separate from that of their indigenous Greek neighbors.
After their harrowing trek to Greece, many of the refugees were sick, starving, and
exhausted. Some discovered relatives who could help them, others were sheltered
in urban slums or in theater buildings, schools, and abandoned warehouses. Still
others trailed around the countryside begging for sustenance even as they sought
deserted villages or homesteads in which to establish themselves. They generally
tried to settle with fellow villagers from the Pontos, as is born out to some extent
by the number of refugee settlements in Greece named after cities or villages in
the Pontos.5
Like other refugees from Asia Minor, Pontians faced enormous difficulties
upon their arrival in Greece. They soon exhausted their resources and suffered the
perils of any displaced people—starvation, disease, poverty, and homelessness.
Like all forcibly uprooted peoples, they also suffered the psychological terror
of dispossession and readjustment. Moreover, they were confronted by a hostile
reception on the part of local Greeks, who were themselves still reeling from
the consequences of the Asia Minor Disaster and the shattering of the long-held
national ideology known as the Megali Idea—“The Great Idea,” according to
which Greece would retrieve all its unredeemed lands in Anatolia. Indeed, local
Greeks found themselves saddled with the refugees as permanent reminders of
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
49
their national disgrace. Inundated by refugees, many of whose mother tongue was
either Turkish or an alien variety of Greek, the indigenous population mocked
them as “Turk-spawn” and ridiculed the Pontians in particular when they tried to
communicate in the high-flown Greek they had learned in school.
The demographic effect of the population exchange on Greece was immediate.
Within a few weeks, it had transformed Greece into a nearly homogenous state
that had achieved apparent territorial and ethnic integrity. From one standpoint,
the refugees were all Greeks, sharing the religion and national ideal of other
Greeks—reports and statistics tend to mask the ethnic diversity of the newcomers.
But each group had inevitably brought with it its own idiosyncrasies. While the
various relief organizations operating at the time recognized this multiplicity
of ethnic characteristics, the prevailing official attitude of the time was that the
refugees needed to lay aside their Asia Minor heritage in order to concentrate on
assimilating fully into the rest of the Greek population.
This assimilation was never completely realized, although on the surface
it might have seemed inevitable. The Pontians’ cultural bonds with Greece,
especially their consciousness of their classical heritage, had been revived in the
last years before the population exchange. Like other Greeks, they had maintained
their Orthodox bond with Byzantium through the Church. Nevertheless, despite
these ties and the pressure to assimilate, Pontians remained a distinct minority
within Greece. Their difficulties as refugees contributed to this, as did their former
social situation in Asia Minor. Ottoman society and administration had classified
people by their religious affiliation, so that people were divided less by class than
by ethno-religious identity. Rich and poor Greeks shared a collective identity:
“Since many Greeks had become influential and wealthy, their less successful
fellows were able to bask in reflected glory, as it were, reinforcing the conviction
of their overall superiority as a group. Later, in the Greek state, despite their rapid
entrenchment at the bottom of the social and economic ladder and their political
impotence, this sense of cultural and moral superiority was maintained.”6 Their
new awareness of class difference can be felt in the tales they told in Greece,
where a greater emphasis is placed on the differences between rich and poor than
in those that were told in the Pontos.
The refugees found themselves ideologically at odds with the state. In their Asia
Minor homeland, they had been accustomed to local democracy, virtually governing
themselves and maintaining responsibility for community institutions such as the
church and school, whereas in Greece they were governed by a centralized state.
The refugees’ distrust of the form of the established Greek government fed their
passion to be avenged for their uprooting and their irredeemable losses. They
made their anger felt through the ballot box: the abolition of the monarchy in
1924 has been directly attributed to their influence.7
During this period, many Pontians became ethnicists, actively interested
in maintaining their cultural community. They joined together to organize for
the preservation of their traditional heritage and to resist full assimilation with
the rest of the Greeks. The societies they established included the Epitropi
50
Women in the ottoman Balkans
Pontiakon Meleton [Committee of Pontic Studies], founded in Athens in 1927,
the Filekpaideftikos Syllogos [Pro-education Club], established near Drama in
1928, and the Efxeinos Leskhi [Euxine Club], founded in Salonica in 1933. Such
Pontic organizations proliferated throughout the country—in the city of Salonica
alone there were sixteen.
