Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  The Greek invasion of Anatolia, egged on by Lloyd George, was smashed by Kemal Ataturk in 1922. The following year brought the Treaty of Lausanne, and the 'exchange' of Moslem and Christian minorities. The Greeks of Istanbul and the Aegean islands west of the Dardanelles were allowed to remain for another half-century, until most of the surviving Greeks left during the Greco-Turkish confrontation over Cyprus after 1974. The Great Idea' was extinct at last.

  But the Pontic Greeks were not extinct at all. From being a motherland with widely scattered children, the Pontos had become a diaspora. One part of the diaspora now made its life in Greece, remaining for other Greek citizens a puzzling, inward-looking nation-within-the-nation. The other part vanished behind the fortress walls of the Soviet Union and the outside world, including most Greeks, forgot about them. But they, it turned out, did not forget about Pontos or Greece.

  Most Greeks in the new Soviet Union lived around the Black Sea. Settlers who concentrated around the north shores of the Sea of Azov (the 'Mariupol Greeks') had a dialect and culture of their own; they were the descendants of an older farming community in Crimea which Catherine the Great had moved into southern Russia. But the majority was of Pontic origin. The Greeks lived in the port cities, especially Odessa, Rostov and Sevastopol, in the fertile Kuban steppes, in the coastal towns and villages of Georgia and Abkhazia and in the hills of central Georgia.

  The first Soviet years were tolerable, even encouraging. The Greeks rapidly recovered from the devastations of the Civil War. They kept most of their farms, and there was a vigorous cultural revival: a reform of the Greek alphabet; a wealth of bold and interesting Greek books, journals and newspapers in the kiosks; a state-assisted network of Greek-language education. On the Kuban coast and in some districts of Ukraine, Greek autonomous regions were established.

  But with the collectivisation of farming after 19x8, and Stalin's usurpation of supreme power, the Greeks were transformed almost overnight from beneficiaries of the Revolution to victims. Everything about them was now construed as counter-revolutionary: their tradition of free enterprise, their links with the 'imperialist' world outside and especially with Athens (many of them held Greek passports), their independent culture. The Greeks in south Russia and Ukraine strongly resisted the loss of their farms, and thousands were arrested. As the 'Great Purges' developed in the 1930s, their cultural and political leaders were charged with treachery or Trotskyism and murdered. The Greek schools were closed and Greek literature destroyed. In south Russia, political persecution rapidly turned into ethnic pogroms; entire Greek communities were arrested and deported. Dr Effie Voutira, who has done much research among the Pontic Greeks in the ex-Soviet Union, estimates that as many as 170,000 Greeks were expelled to Siberia and Central Asia after 1936.

  But this had been only a prelude. The full impact of state terror was turned against the Greeks in the aftermath of the Second World War. Like the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and the Volga Germans, the Greeks of the Soviet Union became a condemned nationality and were banished.

  The 70,000 Crimean Greeks, almost all Pontic by descent, went first. Then came the Greeks of Kuban and south Russia. Finally, on the night of 14/15 June 1949, a single immense operation planned in secret for many months rounded up almost the entire Greek population of the Caucasus. The settlements in Abkhazia and along the Georgian coast down to the Turkish frontier were the principal target. About 100,000 people were seized. Their villages were surrounded in darkness by NKVD special troops, and they were given only a few hours to pack. Many of them perished on the sealed trains, and when they arrived at their destinations - usually weeks later — they were deliberately dispersed: scattered among small Moslem communities and kolkhoz cotton farms across the Central Asian plains.

  Why was this done? There is no clear answer, even today. Stalin's fear of war in the Black Sea, his memories of the 1919 Intervention, Georgian intrigue and envy or the possession of Greek passports by so many Pontic Greeks - all these have been put forward as explanations. Perhaps the real provocation was that the Greeks were a family. Their human links were stronger than the artificial bonds of totalitarian politics. They were residents of the Soviet Union, but their crime was to be 'cosmopolitan'; to be members of a wider world of trade, gossip, marriages and family funerals which carried on its activities across and beyond the Soviet frontiers.

