1. Introduction

It is reported that in 1849¹ the philologist and principal of the school “Frontistirion” of Trebizond, Konstantinos Xanthopoulos, published the study “Άσματα των παρά την Τραπεζούντα χωρών και ολίγα περί Τραπεζούντος” (Songs from regions around Trebizond and a few things about Trebizond) in the journal Φιλολογικός Συνέκδημοτης, thus initiating the collection of Pontic linguistic and folkloric material. However, more widely known and unanimously accepted as pioneers were Periklis Triantaphyllidis and Savvas Ioannidis, whose work coincided with a series of local contests held in 1870 by the “Greek Philological Association of Constantinople” for the collection of “living monuments” and their comparison with the respective ancient monuments, as well as with the 1875 edition of the epic of Digenes Akritas.² Similar activities, including lots of publications on folkloric material, are very common in the Pontus as well as in other regions from that year onwards. The specific activities in the region continued outside the Pontus after 1922 and helped the emergence and development of the Pontic folklore.

2. The Pioneers: Collections

The starting point for the first collections of Pontic linguistic and folkloric material was the atmosphere of cultural rebirth created due to the formation of a relatively prosperous commercial bourgeoisie³ after the Tanzimat reforms. This cultural rebirth was based on the ideological axis of a “Hellenism” consolidated by the intellectual efforts of non-liberated Greeks. The main associations that helped those efforts were the “Greek Philological Association of Constantinople” and the club “Society for the Dissemination of Greek Letters in Asia Minor” of Smyrna. The interest of those involved, who were mainly members of the civil elite, was initially focused on their birthplace and was expressed through material and intellectual benefits: establishment or re-establishment of schools (“Frontistirion” of Trebizond, “Megalo scholeio” of Kerasounta), charitable and educational clubs (“Charitable Society” of Trebizond, “Xenophon” of Trebizond, “Schools’ committee” of Trebizond), as well as increased writing activity, initially in the form of individual studies and later in the form of articles⁴ referring to the place. The patriot scholars examined their native land with respect to the place (geography, morphology, topography), time (histories “from ancient times to date”) as well as the ethnology and composition of its population (statistics).⁵ The writers aimed to spread anything they knew about their place to their compatriots: “it is sad that the foreigners travel around our country and learn about it, […] while we, who were born here, know nothing about it and are reluctant to explore it, […] although today there are clubs supporting such activities and the public asks for them” underlines Savvas Ioannidis in the introduction of his work Ιστορίακαι Στατιστική της Τραπεζούντος(History and Statistics of Trebizond).⁶ These scholars also addressed the “outside word”, thus aiming to make their birthplace and its problems known to the world. In the prolegomena of his work Ποντικά,⁷ Periklis Triantaphyllidis bitterly criticizes the indifference of Greece towards the Greeks living abroad and asks for immediate help so that ”the expatriate Greeks living among the Asian barbarians” could be further educated.

3. The Pioneers: Choices

The fact that these scholars were at the same time collectors and philologists, that is, teachers with extensive educational work, who had often been “nurtured” by the “Frontistirion” of Trebizond and the University of Athens in a general atmosphere of linguistic archaism,⁸ by all means affected their activities and became the criterion for selecting and negotiating the collected material. Therefore, their interest was mainly attracted by the popular language and literature (songs, fairytales, proverbs, etc.) to the extent the latter offered the evidence for the historical continuity of the Greek element of the Pontus and the purity of its Greek origin. In the chapter referring to the “περί την Τραπεζούντα διάλεκτο» (dialect of Trebizond), S. Ioannides underlines: “Several foreigners […] consider it a mixture of Turkish, Persian and other barbarian words together with corrupted Greek ones. […] It is impossible for anyone to talk about the pronunciation and purity of the dialect, which is more Greek than any other Greek popular language. Because this is not an encomium to the dialect, the mere citation of part of the grammar, popular stories and fables […] in the local dialect would be enough”.⁹ This tendency, which defined the object and limits of observation of the early collectors and to a great extent of their successors, contributed “in our having today a one-sided and partially accidental picture of the Pontic folk culture”.¹⁰ Therefore, in their studies, the collectors of the Pontus not only were indifferent to issues of primary importance, such as the influence of the Turkish over the Pontic element, but to a great extent they “purified” the collected linguistic and folkloric material from words and themes. Besides, in the first volume of Αρχείον Πόντου, G. Soumelidis reported that “Triantaphyllidis and Ioannidis are the first who delved extensively into the songs of the Pontus and made them known to the literary world. But […] the linguistic rendering of the texts (particularly in S. Ioannidis’ work) is often poor. The Παραλλαγαί are incomplete, with discontinuities and additions from other songs, while the meaning is either missing or is not always correct”.¹¹

