may have to do with the relationship between the teller of the tale and his or her
audience. The influence of the relationship between storyteller and audience on
the telling of a tale has been noted in other cultures. Among the Navajo, Barre
Toelken found that the narrator Yellowman would embellish his tales with more
digressions and a greater degree of animation and detail when he was telling
them to an audience of engaged, actively listening native speakers than when he
was simply reciting them into Toelken’s microphone.56 Kirin Narayan noted, of
tale-telling in an Indian village in the Himalayas, that “[a] storyteller reshapes the
story to the particular situation at hand, in interaction with particular listeners.
Listeners shape the story by their responses and queries.”57
Other differences in the two tales may have to do with the ages and talents
of the tellers. Fotiades was only eighteen when Dawkins recorded his stories;
all his tales, even relatively longer ones, are short and to the point, with very
few digressions. The woman narrator from Stavrin, on the other hand, freely
emphasizes details of spinning wool, the importance of a good woman to the
household, and relationships within a family. She also stresses the good sister-in-
law’s virtual exile from her own people, her isolation within her new community,
and her increasing despair due to the malice of her sister-in-law. Fotiades, on the
other hand, delivers the tale as a fable contrasting the fate of well-wishers with
that of ill-wishers. For Dawkins’ benefit, he includes all the names of the months
and seasons.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
Characteristics of Female and Male Narrators
In the stories studied above, the differences between those told by men and those
told by women are generally a matter of detail and emphasis. The four male
narrators whose stories are discussed above stress action over motivation, and are
apt to linger over action sequences such as a magic flight from murderous parents.
They show little concern with getting the elements of marriage arrangements
properly laid out: weddings take place as soon as a king desires a girl, whatever
her age. Male characters in their tales are apt to be curious and investigate odd
phenomena. Their female protagonists are too good-natured or too gentle to
recognize danger. In other folktales throughout the Pontos (except those from
Santa), we find male narrators telling how their male characters strove to win
a bride, to support an ailing mother, or to earn honor in the world. Even as they
struggle, however, they are consistently betrayed by women or when they return
home from their adventures; those who love them inadvertently cause them
harm. The Pontos was a patrilocal society: women moved at marriage into their
husband’s parents’ house, which intensified the theme of the woman as outsider,
as unknown, as a potential traitor in the tales narrated by men.
For their part, Pontic women narrators do not portray their female characters
as necessarily soft or gentle; in a number of tales told by women, we find female
characters clinging ferociously to their chastity or to other virtues. The two
women narrators discussed above emphasize the lack of security experienced by a
girl when she is removed from parental protection, show her suffering persecution
from sisters or sisters-in-law, and include the motif of a substituted bride where the
men do not. They show detailed interest in the social interaction within houses, in
elements of housework (thrifty provisioning, wool-spinning techniques, evening
work party etiquette) and in the motivations that lie behind actions. Although
women’s female characters speak no more frequently than do those in tales told
by men, their protagonists recognize danger even when they can do nothing about
it, and think defiant thoughts even as they must remain silent. In other folktales
narrated by women, in spite of their hard-held virtue, female characters are
misunderstood by their husbands, attacked by servants, lied about and unjustly
persecuted within the family, or abandoned far from home.
Tales by a Female and a Male Narrator from Imera
Each set of tales examined above were told by men and women from different
villages. As mentioned earlier, we dispose of two repertoires from Imera, one
male and one female, with no shared tales. Still, we can learn something of the
differences between their two points of view by looking at their repertoires as
a whole. Despoina Fostiropoulou collected ten folktales from a female narrator
living in Greece. This collection shows some of its narrator’s preoccupations.
The majority of the narratives trace a girl’s career before and after her move to
her husband’s house. Nine of the ten stories include a difficult situation at the
groom’s house: persecution, a revolting groom, or an impossible set of tasks to
accomplish. Three heroines suffer persecution both at their parents’ house and
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
65
at their husband’s; a mother-in-law is persecuted in her own house. Two of the
ten suffer persecution only at their husband’s house. Three of the ten suffer no
persecution but take command of their situation, however difficult. Although the
earthy, rather comic “Undying Sun” may seem to stand outside the model of the
female tale, it still insists on the importance of charity and housekeeping skills as
a way of getting on with one’s life.
Themes that recur in this series are housekeeping as drudgery;58 lack of security
when removed from parental protection;59 betrayal within the house;60 lack of
security within marriage;61 the husband being tricked into taking another wife;62
and the husband’s remorse at the wrongs suffered by his bride.63 A woman is
able to take command of her situation only in stories where she has no in-laws to
thwart her.