  But Black Sea life without Greeks - the local politicians and factory owners, the grocers and cafe proprietors, the journalists and bank-clerks and grain-dealers and ship's captains — was a thin shadow of what it had once been. The Greeks had been envied by their neighbours. Now they were painfully missed.

  Fazil Iskander is the great man of twentieth-century Abkhazian poetry and fiction. In his novel Sandro ofChegem, there is a scene in which Sandro, an Abkhaz hero of opportunism, is tempted to buy the house of a Greek family. The husband and wife have been deported to Siberia; their abandoned children taken for adoption by relations in Russia. It is a pretty little house, well looked after, surrounded by flowers and fruit trees. But then Sandro's father, a village patriarch from the hills, gradually realises why the house is empty, and why the city soviet is selling the house to his son for the price of two pigs.

  'My son,' he began in a quiet and terrible voice, 'before, if a blood avenger killed his enemy, he touched not a button on his clothes. He took the body to the enemy's house, laid it on the ground, and called to his family to come out and take in their dead man clean, undefiled by the touch of an animal. That's the way it was. These men, now, kill innocent people and tear their clothes off them to sell cheap to their lackeys. You can buy this house, but 1 will never set foot in it, nor will you ever cross the threshold of my house!'

  Like the Crimean Tatars whose exile they shared, the Pontic Greeks in the Soviet Union did not merely sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon. They tried, illegally and in secret, to teach Pontian Greek to their children, who at school were being indoctrinated into a monoglot Russian-Soviet culture. In the dusty kolkhoz villages of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, parents managed to transmit at least fragments of their culture - music and cookery, especially. At the same time, their sense of identity slowly changed and hardened during the decades in Central Asia. Although they had now lost contact not only with Athens but with the remnants of the old Greek diaspora around the Black Sea many thousands of miles away to the West, their sense of 'Greekness' tightened into a belief in their own Greek political identity.

  Most of the Pontic Greeks who went into exile had retained Greek passports. After the First World War, the government in Athens had distributed national identity papers throughout the diaspora, a gesture which paid respect to the dying, irredentist 'Great Idea'. At the same time, it was in line with a new current in post-1918 nationalism: the notion that nation-states had a right and even a duty to extend some degree of membership to their own ethnic compatriots abroad. Cultural affinity was to be developed into political affiliation. This idea was taken up principally by nations with a tradition of emigration and a recognisable diaspora. Germany, Ireland and finally Israel were among the nation-states which constructed versions of a 'right to return', the right to citizenship based on ethnic criteria which could be biological, religious, cultural or a mixture of all of them. Poland, before and after the Second World War, experimented with several versions of 'Polonia', a category which was intended above all to tap the wealth of the huge Polish diaspora in the United States.

  What did this call to identification with a 'motherland' really mean? The contemporary states of Greece, Ireland, Israel, Hungary and Poland are all modern restorations of lost polities. As restorations, they are all highly inaccurate; none of them has the frontiers of its 'original'. But those originals all had in common the fact that they were obliterated from the political atlas by imperial violence. Accordingly, those who left the old national territory as emigrants - mostly in the nineteenth century - retained and passed down some sense that their departure from their native coun
tries had been a matter of coercion rather than of free choice.

  The resurrection of these countries as independent nation-states was therefore at once touching and reassuring to a diaspora. It was emotionally touching because independence did not merely avenge the trauma of emigration but also legitimated it. In a country like the United States, the appearance of Ireland or Poland on the world stage as a fully fledged, passport-issuing, conference-attending state raised the self-esteem of the Boston Irish or the Chicago Poles. The whole rhetoric of triumphant national liberation ascribed the tragedies of the past to foreign imperial oppression. 'We did not run away from our country in its hour of need. We were driven overseas by English landlords, or Prussian gendarmes, or tsarist Cossacks.'