4. Digenes Akritas

The comparison between the consequences of the publication of the epic of Digenes Akritas for the Greek and Pontic folklore is highly interesting. Akritas distracted the attention of the Hellenist scholars from the “patriotic” klephtic songs of Epirus and Continental Greece and opened up new horizons for the Greek folklore. According to Dawkins,¹² the afflux of songs from Asia Minor and the Aegean islands created the suitable conditions for a new outlook that turned from national-patriotic issues to a pure folkloric interest like the propagation of oral tradition. However, in the case of the Pontus no significant changes are observed in this direction. On the contrary, the epic was interpreted as proof of the national spirit, the bravery and militancy of the Greek element against the conqueror, a complete testimony whose extracts were preserved even in the form of songs “sung by overage farmers”.¹³ The interpretation P. Triantaphyllidis put on an akritic song should be noted.¹⁴ Although the song is clearly focused on death and the inability of even a mortal with supernatural powers to escape it, Triantaphyllidis interprets it as a hymn to a fearless man, defender of freedom “in the early years of the Turkish dominion […] whom, for he was the greatest of all, [the traditions] over-praised for what he had done”. Therefore, Akritas influenced the Pontus at a quantitative rather than at a qualitative level. A. Bryer¹⁵ underlines that “the akritic epic helped the further collection of mainly linguistic material in an atmosphere requesting the instant rescue of history and the ‘real’ culture of the Pontus and the overall nation”.¹⁶ The changes noticed from 1880 onwards in the Pontus in the directions and style of specific collectors are not directly connected with the invention of Digenes Akritas but with wider social phenomena mainly related to the bourgeoisie.

5. Second Generation

From 1880 onwards the collectors of mainly linguistic material start to display a tendency different from their predecessors’, in the sense that it is less dedicated to the unconditional documentation of the purity of Pontic Hellenism. The collection method becomes more systematic as well as effective and consistent with actual facts, while the collected material is used in different ways: it is not fragmentally incorporated into works-anthologies of varying content but constitutes a corpus of scientific studies. Main representatives of this tendency were Ioannes Parcharides and Demosthenes Oikonomides. The first presented the Γραμματικήντης διαλέκτου Τραπεζούντος(Grammar of the Trebizond dialect) in 1880, which was awarded a prize in the linguistic contest held by the “Greek Philological Association of Constantinople”. The second submitted a doctoral thesis titled Lautlehre des Pontischen (Phonetics of the Pontic dialect) to the School of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig in 1887. His work was awarded the prize of three hundred golden marks by the foundation of the linguist G. Kourtis. It should be noted that the new tendency, apart from collections, is also reflected in the wider society. Therefore, from 1890 onwards the number of teachers, consular servants, doctors and lawyers increased among the members of the “Greek Philological Association of Constantinople”, while merchants and real estate agents became fewer.¹⁷ It is evident that the “second generation” of the collectors of living monuments includes more scientists, although this does not imply an epistemological step: the two tendencies involved with the linguistic and the folkloric material were in concord even within the work of the same scholar. Thus, while he “fought on the front line with his scientific studies, lectures and propositions, which became famous for their scientific methods and profound content,”¹⁸ and produced serious works like the Γραμματικήτης ελληνικής διαλέκτουτου Πόντου (Grammar of the Greek dialect of the Pontus),¹⁹ D. Oikonomides also published articles, such as the “Ανέκδοτον ποντικήν παράδοσιν” (Unpublished Pontic tradition) in volume G of Λαογραφία (Folklore), where he included a fairy tale from Argyroupoli in a simple and unprocessed way without interpretations.

