Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

by Amila Buturovic

  order, in Pontic tales, tend to be represented either by poverty so extreme that

  the family makes bread from ashes, or by the fact that the hero or heroine is a

  widow’s child or the offspring of a king’s unacknowledged wife. But there are

  exceptions. The hero or heroine may be the only child of a well-to-do couple

  (“The Rich Boy,”28 “Giannitson”29). The Pontic hero or heroine, like European

  and Middle Eastern counterparts, is guided by gifts, advice, assistance; he or she

  is also occasionally moved by impulse or conscience. Desire for a wife or husband

  may be the motivator, or sometimes perhaps a less tangible goal—Giannitson is

  overcome by his vocation to be a monk, Kyrlovits is moved by pity for his wife,

  the hero and heroine want to find and reassure their parents (in the final section

  of “The Rich Boy”). Poverty becomes a motivating force more frequently in tales

  told after the Greek-Turkish population exchange forced the Pontians out of their

  homeland and into exile in Greece.

  Although a villain is common in Pontic tales, there may be more than one to

  a tale, or there may be none. When the tale does involve one or more villains,

  revenge is not always exacted. Pontian narrators set things straight in their tales

  differently than did their European counterparts. For example, revenge in German

  tales may involve the evil-doer’s being burned at the stake, drowned, forced to

  dance in red hot shoes, or stripped naked and put in a barrel studded with nails and

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  harnessed to a horse. These punishments are often described in even greater detail

  than the final good fortune of the heroes. By contrast, punishment is not inevitable

  for Pontic villains, nor is it often a dose of his or her own medicine, through the

  use of their own evil methods, the way it so often is in European tales. Where the

  punishment is not entirely omitted, it is often either left to God to mete out justice,

  or to natural consequences (with divine agency left tacit). On the occasions when

  the villain is punished in the folktale, the description is usually perfunctory: he

  may be chopped into small pieces or may burst from ill nature, or she may be

  offered death by the sword or the horse. By no means can it be said of Pontic

  tales, as Tatar does of German stories, that the villain’s death in the most painful

  possible way is a precondition for the hero’s happiness.30

  Almost all Pontic folktales end with the hero or heroine in a modified and

  elevated version of his or her original condition; however, they may or may

  not include a wedding. When weddings do occur, they last forty days and forty

  nights. Some Pontic tales seem to end almost perfunctorily with such a wedding;

  others have weddings as the true culmination of the story. In still others there is

  no reason for a wedding, or the wedding is left out even when one would have

  expected it. Especially when the protagonist is a girl, a wedding may also occur

  midway through the narrative and lead to still other adventures.31

  Tale Characteristics of Different Villages

  While it is useful to consider Pontic folktales as a group, they harbor important

  differences from village to village, and from narrator to narrator—especially

  when the narrators are of different sex—within a given village.

  What we know of the folktale repertoire of Imera comes from two collectors,

  Despoina Fostiropoulou and the British philologist R.M. Dawkins. The former

  collected her tales from an unidentified woman, and the latter from two eighteen-

  year-old men, Vasilios Vasiliades and Haralampos Fotiades. They told no tales in

  common. Taken as a whole, these thirty-eight tales give us an idea of the character

  of the Imeran folktale. It is down-to-earth, and contains a stronger religious

  element than was common in Pontos. The characters come almost entirely from

  within the Greek community.

  Both female and male sets of narratives often express a reliance on God to

  rectify injustice. The widow is told not to seek vengeance against the thief who

  stole her hen’s eggs (“The Undying Sun”); Maritsa decides to leave the matter

  of her sisters coming to live with her in the palace in God’s hands (“Cinderella

  Maritsa”); a traitorous servant is left to await his just deserts (“The Scaldhead and

  the Chance Find”). There is very little of the type of magic found in most wonder

  tales. Birds descend to sort grain from ashes or to donate feathers for a mattress, a

  river and a rock speak, angels appear, and a devil deceives a blacksmith, but there

  are none of the magic cudgels, sacks producing entire dinners, man-eating ogres,

  or talking crows that appear in other Pontic tales.

  Folktales from other villages also have their individual character. Those

  from the seaside town of Kotyora feature more elaborately worked-out plots

  Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy

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  and include more Middle Eastern monsters and character types than those from

  Imera. Some of those differences might be explained by differences in population

  size and geography. On the other hand, the village of Santa was similar to Imera

  in terms of geography and size, but its tales are very different. Santan folktales

  contain many fantastic elements and are more violent than the average Pontic

  Greek tale, some of its women are given greater equality with men, and some

  of its men are fiercely proud and defiant of the king’s authority. Internal family

  relations are somehow much tighter: women are less likely to betray their men.