An overview of the founders of the Epitropi Pontiakon Meleton sheds
light upon the original focus of one such organization. They consisted largely
of clerics and teachers who had been active in petitioning for an independent
Pontic Republic—men who had been educated at the major Greek schools of
Asia Minor and had taken as their goal the preservation and publication of their
historical, linguistic, and folkloric heritage. These founders included Metropolitan
Chrysanthos Philippides, who had worked for establishing the independent
Pontic Republic; Leonidas Iasonides, a politician and lawyer, had traveled with
him to Paris to petition for the republic; Anthimos A. Papadopoulos, a priest and
linguist, and Demosthenes Oikonomides, a linguist and folklorist, had worked
on the Historical Lexicon of the Greek Language of the Academy of Athens. All
these men transferred the focus of their activities from nationalist separatism in
Asia Minor to an active ethnicism within Greece. The early years of the journal
Arheion Pontou [Archive of Pontos] were devoted to gathering as much material
as possible about the Pontos, its people, history, and culture. It contains collections
of folktales, folk songs, dialectal vocabulary lists, collections of riddles, proverbs,
superstitions, folk medicine beliefs, and descriptions of towns and villages and
their peoples. It published the folklore materials collected by Stathis Athanasiades,
Ioannis Valavanis, and Despoina Fostiropoulou, discussed below. The Pontiaka
Fylla [Pontic Leaves], which published many of the folktales from Stavrin
collected by D.K. Papadopoulos, was founded in 1936. Army-officer-turned-
folklorist Xenophon Akoglous founded the Hronika tou Pontou [Chronicle of
Pontos] in 1943.
Pontic Folktales: An Overview
To date, Pontic folktales have been studied as homogeneous, and for good
/> reason.8 They share characteristics that set them apart from tales from other parts
of the Greek world, Europe, and the Middle East. Though they belong squarely
within the wider Greek corpus of tales, they are little known outside the Pontic
community, except among specialists in Greek folklore—among whom they
have a reputation for being particularly violent. The primary obstacle to a wider
readership has been language. The Pontic dialect and standard spoken Greek are
mutually incomprehensible; on the page, Pontic does not even look like demotic,
since the standard Greek alphabet has to be modified to transcribe it. Pontic tales
have rarely been translated into either standard Greek or any other language, so
that even when the tales do get included in collections of Greek tales, more often
than not they are left in the original opaque dialect. They appear chiefly in Pontic
ethnic journals or in books about Pontic traditions that were produced before the
1970s.
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
51
The description of the Pontic folktale in situ that follows is based on accounts
published by Pontic tale collectors; the analysis is largely based on my study of
a 1962 selection of tales by Lianides.9 The vast majority of Pontic folktales was
collected by men, many of them school teachers. Despoina Fostiropoulou was the
only Pontic woman whose collection has been published. She was well educated
for a Pontic woman, and was fortunate in having a schoolmaster husband who
shared and encouraged her interest.
Published versions of Pontic tales do not appear to have been worked over the
way the Brothers Grimm’s tales were: even noticeable errors remain uncorrected.
In “The Drooling Fool, His Brothers, and the King,” a tale from the village of
Santa, for example, the unpromising hero magically summons the white horse
he was given once, the red horse twice, and the black one not at all.10 In addition,
although the tales are often part of “showcases” of Pontic culture, no proverbs
have been appended, no “proper” sentiments woven in, while scatology and other
crudities remain. Certainly there must have been some editing: although they
were not made literary as such, they contain few interruptions, few interjections
by the audience, few hesitations or stumblings. On the other hand, the occasional
“I should have mentioned earlier that…” has been retained. Very occasionally we
find indications of vocal changes (as in the “huuuge boulder” met by the widow in
Fostiropoulou’s “The Undying Sun”11), or markers of a break in the narrative, as
when the transcriber includes the following exchange in “The Good Brothers”:
…The other ones waited for him up above. His wife cried, cried, cried, no
one could console her.
Let us leave them up above and him down in the earth and let us make
ourselves a cigarette: give me your fixings, Sofokles…
* * *
Now, where was it that we stopped?—He went down into the earth (say the
others).—Ah, yes: my lord went there, he looks and eeeeeeeeeveryone is
sad and wearing black… 12
Pontic folktale narrators were members of the community. There are no
references to professional storytellers of the sort that existed in some parts of
Greece. As Xenophon Akoglous wrote of those in Kotyora, a town on the Pontic
coast, “There were only certain people who knew the folktales and they weren’t
necessarily old. There were also quite a few young men, young women, and
middle-aged tale-tellers.”13 Outsiders may well have also acted as narrators:
although not mentioned by Pontic commentators, there is evidence from the
folktales themselves that visitors might have been invited to contribute.14
As in other communities, Pontic tales were also told at work sessions. Pontians
told tales during the shucking of the corn harvest and the husking of the hazelnut
crop, and while sorting, carding, spinning, and knitting wool. Tales were also
commonly told at winter’s evening gatherings of family, friends, and relatives.
