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The Pontian Greek diaspora refers to the [number] Pontian Greeks[a] who live outside of the Pontos in northeast Turkey. Pontian Greeks, also simply called Pontians, are indigenous to the Pontos, which is located in the Black Sea region of modern Turkey.[1][2][3][4] They traditionally speak Romeika, which is related to Demotic Greek, and practice Greek Orthodox Christianity.
In Greece
[edit]Pontians in Greece (WWI refugees)
[edit]- In Greece, when the Pontian refugees first arrived, they weren't viewed as true Greeks. They were called Turks, Turkish seeds, "baptized in yogurt," or "sowed by Turks." Local Greeks believed the refugees would give them lice and other diseases. Greeks questioned the faithfulness of Pontian women and the religiosity of Pontians; they were viewed as less than true Christians. Pontians were stereotyped as stupid, criminal, or - in the case of women - sexually voracious. Unlike the Greeks from western Anatolia (Smyrniotes, Constantinople Greeks) and the Thracians, their language was unintelligible to the average Hellene. They shared little history. However, many modern Pontians embrace their Greek identity.[5]
- Pontians and native Greeks were on opposite sides of the National Schism. Pontian refugees typically favored Eleftherios Venizelos, while many native Greeks favored the King.[6] Pontians, as a group, were also more likely to have communist/leftist affiliation.[7]
- "ethnically impure invaders"[6]
- Pontians were used to democratic self-government. The Turkish and Ottoman governments generally left them to their own devices. They generally disliked the monarchy upon arriving in Greece, and they voted to abolish it in 1924: "The abolition of the monarchy in 1924 has been directly attributed to their influence."[8]
- Greeks viewed Pontians as an unfortunate reminder of the failure of the Megali Idea. They called them "Turk-spawn," mocked their language, and also ridiculed them when they tried to communicate in the literary Greek that they learned in school.[8]
- "To the mainland Greeks not only was the Pontic dialect mutually incomprehensible with standard Greek but Pontic dances were utterly alien, Pontic music cacophonous, and Pontic native dress outlandish."[9]
- "To the mainland Greeks not only was the Pontic dialect mutually incomprehensible with standard Greek but Pontic dances were utterly alien, Pontic music cacophonous, and Pontic native dress outlandish. Furthermore, because political tensions remained high between Greece and Turkey for decades after the Exchange of Populations, all the Asia Minor Greeks were strongly discouraged from publicly discussing their history or culture and were urged to assimilate fully in mainstream Greek culture."[10]
- One man, Abraham Elvanides, said he and the other Pontian refugees he came with spoke no Greek. Rather, they spoke Pontic Greek, which is "is far removed, not only from the official purist language of the Greek state and schooling system, but from the spoken language of the indigenous population of Greece. It is unintelligible to speakers of modern Greek." He reports that the locals mocked Pontians, calling them "sons of Turks."[11]
- Pontians did not really fully integrate into Greek society until the 1980s[12]
- "Pontians are represented as freedom fighters and exemplary Greek revolutionaries, in accordance with the national heroic narrative of Greek mainstream historical discourse, and especially that of the 1820s revolution. The second trope is that of ethnic purity. The Pontians are represented as ethnically purer than the local Greeks, as exemplifying continuity with the ancestral ancient culture to a higher degree." (Tsekouras)[13]
- Pontic Greek adults, growing up in the midcentury, report being beaten for speaking Romeika in schools[14]
Pontians in Greece (Soviet refugees)
[edit]- There's also some confusion over what is the true "homeland": Russia, Greece, or the Pontos. "The Caucasian Greeks go to Greece as the “Homeland,” but what they discover there...is their otherness. The majority of them speaks Russian or Turkish, but do not know any Greek. If they have maintained the Pontic Greek dialect in their families...they soon realize that it is not comprehensible for native Greeks. In fact, their Greek-ness, which constituted the desire of three generations to live in Greece, is put into question. They encounter a new ethnic border between the native-born Greeks, who are called the “Hellenes,” and newcomers, migrants from the former Soviet Union, who are defined by the natives as “Russo-Ponti” (literally, the Russian Pontians). They departed from the Caucasus as Greeks, but arrived in Greece as the Russians and Pontians." Distance from "real" Greeks and the perceived homeland. "In Vitiazevo, a 40-year-old man told me that he had heard that the Pontic Greeks and Hellenes did not like each other because the Greeks from Greece did not help the Pontians during the massacre in the Pontos."[15]