Another common theme shows the bride allegiance divided between her
parental and marital houses.64 All is set right in “Shihouna” when she finally
allies herself with her marital home. “The Almsgiving Bride” dies (a martyr) in
retaining allegiance to her mother’s way of doing things. Only the widow and the
clever peasant girl leave home voluntarily. “The Almsgiving Bride,” even more
than the others, expresses a woman’s loss of volition in marriage. Although she is
not in danger of being seduced, she clings to her goal of almsgiving as fiercely as
other heroines cling to their chastity.
Fostiropoulou’s narrator was telling tales to someone who shared her language,
worldview, aesthetic standards, and ethical values. She primarily told tales about
women and their concerns, and tried to plumb the psychology and motivations
of her characters. The tales are all set in an unspecified village or in the folktale
realm just outside its borders. The narrator showed attention to housework and
sensitivity to tensions within the household. In stark contrast to the women in
Fotiades’ tales, those in the tales of Fostiropoulou’s narrator value their honor
and their chastity even above the lives of their children. The latter was especially
eloquent in depicting the plight of young brides in the houses of their in-laws,
but she was equally sympathetic to a mother-in-law whose fate crossed that of
a vicious daughter-in-law. Even the worst mothers and in-laws, however, were
not actively punished (although villainous stepsisters and witches may be).
The women of her tales worked within the confines of their social roles, which
generally meant staying within the confines of the house. When they did have to
leave the house and act on their own, they disguised themselves as men and strove
to return to their (husband’s) community.
The tales narrated by Haralampos Fotiades were collected by the British
philologist Richard Dawkins. Fotiades provided Dawkins with twenty-six tales,
but he was clearly a fledgling narrator: his tales have little nuance. He may,
however, have deliberately eschewed nuance because he was telling his stories
to a non-native listener;65 he certainly left off the usual formulaic openings and
closings. Unlike many other Pontic narrators whose tales have been published, he
keeps his narratives schematic, developing little more than a basic plot for each.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
Nine of Fotiades’s tales contain the theme of the mysterious ways of God (and
other religious motifs). Nine feature the theme of cleverness (ways of winning
contests, common in Greek tales). Six tales dwell on the infidelity of women and
girls—in his tales, almost all keep lovers, and therefore betray and dishonor their
fathers or husbands. Five tales contain the theme of the master-pupil relationship;
Fotiades narrated didactic tales and fables, and presented “The Twelve Months”
to Dawkins as a way of learning the names of the months in Pontic. There are no
enchantments and few magical objects or persons. Fotiades seems preoccupied
both with fate as ordained by God and with student-teacher relationships and
the didactic process, as well as with the perfidy of women. Some tales are set in
exotic locations: one in Austria, one in Germany, and two in England. Russia, the
setting for one tale, was not a particularly exotic location for Pontians, many of
whom emigrated there in search of work.
Conclusion
The Pontic Greeks have been an embattled people, as a religious minority in
their homeland and as an ethnic minority in their lands of exile. Their history
and culture gave rise to a deep-seated conservatism which we see reflected in the
remarkable consistency of their folktales over time and space.
In terms of structure, Pontic tales do not vary greatly whether they were told
by men or by women. The tales were often told during evening sessions in which
men and women, boys and girls would gather around the hearth in winter to listen
as they worked. The family is the organizing principle, and the house its clear
locale. Structural oppositions between the interior of the house and public space
for women, and between the interior and the exterior of the village for men also
hold sway. A wedding is not a mandatory part of the plot, nor is punishment for
the villain. Almost all the stories end, however, with the protagonist in a modified
and elevated version of his or her original condition.
Narrative idiosyncrasies appear among villages. In contrast with the elaborate
plots and Middle Eastern motifs of tales from Kotyora and the defiance of
authority and the violence of tales from Santa, we can recognize the down-to-
earth nature of Imeran narratives, their shunning of magic and flights of fancy,
and their preoccupation with morality. Each tale’s narrator was shaped not only
by his or her personality and biography, but also by the narrative traditions of his
or her place of origin.
Examining the two Imeran narrators reveals something more interesting than
just the particularities of tales from that village. By picking out the features that
the male and female tale-tellers from Imera shared with other narrators of their
own gender, we can use the Imera tales as a lens to bring into clearer focus some
consistent differences between male and female storytellers in the Pontos. Men
tended to emphasize action in their stories and spent little time detailing the
reasons behind it. Women tended to explore motivation and to detail the nuances
of interpersonal relationships. The men showed the rare good female character
in their stories as someone passive out of naiveté; not only were such female
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
67
characters less rare in women’s stories, but moreover they were described as being
passive only because of the rigorous self-control demanded of them by society.
