In the Black Forest, in the pretty village of Schopfloch, lives a German scholar called Wolfgang Feurstein. He inhabits an old wooden house on the village's main street, a house filled with fair-haired children, books, papers and envelopes with foreign stamps. Feurstein, who has a yellow beard and very candid blue eyes, is not a rich man. He does not teach at any university and, unusually for a German intellectual approaching middle-age, he is not a Herr Professor or even a Herr Doktor. But he is a very busy man. In the wooden house at Schopfloch, he is creating a nation.
Feurstein first went to the Lazi country in the 1960s, travelling around the villages and learning to speak and understand Lazuri. He found an elaborate oral culture, music and songs, fairy tales and rituals and a spoken tongue which had fascinated linguists before him. But he also found a community with no written language save Turkish, with no knowledge of their origins, with no memory that they had been Christians until the final Turkish conquest of the Pontos in the fifteenth century. Feurstein saw, too, that the tides of mass communication and social change were beginning to reach these distant Pontic valleys, and that, if nothing was done, the Lazi identity would be washed away within a few decades.
What came over this mild young man then was something like a religious revelation. It came to him that the Lazi were a Volk - an authentic national community, whose survival and growth and flowering was one of the precious components of humanity's inheritance. If nothing was done, this tiny people — defenceless, still at an almost foetal stage in its development — would be lost for ever. Feurstein resolved to save it.
He was soon in trouble. News of his interests and movements came to the Turkish authorities. Framed by the security police for 'illegally entering a frontier district', he was arrested, beaten up, threatened with death and then, after a brief imprisonment, expelled. Since then, for some fifteen years, Feurstein has carried on his life's mission from Germany. He and the small group of Lazi expatriates who form the 'Kachkar Cultural Circle' set about the task of building a written national culture for the Lazi.
First came an alphabet. That had to be the start. Then came little text-books in Lazuri for primary schools, which went out from Schopfloch towards Turkey through many clandestine channels. For a time, it seemed that nothing was happening. Possibly they were not reaching their destination. More probably, Lazi families who found the whole enterprise baffling and dangerous, as many did, were suppressing them. But then, gradually, the first echoes began to come back to Germany. The text-books were being photocopied, page by page. There were reports that they were being used discreetly among Lazi pupils in unofficial lessons after school. Here and there, a few young teachers were adopting this new idea and were prepared to take a risk for it. It was still very small, but it had begun.
The first Lazuri dictionary is now being prepared at Schopfloch. So are the first volumes of what will be - not a history, for it is too early for that, but a source-book and bibliography of the Lazi past. In periodicals which are now finding their way to the valleys, folktales and traditional poetry are edited and written down. These are the basic raw materials with which the first Lazi 'national intelligentsia' can begin its work and go on to compose a national literature. And already, something is starting to flow back, through the post or in the bags of migrant Lazi workers returning to Germany. Feurstein says reverently, 'With every poem, there come new, unknown Lazuri words!'
To bring an alphabet to a people who have never written down their speech ... that is something given to few human beings. In myth, it is gods who bring letters down from heaven. When I held in my hand Feurstein's Lazuri alphabet, done in Turkish Latin script for clarity, with Georgian characters opposite, I felt a sense of awe, as if I were holding something like a seed but also like a bomb. With an alphabet, a people - even a tiny one - sets out upon a journey. Ahead lie printed novels and poems, newspapers and concert programmes, handwritten family letters and love letters, angry polemics and posters, the proceedings of assemblies, the scripts of Shakespeare translations for a theatre and of soap-operas for television, the timetables of ferries, the announcements of births and deaths. Perhaps, one day, laws. But perhaps, too, leaflets with a last speech from the condemned cell. This is a long journey, and it may be a dangerous one.