6. The Production of Living Monuments

The collection of linguistic and folkloric material may be better understood in the light of the factors that made it available, that is, the conditions and processes through which certain social practices became collectibles and were structured as “monuments”. Linguistic archaism, a frequent point of reference for subsequent theorists, although to a certain extent it may explain the choices and attitude of Pontic collectors towards the material they recorded, is not the answer to the motives that drove them to this activity. “Today the expression ‘memorials of speech’, as it could be translated in English, means nothing at all and requires an explanation in reference with its background, although it is so common in our literature that nobody wonders about its origin”.²⁰ This remark made by Aliki kuriakidou-Nestoros concerns the entire Greek folklore and not just the region of the Pontus. However, it underlines that the existence of living monuments is neither an evident nor an everlasting phenomenon. On the contrary, it is the product of specific people who under certain conditions were interested in a special way in some social practices, such as the narration of stories and nomadic stock-breeding, and turned them to “fairy tales”, the “Parcharia in the Pontus”, etc. The starting point of the product is the oral speech of “overage farmers”.²¹ This raw material was collected by scholar-teachers, who transferred it to printed publications mainly read and backed by the members of a rising middle class including merchants and real estate agents²² settled in the Pontus or at refugee reception centres, such as Constantinople, Smyrna and the Russian coasts of the Black Sea. A question about the benefits of this production arises at this point. Most of the scholar collectors were famous for their unselfish attitude: they were tireless researchers (Balabanis, Oikonomidis), who swept the country in the little free time they had due to their educational activities, thus often putting their lives at risk (Parcharides) in order to rescue from “oblivion”²³ the traditions that were threatened to “be swallowed by the love poems of modern poetry introduced by the new invading culture”.²⁴ As a matter of fact, money was not the benefit from the production of living monuments. Besides, the amounts awarded as prizes at various contests, such as the one held by the “Greek Philological Association of Constantinople”, although not negligible, were usually absorbed by the publication of the winning study. Scholar collectors usually considered the historical value of the collected material a sufficient reason for the obsession they had: the preservation of living and mainly linguistic monuments.

7. Τhe Paradox of Living Monuments

Some of the determinants of the paradox of the living monuments in the Pontus are the historical value of the monuments that “improved” during their narration, the different grammars of the Pontic dialect, which by no means were intended for teaching, the use of the Pontic dialect in publications, strictly in jokes, fairy tales and quotations,²⁵ as well as the extensive activities of the middle class on agricultural traditions “which nobody cared for anymore”²⁶ and were usually presented without comments. The above paradox may be summarised as follows: the symbolic overcharge of the collected linguistic and folkloric material is opposed to its depreciated practical use since any text written in the Pontic dialect is quoted as if it were a bad form or a lack of seriousness, which the quotes intend to justify in order to avoid all misunderstandings. In this case, the bourgeois collectors of living monuments and their bourgeois readers could be described as users of the records they had turned to monuments. As a matter of fact, scholar teachers, whose “sweet and shiny style certainly contributed to creating a gap between civil and agricultural populations as well as between generations”,²⁷ were far from being identified with the “overage farmers” from whom they collected songs and fairy tales. They aimed at highlighting the traditional elements that, according to their opinion, had actually survived and could be considered evidence of the Greek culture, at the same time forming the base of a Pontic civil symbolic capital, rather than at praising an agricultural population they considered, just like the Pontic language, corrupted if not non-existent.²⁸ Therefore, there is nothing accidental in the fact that the operation to preserve an “original” culture, despite the large amounts of energy consumed by the collectors, was accompanied by the concurrent inactivation of its actual forms of manifestation so that “a one-sided and partially fortuitous picture of the Pontic folk culture is today available”.²⁹ All the above, which form the substance of the paradox of living monuments, finally were a sine qua non factor for the successful collection of folkloric and linguistic material.