  And it was reassuring to the diaspora because it demanded little of the emigrant. There could of course be strong moral pressure to 'return' — intense in the case of Zionism, perfunctory in the cases of Ireland or Poland. But for the most part the emigrant could both have his cake and eat it. He or she could remain in the relative comforts of Chicago, New York or Melbourne with the extra sentimental empowerment of a second passport and a flag to carry on the old country's independence day parade.4

  At the same time, the cultural gap between diaspora and 'homeland' could widen very rapidly indeed. Less than two centuries have been enough to make the average Illinois Pole into a foreigner in Warsaw, where, if he speaks Polish at all, he usually baffles his listeners with remnants of extinct peasant dialect. In Budapest, the Szekelyi women from Transylvania, wearing peasant costume and selling embroidered linens in the underpasses, are not exactly emigrants - their country left them, when Hungary lost Transylvania to Romania, rather than the other way round - but their culture is now remote from that of late twentieth-century Magyars. The German Einsiedler, now arriving in the Federal Republic after hundreds of years of village life in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Russia and Siberia, often speak little or no German and bring with them an idea of Germany - pious, servile to authority, repressive - which was already obsolete when Bismarck was chancellor.

  Two different processes operate here, apparently contradictory but actually complementary. As the cultural gap widens, so the subjective importance of national identity — in the narrow sense of nation-state membership - intensifies. This new diaspora patriotism may remain little more than a luxury of the imagination, but there are times when, suddenly and desperately, these cheques on the Bank of Symbolism are presented for payment. We have been living through such times for fifty years. Twentieth-century anti-Semitism in Europe, followed by the rise of Arab nationalism, brought the Jews of Europe and the Middle East to Israel. As the Soviet dictatorship weakened, the Volga Germans (also deported by Stalin to Central Asia) set out for Germany announcing that they were 'returning home

  The Pontic Greeks were doing the same thing. Perhaps 300,000 are left in the territories of the old Soviet Union, more than half of them in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Most now intend to 'return home’, and nearly 200,000 have already done so in the last few years. And by 'home’, they mean modern Greece.

  Even Zionist Jews cannot match the extravagance of this statement, as a remark about history. It is nearly three thousand years since the first Greek colonists passed through the Bosporus and set up trading-posts around the Black Sea. Most of them originated from the Ionian cities, on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, rather than from the Peloponnese. Since then, their culture and language have steadily diverged from those of the peninsula we call 'Greece'. And yet now their descendants head for Athens or Salonica as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  After Stalin's death in 1953, the deported Greeks who had acquired Soviet nationality were allowed to return from Central Asia. (Most went back to Georgia, although their houses and farms had been sold off or confiscated after 1949.) The rest, those who held Greek papers issued by a country which they had never seen, remained in exile. At this stage, it seems, their concept of their status and of their relationship to Greece began to change. They had accepted their first great uprooting, the flight from the Turks in Pontos, as an emigration, a move to new shores on the same sea. But Stalin's banishment turned the Pontic Greeks, in their own estimation, into refugees.

  Dr Effie Voutira has pointed out that the modern use of the word 'refugee' - especially in English - predicates the existence of a nation-state. By the mid-twentieth century, everyone was assumed to be a member of a national community. Everyone was at home somewhere, each with his or her passport. The great and growing number of human beings who had become internationally 'homeless' - the refugees - were therefore people whose primary plight was that they had been separated from their rightful nation-state. This is why we almost always add a national adjective to the term, as in 'Bosnian/Polish/Zairean refugee'. The refugee is somebody who once had a nation, but lost it.

  This is an odd, inadequate way of designating the millions of displaced individuals and families carried back and forth on the tides of the world, but the displaced themselves are increasingly inclined to adopt it - precisely because 'refugee' implies membership of a state community. This was not always so. The Gaelic-speaking Highlanders who were removed from their townships and transported to Canada considered themselves emigrants, rather than refugees, although their departure (the 'Highland Clearances') was not usually voluntary. The Pontic Greeks who fled from Trebizond to run beach cafes at Sukhum, or print newspapers in Odessa, or plant vineyards in Georgia, grieved for their lost homes but prepared to put down fresh roots. But when Stalin snatched them away from the Black Sea and dumped them in the steppes of Central Asia, threatening their whole community with physical and cultural extinction, they could no longer consider themselves emigrants. This time, they had been not merely transplanted but condemned.