  Unlike other Greek or Pontic stories, heroes who rescue a sister or a mother are

  not subsequently betrayed by her; rather, they usually end up working together to

  survive their adventures.32 A witch hired to get rid of one hero ends up marrying

  him and being loyal to him. Even in the tale of “The Drooling Fool,” where the

  wife is embarrassed by her husband and always hopes he will die in his adventures,

  she takes no steps actively to get rid of him.33

  Four Tales Told by Both Women and Men

  In Pontic folktale collections such as those of Simos Lianides, Xenophon

  Akoglous, Ioannis Valavanis, and Ioannis Parharides—all men—women are

  usually depicted as liable to betray their households and their men. The tales by

  Haralampos Fotiades, another man, also fit this mold. On the other hand, those

  by Fostiropoulou’s narrator, a woman, do not. In Fotiades’s tales, the women

  are more to be censured than pitied; just the opposite in Fostiropoulou’s. In

  his, man is set against God’s demands; he is God’s pawn. In hers, men measure

  themselves against society’s demands, while women are men’s pawns. In his,

  trouble originates usually from the workings of fate; in hers, it originates within

  the household, usually with a mother-in-law or traitorous servant.

  If we had only the collections of folktales from Imera to go by, we might have

  postulated that there were two different Pontic folktale repertories, a male and a

  female. Such a conclusion could be supported by evidence from elsewhere in the

  Middle and Far East, where women and men participate to different degrees in

  the narration of folktales, and often have different
repertoires from one another.

  In Afghanistan and India, women have rituals at which they tell folktales and in

  which men do not participate.34 In Egypt, boys are expected to leave folktales

  behind when they attain manhood; Egyptian women tell their folktales primarily

  for children and for other women.35

  In parts of Europe as well, women and men can tell very different versions of

  the same basic tale, and Alan Dundes shows that this tendency persists even when

  the folktales are transformed into literature.36 In his study of Spanish folktales of

  courtship and marriage, James Taggart even found a kind of “gendered dialogue”

  in Spanish villages.37 He psychoanalyzes this dialogue, and to that end assigns

  “meanings” to the tales to show where they fit within the dialogue. He might

  have read the differences between the tales told by women and men in the Pontos

  as a kind of conversation between the sexes, in which each side justifies its own

  position and shows how it is betrayed or falsely accused by the other. A similar

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  dialogue, in a Turkish context, is made literal in Sheykh Zada’s The History of

  the Forty Vezirs, in which a man convicted of rape and condemned to death and

  the woman who accused him of the crime each argue the merits of their case

  through storytelling. As early as 1926, the Russian researcher Mark Azadovskii

  also remarked on the differences between folk poetry and narratives performed by

  women and those performed by men.38 “Even if the emphasis lies elsewhere,” he

  writes, Vinokurova “put the female theme in the foreground and treats it carefully,

  even if it is not the main concern.”39 He shows how Vinokurova’s time working

  as a maid led her to emphasize the work of servants in her narratives. Azadovskii

  makes a similar observation comparing a Siberian woman’s narratives to those of

  other raconteurs in the region: “The fundamental trait of Vinokurova’s disposition

  is her sensitive, soft delicacy, and this soft coloration, this delicacy permeates

  all her tales. Thus … there are no obscene instances at all. She did indeed tell

  me the tale of the four Popes … but this tale, which I repeatedly recorded in

  the Verkholensk region, is scarcely recognizable in her rendition (in regard to

  manner, not in regard to content).”40

  Despite the existence of two Imeran repertoires, one male and one female,

  men and women in the Pontos seem by and large to have told the same stories,

  but with different emphases. Each tale is easily recognizable as the same version

  when told by a man or by a woman: they take the same framework and clothe

  it slightly differently. We find a fictionalized description of this phenomenon

  in a novel, Aioliki Gi [Aiolean Land] by Ilias Venezis, which is set in a Greek

  farmstead on the western coast of Asia Minor. Venezis contrasts the folktales told

  by a grandmother with those told by a grandfather. For example, the grandmother

  consistently softens evil-doers: ogres become benevolent demigods of the woods,

  the wolf in “Red Riding Hood” a beast that tries to do good but falls into evil ways

  in spite of himself. The grandfather’s wolf, on the other hand, is a ravening beast

  who slakes his hunger greedily first with Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, then

  with the child herself.41 The picture that he draws of the differences between the

  grandmother’s and grandfather’s narrative styles are exaggerated versions of the

  differences we find in tales told by Pontic female and male narrators.

  Below are examples of four different Pontic tales for which a female version

  can be contrasted with a male version. No context for the telling of the tales was

  recorded. In no instance did they originate in the same village, and it is unlikely

  that the narrators knew each other or had heard each other’s tales.