The worldviews in the two sets of stories are divergent enough that we can
recognize a kind of dialogue between female and male narrators. In brief, men
persistently showed that they could be victims of perfidy and betrayed by the
women in their lives, so that they needed to take action to prevent or end such
situations. Women equally persistently showed that their actions and motivations
were open to misinterpretation, and that they could unjustly be persecuted by their
men and their in-laws. Within a culture in which heart-to-heart conversations
between people of the opposite sex would have been nearly unthinkable, narratives
of this sort may have provided, if not a fair and balanced view of prevailing
issues, at least one way for the men and women of the region to air their particular
preoccupations and concerns.
Notes
1. Augustinos 1992: 16–17.
2. Fostiropoulos 2002: 6; Augustinos 1992: 12–13.
3. My thanks to Bruce Clark of the Economist for information about his interview
with Mr. Siamanis.
4. This section is based on Bouteneff 2002.
5. Tanimanides: 1988; cf. also Bryer, “The Pontic Revival”: 179.
6. Hirschon 1989: 13.
7. Pentzopoulos 1962: 174ff; Clogg 1979: 122.
8. A different version of this overview appears in Bouteneff 2003: 293–295.
9. Lianides 1962.
10. Ibid., 270, 272, 276, 280.
11. Fostiropoulou 1938: 181–202; 181.
12. Akoglous 1939: 393.
13. Ibid., 385.
14. Akoglous 1950: 202.
15. Akoglous 1939: 385.
16. Ibid., 386.
17. Parharides 1951: 81–84.
18. Lianides 1959: 68–76.
19. Fostiropoulou 1938: 184–191.
20. Fostiropoulou 1941: 130.
21. Dawkins 1914: 44–55.
22. V
alavanis 1956: 135–138.
23. Dawkins 1914: 174–177.
24. Ibid., 212–213.
25. Darnton 1984: 9–72.
26. Ibid., 54.
27. Luethi 1976: 23.
28. Papadopoulos 1946: 183–196.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
29. V
alavanis 1958: 135–142.
30. T
atar 1987: 181.
31. Cf. Dan 1977: 13–30.
32. “The King’
s Wife” (AT302) in Dawkins’ Santa notebook, 17–54.
33. Lianides 1959: 61–68; subtype of
AT530.
34. Mills 1985: 201–206; Narayan 1997.
35. El-Shamy 1980: li–liii; 1999: 9–10.
37. T
aggart 1990.
38. Azadovskii 1926: 41.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 45
41. V
enezis 1943: 45–46, 70–72.
42. Fostiropoulou
1938; Akoglous 1952. The motif of the “Undying Sun” or “The
Sun’s Mother” may be linked to the mysterious “Fortress of the Sun” of Pontic
Greek folksongs.
43. Dawkins 1953: 458.
44. Dawkins 1950: 367–368.
45. T
aggart 1990: 120–129.
46. Fostiropoulou 1938: 185–193; Parharides 1951: 91–100.
47. For
overviews of the Cinderella folktale throughout the world, see (among
many other studies) Cox 1893, Rooth 1951, Dundes 1988.
48. Parharides
1951: 91–100; Papadopoulos “Sahtaritsa”; D. Fostiropoulou 1939:
184–190 ; Akoglous 1939: 397–401.
49. Angelopoulou 1989: 71f
f; Cox 1893: 499.
50. Lorimer and Lorimer 1919: 60
51. Angelopoulou 1989: 76.
52. Fostiropoulou 1931: 193–202;
Athanasiades 1928: 197–202.
53. Dawkins 1923: 285–291; Papadopoulos 1946: 171–206.
54. Roberts 1958.
55. Dawkins did not, however
, recognize the two as related tales.
56. T
oelken 1976: 155; 1998: 382.
57. Narayan 1997: 221.
58. “Cinderella Maritsa”; “Kyrlovits.”
59. “Cinderella Maritsa”; “The Scaldhead and the Chance Find.”
60. “Cinderella
Maritsa”; “Giannits and Maritsa”; “Kyrlovits”; “The Scaldhead
and the Chance Find”; “Almsgiving Bride”; “The Flattened Rings.”
61. “Cinderella Maritsa”; “Giannits and Maritsa”; “Almsgiving Bride.”
62. “Cinderella Maritsa”; “Giannits and Maritsa.”
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