  In Central Asia, the Pontic Greeks faced two extreme alternatives. One was to assimilate to Soviet society, and to seek to climb the Party ladder - which many Greeks did. The other was to reject the whole new environment. In the end, the choice was effaced. The Communist Party and then the Soviet Union capsized and sank, leaving climbers and rejectors together in the same leaky boat: all were now non-Kazakh or non-Uzbek 'colonialists' in newly independent Moslem states. The 'natives', who understandably drew no distinctions between outsiders who had arrived in their land as conquerors, imperial settlers or banished victims, contemplated the farms and bureaucratic posts occupied by Russians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Volga Germans, Chechens and Meshketian Turks, and began to close in. By 1990, ethnic rioting between locals and incomers was spreading across the Central Asian republics. Now, with fresh desperation, the Pontic Greeks appealed to 'their nation': Greece.

  In the first years after the Russian Revolution there had been some outflow to Greece, and more Greeks contrived to escape in 1938—9, after the Great Purges. But then the Soviet external frontiers closed tightly. They did not open again for almost fifty years, when Mikhail Gorbachev began to lift the ban on mass emigration.

  At that time, in the mid-1980s, probably around 500,000 Greeks were living in the Soviet Union, almost all of them of Pontic origin. By the end of the decade, they were arriving in Greece at the rate of 20,000 a year, and by the mid-1990s, the Greek villages in Central Asia were practically empty. Some, a minority, went back to the Black Sea coasts in south Russia or Georgia. There was even some optimistic talk of reviving the old idea of a Greek autonomous region in the Kuban; a congress of Greek delegates was held at Gelendzhik, near Novorossisk, in 1991, and a Greek-language newspaper (Pontos) appeared in the little port of Anapa. But the Caucasus grew much less attractive for Greek exiles in the next few years. Civil war in Georgia was followed by an even more violent struggle as Abkhazia, historically one of the centres of Greek settlement, fought Georgia for its own independence. Most Pontic Greeks headed 'home' - to Athens or Salonica.

  Travelling westwards from Central Asia by train and then by ship, they brought with them enormous wooden packing-cases, crammed not o
nly with their own possessions but with every kind of cheap Soviet household goods they could buy before they set off. Arriving at a Greek port, the new immigrants levered open the cases and sold their contents on the stalls of suburban flea-markets. Finally, when the trade goods had gone, the packing-cases were recycled as shacks for Pontic families to live in.

  They had come 'home' to a poor country, which had forgotten that they existed. Greece opened to them its door but not always its heart. Less than a third of these immigrants spoke any kind of Greek which their neighbours could understand, while their Soviet qualifications and educational certificates were meaningless. Work and housing were and remain hard to find. And although there has been a large Pontic Greek minority in Greece since 1923, when Metropolitan Chrysanthos of Trebizond led his followers out of Anatolia, prejudice against Pontics endures. Right-wing Greeks often regard them as 'Russian' and therefore politically suspect. The Left, in turn, resents their nightmarish (and perfectly true) tales of persecution, poverty and corruption in the old Soviet Union. But the real problem, in a country which regards ethnic uniformity as the badge of Greekness, has been the Pontic insistence on maintaining their distinct cultural identity.

  As Anthony Bryer writes: 'Pontic Greeks . .. will not lie down. They are perhaps the most astonishing of all survivors. But some seek a history, some seek a homeland, and some both.' It is not surprising that modern Greeks often feel baffled by the contradictions of Pontic attitudes. On the one hand, they have opted for Greece as 'home', but then — as soon as they have disembarked in •the promised land - they begin to weave together a wonderful, exotic bower of special tradition and private destiny which suggests that their home is, after all, entirely elsewhere. Their emblem is the Pontic eagle or the Byzantine peacock, perhaps the 'good bird' which flew from the City to proclaim that 'Romania is taken'. Their slogan is the last line of that song: the proclamation that dead Romania will 'flower and bear fruit again'. Their ceremonies are an intimate mixture of religious and cultural revivalism. The old icon of the Madonna from Sumela was lost after 1923, but every August, on the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin, there takes place at Panayia Sumela in northern Greece a great procession of Pontic Greeks in traditional costume who carry down the street the icon of the 'refugee' Madonna of Sumela. At the core of this cultural revival is the Pontic Theatre. The scholar Patricia Fann describes it as a semi-religious ritual; the community itself considers it a baptismal font, a 'Pool of Siloam' whose holy waters open the blind eyes of actors and spectators alike to the true faith of Pontic identity.