  The Undying Sun

  (AT 461A; Eberhard-Boratav 126; El Shamy 461A.)42 The two stories under

  consideration here would both have been collected in Greece; their tellers

  originated in different Pontic villages. The version from Imera was collected by

  Despoina Fostiropoulou from an unidentified female narrator before 1935; the one

  from Kotyora was collected by folklorist, historian, playwright, and army officer

  Xenophon Akoglous from a male narrator before 1952. As mentioned above,

  Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy

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  Imera was a mountain village, Kotyora a coastal city. In Pontic, Fostiropoulou’s

  story is called “The Undying Sun,” Akoglous’ “The Sun’s Mother.”

  Greek variants of this story can be found in Crete and the Caucasus, and there

  is a Turkish variant from South Siberia.43 In each case, advice is asked of the sun.

  Dawkins also located it among the Gagauzy of Bessarabia, in Persia, Armenia,

  Russia, and Italy.44 The Aarne-Thompson tale type index refers to only one tale

  of this type, from India; the motif of a thief being punished by having feathers

  stuck to his head (J1141.1.5) also appears in India. The Eberhard-Boratav version

  is thematically related to “The Undying Sun” and is found throughout central

  Turkey. Arab versions have Moses asking advice of God on behalf of a destitute

  brother and sister. In a Spanish version, “The Griffin Bird,” the requests are made

  of a traveler seeking the advice of a frightful monster, and the story includes a

  river that must be crossed before the advisor can be reached.45

  In the Pontic female version, an old woman sets out to visit the Undying Sun

  to ask who is stealing her hen’s eggs; in the male version, a poor man cannot earn

  enough to feed himself and his three daughters, so he goes to ask for advice of

  the Sun’s mother. Along the way, the widow meets three spinsters who want to

  know why they cannot get married; the widower also meets three old maids. The

  widow next encounters a woman wearing three fur coats who wants to know why

  she cannot get warm; the widower meets a man buried to his waist in the ground.

  The widow then meets a raging river that wants to know what it must do to be at

  rest and a boulder teetering on the edge asking the same question; the widower

  meets only the hanging rock. When the widow finally finds the Sun, he answers

  all these questions and concludes by saying: “The one who steals your eggs is

  your neighbor, but say nothing to him; leave him to God and he will come to his

  just desserts.” The Sun’s mother gives the widower advice for the others and a

  magic piece of hide that will always fill his table with food. The widow conveys

  the Sun’s advice to the others and returns home to find that the thief had sprouted

  feathers on his face and died of the shock. After the widower passes on the advice,

  he has adventures that revolve around the loss of his piece of hide to the king,

  forcing him to return for help to the Sun’s mother.

  The female narrator sets out her story as a morality tale whereas the male

  narrator makes the morality tale a prelude to an adventure tale. The male narrator

  pauses for a cigarette immediately after his main character does; no such pause is

  mentioned in the female tale.

  Both stories have a widowed protagonist who is having difficulty getting by,

  the
widow because of the malice of a neighbor, the widower because of the burden

  of providing for three daughters. Neither widow nor widower is a common Pontic

  protagonist. Widows in Pontic tales usually have a son who goes on adventures,

  or a daughter who is sought in marriage; widows lived on the margins of society.

  Widowers—such as the father in some variants of Cinderella—usually die off

  early.

  The widow and the widower each consult a mythical sun-figure. Along the

  way, other characters ask them to consult the sun on their behalf. The humans they

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  meet have moral problems (laziness, selfishness, blasphemy), the supernatural

  characters have magical problems (inability to be at rest). The characters who obey

  the sun’s directions go on to live happy lives, those who do not are destroyed.

  Neither of the widowed protagonists takes direct action against the villain. The

  widow lets natural justice (perhaps delivered by the sun) deal with the thief who

  stole her hen’s eggs. When the widower returns to the sun’s mother for help, she

  supplies him with the tool he needs to persuade the king to return his property.

  These details reflect the storytelling characteristics of the villages from which

  they come. The Imera story has the sun telling the old woman to trust God to

  punish her neighbor. The Santa story has the widower engaged in a successful

  struggle against the king.

  In both tales the narrators emphasize to an unusual extent certain humanizing

  characteristics about their atypical protagonists. The widower takes breaks to

  smoke cigarettes and whets the desire of his audience before telling a story: “He

  sat down and rested, he asked [the girls] to bring him a little water, he also … lit a

  cigarette, and while he was looking at them one by one in the eyes, he smiled, and

  began very slowly” to tell them what the Sun’s mother had recommended. In the

  story from Imera, the widow is equally human: when she approaches the Undying

  Sun with her questions, she offers him a kerchief-full of pears from her garden

  and a basket full of bread; she slaps her bottom to defy the fury of the boulder;

  soon after she crosses the river, she sees the roofs of the village, sees the smoke

  rising from the chimneys, and smells the food cooking. In fact, this return from