What is at once astounding and touching about Wolfgang Feurstein's work for the Lazi is that he seems, at first glance, to have walked straight out of the European past. He is repeating, step by step, the process of creating 'modern nations' out of folk-cultures which was first outlined by Johann Herder in the 1770s, and which was to form the political project of most Central and Eastern European revolutions for the next century-and-a-half.
Herder, in his Essay on the Origin of Language (1772), suggested a dialectical philosophy of social development in which language — the medium in which natural 'feeling' and human 'reflection' could be reconciled — was the most powerful dynamic. Societies passed through growth-phases analogous to the ages of human individuals. Language was supremely important in the 'childhood' phase, above all in the form of epic and 'uncivilised' poetry: Homer, the Edda, Ossian. 'What a treasure language is when kinship groups grow into tribes and nations! Even the smallest of nations ... cherishes in and through its language the history, the poetry and songs about the great deeds of its forefathers.' And Herder went further, casting the leading actor for the tragedies and comedies that were to be acted out on the barricades of the nineteenth century: 'A poet is the creator of the nation around him; he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.'
In these writings about the nation (Volk), Herder prefigured at least three elements of Romantic nationalism. The first was the idea of a Volk as something dynamic rather than static, a living organism subject to 'natural' laws of development. The second was the central importance of language in this development - which led Herder away from the universalism of the Enlightenment towards a celebration of national differences and particularity. The third was the supreme role to be played in this process by the intellectual, as literary creator but also as national historian and as lexicographer-and, often enough, as insurrectionary leader on the barricades.
Popularised, elaborated and often vulgarised, Herder's ideas flowed into the mainstream of European radical thought after the end of the French Revolution. Above all, they helped to form the political programme of nationalism. European intellectuals had no doubt about where this journey with an alphabet should end. A Volk which became literate and culturally self-aware was headed for 'nationhood’, which was held to culminate in the establishment of independent nation-states. It was in that spirit that Frantisek Palacky standardised the Czech language and reconstructed a Czech history, that Vuk Karadzic plunged his hands into treasure-chests of words to select a single 'Serbo-Croat' language, and that -at the end of the nineteenth century — Douglas Hyde founded the Gaelic League to 'de-Anglicise' Ireland.
These intellectuals were the forgers of nations, often in more than one sense of the word. Using peasant speech and oral tradition as a foundation, they set out to build what were, in fact, entirely new models of political community designed to fit into a modern world of nation-states. The patriotic need to discover lost Homeric epics (which, in Herderian terms, would justify the whole national project) was sometimes stronger than probity. James Macpherson, the real author of Ossian, was the first deceiver. Palacky himself was fooled by Vaclav Hanka, librarian of the new National Museum in Prague, who faked a succession of 'ancient' manuscripts (The Song of Vyiehrad and The Love Song of King Wencestas) to bolster the Czech claim to authentic nationhood. From Finland to Wales, Romantic nationalism still has many literary skeletons in its cupboards.
Since then, the intellectual world has changed almost out of recognition. Nationalism still thrives, whether in the open-hearted, modernising form of the 1989 revolutions or in the genocidal land-grabs in Bosnia and Croatia. But the old Herderian underpinning has been discredited. The sovereign nation-st
ate is beginning to grow obsolete, while Herder's comparison of a nation to a living organism which must develop and change according to laws of nature is dismissed as empty metaphysic. The concept of ethnicity is still a dangerous minefield, fifty years after European Fascism was overthrown. Most students of nationalism play safe by suggesting that what they evasively term an 'ethnie' exists only as a subjective conviction: an imagined sense of community in which a shared language or a religion or a belief in some common biological descent are usually present, but in widely varying proportions.
If there were no more to be said, then Wolfgang Feurstein would be no more than an anachronism. He would be the last Herderian, the last European intellectual to invent a nation. He would be another Lord Jim, who took 'the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people' (except that Patusan already existed and Jim was required only to save it, not to devise it). But there is a great deal more to be said.