These were called parakath’ and were not unlike the community sessions known
as veglia in Tuscany or ceilidhe in Ireland.
52
Women in the ottoman Balkans
Tale-telling at a parakath’ followed a certain pattern. “Some narrators acted
grave, or pretended to be grave, above all as soon as suggestions began that they
tell one. They would change the subject, say that they weren’t in the mood, and
generally protracted the question, purely to provoke even greater interest.”15
Women were an accepted part of the audience, and were often narrators of tales
themselves. Just as the narrators could be any age or sex, so could the audience.
Girls and women usually had knitting or embroidery to do, and schoolchildren
might abandon their homework to listen in:
Before the folktale began, the housewife or the daughter of the house
would take care to bring close to the hearth or to the brazier all the makings
for coffee, so as not to be forced in the middle to get up and interrupt the
continuity of the narrative. She would also bring whatever else she intended
to offer to those gathered: hazelnuts usually, apples and appetizers generally,
because some folktales lasted a long time.
When at last everything was ready, the narrator would put on a formal
expression and make the introduction with this formula: “Anyone who is
inside, stay in; and whoever is outside, stay out; and whoever needs to piss,
let him go piss and come back.” And then he would typically begin with “In
the first times and in the silver years there was a…”16
Pontic narrators drew on much the same stock of tales as Greek storytellers:
their oikotypes—the subtypes of the tales that are tied to a particular cultural
setting—generally resemble those of the Greek mainland, and have much less
in common with those of Turks (though they do share certain formula tales with
them) or of their fellow minorities in the Ottoman Empire such as Armenians, Jews,
Kurds, or Laz. Often the building blocks of the tales are virtually identical, but
they are combined in different ways. For example, in Minas Tchéraz’s collection
of Middle Eastern folktales, L’Orient inedit, the Armenian Cinderella combines
elements that, in the Pontic repertoire, are found in “The Jealous Sisters,” “Little
Brother and Little Sister,” and “Cinderella.” In Tchéraz’s Armenian tales, as well,
the narrators consistently portray a special bond between brother and sister. In
that version of Cinderella, we find that the benighted heroine has a brother; he
exists only so that the wicked stepmother can dispose of him in the opening of the
story, an unnecessary element in the Pontic versions which show more interest in
the conflict between the women sharing a household.
Pontic Greek tales originate from a number of sources. Some can be traced
back to antiquity (e.g. “The Cyclops,”17 “The Two Brothers,”18 “Cinderella,”19
“The Animal Husband”20). Others seem to originate in medieval sources such
as exempla or hagiography (e.g. “The Pasha’s Daughter’s Dead Lover,”21
“Giannitson”22). Yet
others appear to derive from more recent sources (e.g.
“Mohammed,”23 “The King and the Bell”24).
Pontic folktales can usefully be compared to their European counterparts. Like
other European folktales, Pontic versions have the family as their organizing
principle. But whereas in the European tale the family is more often than not
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
53
riddled with tensions and inner conflicts, that is not necessarily true of the Pontic
tale, where intra-family tensions flare up only about half the time.
While in French folktales there is an opposition between the village and the
open road,25 in Pontic tales we find an opposition between the interior of the house
and public space (for women), and between the interior of the village and its
exterior (for men). As a result, Pontic heroes and heroines show less confidence
in universal nature than do their European counterparts. Thrust outside the house
or village, girls take refuge in the hollows or branches of trees, and youths remain
perpetually on their guard.
The action in a Pontic folktale usually begins in a house, but then almost
always shifts to the world outside the village. The hero or heroine is usually a
fairly ordinary person until he or she crosses the village border into the magic
space beyond. Except in the case of Cinderella and certain other heroines, the
hero or heroine only becomes marvelous when he or she moves away from his or
her own place—in other words, he or she is marvelous in other people’s places,
while (usually) remaining ordinary in his or her own.
In the French tales, where “no discernible morality governs the world in
general, [and] good behavior does not determine success in the village or on the
road,” cunning and intrigue and the need to perform unethical acts is the norm.26
In Pontic tales, on the other hand, it is usually the clever, industrious people who
succeed; it is usually unethical to attack anyone who is a fellow-villager. Morality
is shown time and again to reap earthly rewards; it is not seen as arbitrary.
The European hero or heroine, as Luethi notes, falls at the extreme end of
the social order, the extreme edge of the family; he or she may be the youngest,
the weakest, or apparently the most unpromising.27 The far reaches of the social
Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History Page 10