- Many Soviet Greeks are migrant workers in Greece, sending money home to family in Russia, Ukraine, etc. Men often work in home repair and construction alongside other European migrant workers (Romanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Albanians) doing heavy manual labor. Women often work in the leisure, tourism, and sex industries.[16]
Pontians in Greece (modern day)
[edit]- Some regard Greeks and Pontic Greeks as separate ethnicities[17][18]
- Many Pontians, even today, find themselves discriminated against. "Albanians reported higher discrimination against their ethnic group, but not higher discrimination against themselves, personally, than Pontic Greeks."[19]
- Historiography in the 1960s/70s: "Greek Orthodox refugees were portrayed as Ionian brothers who fled from the lands of Homer; the Greek Orthodox native population who received them as brothers as immune to racism. National unity and homogeneity were also preserved through the pages of Greek school textbooks, which silenced the voices of refugees who suffered not only during their exodus from Asia Minor but during their resettlement in Greece. The indifference displayed by Greek historians on this issue facilitated nationalist propaganda by fostering collective amnesia about the extraordinary role played by immigration in the economic renewal and cultural enrichment of Greece in the twentieth century."[11]
- One Pontian man recalls an event that happened when he was a student in Thessaloniki the 1980s: He and some other students went to sing Pontian carols in the market around Christmastime. Multiple people spat in their direction.[20]
Other Asia Minor Greeks in Greece
[edit]- The report of one refugee woman, Maria Birbili, from "Yargciler" (Yagcilar?), on going to a Greek village in search of work & lodging: "On the second of October we got to Crete, in Chanea. Somebody came there. He gathered us to pick olives in Paliochora. It took us two days and one night to reach there. We went up hill and down dale. Once we arrived at the village, he wanted to get us to sleep in a hen coop. I told him: ‘I do not go inside. Had I wanted to be captured I would have remained in Asia Minor.’ Then the president of the village council came and settled us in a cell. That was big enough. However, there was neither mattress nor quilt to lie down. A crowd gathered round us and eyed us with curiosity like being another race. [The crowd asked] Do you speak any Greek? Did you have any churches in your country?"[11]
- Female refugees were the majority of workers in textiles and custom clothes (made to measure) in 1930. Women had no right to strike or join unions, and they regularly received 1/2 to 1/3 of male wages. Refugee women were paid the worst in the textile and weaving industries.[11]
- Few refugees had working-age men to support them. At many ports, women, children, and the elderly made up 90% of the refugees, as men had been detained and forced into labor battalions.[11]
- Descendants of Asia Minor refugees today are more likely than other Greek citizens to feel positively toward Middle Eastern refugees trying to seek asylum in Europe (e.g., Syrian refugees). However, the economic crisis in Greece seems to have had a very negative impact on sympathy toward refugees.[11]
In Russia and Ukraine
[edit]Soviet Greeks
In other countries
[edit]- Diaspora groups in USA
- In Armenia
- In Australia
- In northern and Western Europe (Sweden, Germany?)
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ^ Also called Pontic Greeks
References
[edit]- ^ Travis, Hannibal (2009). "The Cultural and Intellectual Property Interests of the Indigenous Peoples of Turkey and Iraq". Texas Wesleyan Law Review. 15: 601. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1549804. S2CID 153304089. Archived from the original on 15 March 2023. Retrieved 17 October 2022.
The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires states to provide an effective remedy to indigenous peoples deprived of their cultural, religious, or intellectual property (IP) without their free, prior and informed consent. The Declaration could prove to be an important safeguard for the indigenous peoples of Iraq and Turkey, the victims for centuries of massacres, assaults on their religious and cultural sites, theft and deterioration of their lands and cultural objects, and forced assimilation. These peoples, among them the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis of Turkey and Turkish-occupied Cyprus, and the Armenians, Assyrians, Yezidis, and Mandaeans of Iraq, have lost more than two-thirds of their peak populations, most of their cultural and religious sites, and thousands of priceless artifacts and specimens of visual art.