Feurstein does not believe that the Lazi Volk is merely subjective. 'This is not something invented in a European head! In every village, I saw this lighting-up of faces and eyes when they understood that I valued their culture. Call them a nation, a folk, an ethnicity — I don't care.' Knowing only too well the problems of non-conformity in Turkey, he is careful not to explore political perspectives; the centre at Schopfloch is only a Kulturkreis - a cultural working group. But the journey has begun, all the same, and its first years of travel are already heading in a very familiar direction.
To his critics, who include some Western academics, what Feurstein is doing is morally and scientifically wrong. Their crudest argument is that nationalism is in all circumstances evil, and that to encourage it is therefore unpardonable. The second, more formidable line of objection is that any student of another society has an obligation to do no more than study. It may be inevitable that the very presence of a foreign researcher will to some extent contaminate and modify the behaviour under examination, but to take sides in that society's disputes, still more to set out to change its attitudes irrevocably, is a monstrous intrusion and a violation of scientific responsibility.
Feurstein, however, believes that events have already justified him. The alphabet which was sent from the Black Forest to the Black Sea is alive and walking now, out of his hands, precious to a small but growing band of young Lazi who discover fresh ways to use it every day. He is impatient with those who say that he should have stood by, recorded and remained silent as one more human language made its exit from history. He says, 'I did not wish to write about a people, but for a people. In that sense, my own personality was only a means to an end.'
This is a dilemma as old as the social sciences — which are not very old, but already battle-scarred. It sounds like a dispute over professional ethics, but it is really an argument about cognition. One side defends the idea that 'facts speak', and that the scholar must therefore listen to them in impartial silence. The other side retorts that facts say almost anything the investigator wants, and that what he hears in the silence is no more than the mutter of his own unacknowledged prejudices. The student is part of the study, acting inside the situation rather than peering at it through some imaginary window, and to admit that fact is the precondition of knowledge.
In that spirit, Feurstein's interventionism has found backers. Dr George Hewitt, Reader in Caucasian Languages at London University, shares his feelings about another imperilled culture: Mingrelian.
Those who seek to reprimand Feurstein and myself for meddling in others' affairs and not being satisfied with letting the Mingrelians (and the Svans) decide for themselves conveniently forget what happens to those Mingrelians who do dare to raise their heads above the parapet in order to try to initiate a debate -[their heads are] metaphorically, and in the conditions currently prevailing in Mingrelia perhaps not merely metaphorically, shot off... Is it not reasonable for interested and concerned Western linguists to suggest to colleagues ... that untaught, non-literary languages are in danger of ultimate extinction in the conditions prevailing at the end of the twentieth century, and to try to encourage a calm and rational debate as to how their viability can be best safeguarded?
Hewitt knew the last speaker of Ubykh.
I regard myself as immensely privileged to have met and worked with Tevfik Esenc, in 1974, and ever since I have not deviated from the belief that it behoves all of us with an interest in the languages of the Caucasus to do all we can to prevent any of the rest suffering the same fate as Ubykh, whether by language-death through accidental or deliberate neglect or by the threat of physical annihilation...
This is the real answer to the last charge made against Feurstein -that by encouraging the Lazi to defend their language and culture, he is actually reducing their freedom. At present, this critique goes, the Lazi have the option of multiple identities: they are full members of the wider Turkish community, with all its possibilities, and at the same time they can enjoy a private Lazi existence at home. But if Lazi nationalism develops, rejecting assimiliation, these two identities will become incompatible, and the Lazi will be forced to choose between them. To this, Feurstein and his supporters retort that dual culture is no longer an option. Unwritten, the Lazuri language is dying as surely as the Ubykh, and with it the heart of a small but unique human group will cease to beat.
What Feurstein has done is not to narrow choice but to enlarge it. For him, as for Hewitt, a scientist is not a camera, and the scientist's duty to a vanishing culture is not only to record but to offer wisdom and to say: 'This end is not inevitable. There is a way to survive, and I can point you towards it.'
