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2
Persecution and Perfidy:
Women’s and Men’s Worldviews
in Pontic Greek Folktales
Patricia Fann Bouteneff
“She had a mouth but she didn’t have a voice.” This is high praise for a newlywed
bride in Pontic Greek folktales. In some ways, however, the same could be said of
non-fictional Pontic women who lived before the modern era. Pontic Greeks, also
known as Pontians, owe their name to their homeland, the Pontos, situated on the
Black Sea coast of Asia Minor. They were part of the Orthodox Christian millet,
one of the Ottoman Empire’s legally protected ethn
ic and religious minority
groups. Women in the Pontos had little public voice—early in their married lives,
they were not allowed much of one in private either. A young wife who moved in
with her husband’s family upon marriage would be expected to keep totally silent
until she had produced a son. Instead of speaking aloud, she would communicate
with her in-laws by gesture. Although she would have been able to have her say in
the house during much of her life, it remains difficult to hear her point of view at
the temporal and spatial distance that separates us, especially since Pontic Greek
women published virtually nothing before their arrival in Greece.
In an effort to recover a little of that voice, this essay explores the Pontic Greeks’
folktales, most of which were collected after the Pontians had been exiled, along
with the rest of the Orthodox millet, to Greece in the early twentieth century. The
majority of these tales were recorded immediately following that deportation, in
the years between 1923 and 1941, when the narrators and folklorists were fresh
to the Balkans and living a life of exile and nostalgia. Tales had been collected
before, in the Pontos itself, and would be collected afterwards, but this was the
time when the drive to preserve tradition was at its strongest.
Methodology
It is standard practice among folklorists to use a comparative method in their
investigations of folk narrative and other traditional art forms. I will be comparing
Pontic tales with their European and Middle Eastern counterparts, as well as
contrasting tales from one Pontic village with those of other Pontic villages.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
These comparisons will lead to the main focus of the paper, a juxtaposition of
tales told by women and tales told by men. Information about the narrators of
published Pontic folktales is generally scarce, but in those instances where we do
know even as little as their names, it is worth making the effort to distinguish the
way tales were told by men from how they were told by women. As it turns out,
this allows us to recognize that something of a dialogue existed between the two
sexes, and to reveal certain preoccupations that they would have been unlikely to
air openly.
After looking at the general nature of Pontic folktales in comparison with
their Greek, European, and Middle Eastern counterparts, I will consider the
idiosyncrasies of the tales from various villages within the Pontic corpus of tales.
I shall then contrast the broader characteristics of tales told by women narrators
with those told by men, and draw some tentative conclusions about the effects
of gender on Pontic narrative style. The tales examined here must be studied
entirely from the evidence they provide as texts. Close examination shows the
extent to which each teller was affected by his or her individual circumstances, by
the narrative tradition in his or her village of origin and the characteristics of its
repertoire, by his or her gender, and by his or her audience. I will not be assigning
“meanings” to the tales, but will highlight their similarities and differences, and
suggest reasons for the points of view they reveal.