- ^ Zografou, Magda; Pipyrou, Stavroula (2016). "Dance and Difference: Toward an Individualization of the Pontian Self". In Meglin, Joellen A.; Matluck Brooks, Lynn (eds.). Preserving Dance Across Time and Space. Taylor & Francis. p. 267. ISBN 9781134906383.
The Pontians are a population that originate from the historical area of Pontus in Anatolia, originally located around the southern and eastern coasts of the Black Sea.
- ^ Mackridge, Peter (October 10, 1991). "The Pontic dialect: a corrupt version of Ancient Greek?". Journal of Refugee Studies. 4 (4): 335–339. doi:10.1093/jrs/4.4.335. Archived from the original on 15 March 2023. Retrieved 2 August 2022 – via Academia.
These people originate from the eastern half of the southern shores of the Black Sea.
- ^ Michailidis, Nikos (2016). Soundscapes of Trabzon: Music, Memory, and Power in Turkey (PhD). Princeton University. p. 62.
- ^ Tsekouras 2016, pp. 65–69.
- ^ a b Tsekouras 2016, p. 68.
- ^ Tsekouras 2016, p. 96.
- ^ a b Fann Bouteneff 2007, p. 49.
- ^ Fann Bouteneff, Patricia (2003). "Greek Folktales from Imera, Pontos". Fabula. 44: 292–312. doi:10.1515/fabl.2003.018.
- ^ Fann Bouteneff, Patricia (September 2003). "Greek Folktales from Imera, Pontos". Fabula. 44: 292–312. doi:10.1515/fabl.2003.018.
- ^ a b c d e f Kritikos, Georgios I. (2021). "Silencing inconvenient memories: refugees from Asia Minor in Greek historiography". Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies. 47 (18): 4276. doi:10.1080/1369183X.2020.1812282. Cite error: The named reference "kritikos" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ Tsekouras 2016, p. 75.
- ^ Tsekouras 2016, p. 98.
- ^ Tsekouras 2016, pp. 100–101.
- ^ Popov, Anton (2003). "Becoming Pontic: "Post-Socialist" Identities, "Transnational" Geography, and the "Native" Land of the Caucasian Greeks". Ab Imperio. 2: 339–360. doi:10.1353/imp.2003.0114.
- ^ Psimmenos, Ioannis (2017). "The Social Setting of Female Migrant Domestic Workers". Journal of Modern Greek Studies. 35 (1). Johns Hopkins University Press: 49. ISSN 1086-3265.
- ^ Dalla, M. and Antoniou, A.-S. (2016), "Successful Aging in the Workplace: A Comparison Study of Native Greeks, Pontic Greeks, and Albanian Immigrants", Antoniou, A.-S., Burke, R.J. and Cooper, S.C.L. (Ed.) The Aging Workforce Handbook, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 59-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78635-448-820161003
- ^ Prapas, C; Mavreas, V (March 2019). "The Relationship Between Quality of Life, Psychological Wellbeing, Satisfaction with Life and Acculturation of Immigrants in Greece". Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. 43 (1): 77–92. doi:10.1007/s11013-018-9598-3.
- ^ Motti-Stefanidi, Frosso; Asendorpf, Jens B. (June 2012). "Perceived Discrimination of Immigrant Adolescents in Greece". European Psychologist. 17 (2). doi:10.1027/1016-9040/a000116. ISSN 1016-9040.
- ^ Tsekouras 2016, p. 72.
Bibliography
[edit]- Fann Bouteneff, Patricia (2007). "Persecution and perfidy: women's and men's worldviews in Pontic Greek folktales". In Buturović, Amila; Schick, İrvin Cemil (eds.). Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture, and History. I. B. Tauris. pp. 45–72. ISBN 9781845115050.
- Shirinian, George N. (2017). "The Background to the Late Ottoman Genocides". In Shirinian, George N. (ed.). Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923. Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781785334337.
- Tsekouras, Ioannis (2016). Nostalgia, Emotionality, and Ethno-Regionalism in Pontic Parakathi Singing (PhD). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.