Where does this journey end? Common sense, wringing her hands, cries desperately that one thing does not have to lead to another. A decision to write a school-primer in a certain language does not have to lead to demonstrations, broken heads, sedition trials, petitions to the United Nations, the bombing of cafes, the mediation of powers, the funeral of martyrs, the hoisting of a flag. All the Lazi enthusiasts want is to stabilise their memories, to take charge of their own culture. That is not much, no provocation. Logically, the journey should stop there — a short, peaceful journey to a more comfortable place within the Turkish state.
But the rougher the journey, the further it goes. In 1992 Feurstein's alphabet was seen for the first time on student placards, in an Istanbul demonstration. Early in 1994, a journal named Ogniy written in Turkish and Lazuri, was published in Istanbul by a group of young Lazi. The editor was arrested after the first number, and now faces charges of 'separatism'. A second issue of the journal appeared a few weeks later. It called, more clearly than before, for an end to the assimilation of Lazi culture. One of the publishers said: 'A new age has dawned!'
Cadmus, first king of Thebes, brought the alphabet to Greece. But he also planted dragons' teeth, which sprouted into a crop of armed men.
Chapter Eight
The deputies do business there [in the Polish parliament] with sword in hand, like the old Sarmatians from whom they are descended, and sometimes, too, in a state of intoxication, a vice to which the Sarmatae were strangers.
Voltaire, History of Charles XII (1731)
FOR MORE THAN a thousand years, between the eighth century BC and the fourth century AD, the Pontic Steppe and much of south-eastern Europe were controlled by 'Iranians' — speakers of the Indo-Iranian family of languages. The peoples whom the Greeks named 'Scythians' emerged from Central Asia and reached the Black Sea in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Four hundred years later, when the Scythians had come to dominate the whole northern shore of the Black Sea and its fringe of Greek colonies, another race of Iranian-speaking nomads began to appear with its covered wagons and herds of horses, moving out of the steppes around the Caspian Sea and the outfall of the Volga and pushing into the regions round the lower Don.
The Scythians and the Greeks both considered the newcomers to be non-Scythian, although their way of life was similar and their speech-so modern linguists
say - was closely related. They called them 'Sarmatians', another vague generic term which was draped over one tribal group after another as it reached the Black Sea in the next few centuries. The Sarmatians gradually occupied Scythian territory, pushing the Scythians themselves westwards towards the Danube delta. They remained in the Pontic Steppe for some five hundred years, until the onslaught first of the Goths and finally of the Huns in the fourth century AD drove them in turn towards the West.
Because of Herodotus, the Scythians are much better known than the Sarmatians. They feature as the original 'barbarians', strange, fierce and free. Because it is more enticing to write about horse-bowmen and the royal death-ritual and the wagon fleets voyaging across the grassland, their enormously successful adaptation to settled agriculture and to the opportunities of the Hellenic Empire is usually ignored.
Only one novelist resisted that temptation to 're-invent the barbarian'. Naomi Mitchison's astonishing historical novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen is concerned not with 'otherness' but with multiple identity — with culture-switching. She introduces an élite of semi-Grecianised Scythians, living in the third century BC in a Black Sea village rather like a small version of Olbia. They still take the lead in the fertility rites which their tribe requires (the ritual death of the king, mass copulation in the fresh-sown furrows • .. Mitchison, as she admits, was much under the spell of Frazer's The Golden Bough when she wrote the book), but they also venture confidently into the Greek world. The two main characters, a Scythian princess with shamanistic powers and her brother, travel back and forth on Greek trading ships between the coast of what is now Ukraine and the Peloponnese. There they become involved in the politics of Hellenic ruling families. In Sparta, they are introduced to King Cleomenes III by his tutor, the Stoic philosopher Sphaeros (a historical figure who spent some years at Olbia). Informally adopted into the family of Cleomenes, they witness his doomed attempt to construct a communist utopia and to defend it against the Achaean League.
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