Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

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Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History Page 10

by Amila Buturovic


  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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.

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  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

 

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