans, where the black sea drains into the mare nostrum but not easily, not without gateways and pillars, the cow-crossing, hero and leander, the black shores where greeks colonized halfway to the center of asia, the siege of Vienna where a Polish general rescued the eastmark from the Turk.
How fancy of me, how historically aware. How inadequate words like lachrymose and words like sad. Despair is a better match. It just gets worse and worse.