Background
Geography and Society
By the time of their exile, Pontic Greeks had lived on the southern coast of the
Black Sea for some three thousand years. Greeks began to settle that region in the
second millennium B.C. They came as colonists from the Ionian city states, and
clung to their Asia Minor foothold through the successive empires of Alexander
the Great, Byzantium, Trebizond, and the Ottomans. By the sixteenth century,
they were a Christian minority within a Muslim land. Far from historical Greece,
they inhabited a region whose geography isolated them not only from other
Greeks, but often even from each other, a condition which bred in them a fierce
independence and self-reliance. As Gerasimos Augustinos writes in his history of
the Greek communities of Asia Minor:
[Their] ability … to persist was sometimes determined, paradoxically,
by how little they depended on the outside world, whether Byzantine or
Ottoman. … Physically secluded from the rest of the peninsula and situated
far from the imperial capital to the west, the Greeks of the Pontos looked to
their own commercial, intellectual, and political resources to survive. Their
Hellenic Orthodox world remained intact longer because the Christian
empire of Trebizond avoided Turkish domination until the latter part of
the fifteenth century. But even before then, Constantinople’s political and
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
47
spiritual authority was a distant matter that, in the view of the Trapezuntines,
was best kept that way. 1
The climate and physical features of the Pontos combined to restrict and
concentrate human habitation along the coast. The largest settlements, such as
the city of Trebizond or the town of Kotyora, lay directly on the seaside. Villages
were often isolated from one another by the ruggedness of the terrain. Although
the Pontic coastal region was rich in natural resources and agricultural products—
fish, vegetables, and fruit- and nut-bearing trees along the coast, silver and lumber
in the mountains, and grain in the interior valleys—many of the inland villages
were too mountainous for anything other than subsistence farming. The village
of Imera, however, prospered for a while by supplying charcoal to the silver
mines of Argyroupolis, but by the late nineteenth century, its survival, like that
of many other Pontic villages, depended almost entirely on the wages of seasonal
emigrants—men who found work nearby as silver miners, in other parts of the
Ottoman Empire, or in neighboring regions of Russia as builders, craftsmen, or
shopkeepers.2 The men of such villages as Stavrin and Santa might return home
each winter, every few years, or only after retiring from their work abroad. Those
who remained in their villages occupied themselves with farming and animal
husbandry. Because men of working age spent most of the year away from
home, villages more than towns often depended on their women to maintain the
community and households.
The Asia Minor Disaster
Pontic life in the homeland ended with the Asia Minor Disaster. Greece, in
making a bid to reclaim the territories once held by the Byzantine Empire,
launched a major offensive against the Turks in March 1921. By autumn, there
was a stalemate. At the end of August the following year, the Turks had routed the
Greek army, which retreated to Smyrna (İzmir), which was burned to the ground.
The Turks demanded the removal of most of the Orthodox Christian minority
within its boundaries; the Lausanne Convention for the Exchange of Populations
was signed on 30 January 1923.
During the population exchange, many Pontians were given short notice—
anywhere from two hours to three weeks—to prepare themselves and their
belongings for removal to Greece. Most could not liquidate their estates and
took with them only what they could personally carry. Grief-stricken, destitute,
bewildered, they
took to the road or embarked on overcrowded transport ships.
The majority came to Greece, though others went to the Soviet Union, the United
States of America, or elsewhere.
Pontic folktale narrators and collectors found themselves among the exiled.
The experience of the Siamanis family, into which the folktale collector Despoina
Fostiropoulou had been born in 1907, was typical. Despoina’s brother, Giorgos
Siamanis, now over 90 years of age, remembered from his home in Athens that
his family decided to leave Imera before they were forced out by the coming
48
Women in the ottoman Balkans
exchange of populations. Because the men of working age in their village spent
most of the year away from home, the village had relied largely on its women.
So it was the women who organized the move and made all the arrangements for
the transfer of the family to Salonica (Thessaloniki). His father, who had been
working in the Soviet Union, only joined them after they arrived in northern
Greece.3
Other folktale collectors arrived in Greece in less conventional ways.
D.K. Papadopoulos, who collected the tale of “The Twelve Months” from Stavrin,
fled to Russia to avoid military conscription, worked as teacher, founded a Greek
school, and helped protect the Greek population during the Russian revolution in
1917; only in 1921 did he arrive in eastern Thrace, where he again took work as a
teacher. Xenophon Akoglous, who collected one of the versions of “The Undying
Sun,” also fled to the Crimea to avoid conscription, then joined the Greek army,
fought in battle, became an officer, and took part in the Greek invasion of Asia
Minor in 1919; after the army returned to Greece, he became an instructor at the
military academy.
Exile: Pontic Greeks as an Ethnic Minority
The Pontians’ reception and resettlement as refugees in Greece has had an indelible
effect on their worldview and served to cohere them as an ethnic group.4 The
refugees felt themselves to be the victims of an unequal system: they had had to
abandon their property at short notice, whereas the Muslims in Greece had been
allowed to liquidate their property and effect a relatively leisurely departure. They
also believed that the circumstances of their arrival turned their fellow Greeks
against them; this belief further confirmed them as holders of an ethnic identity
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