Black Sea (34 page)

Trebizond shared this properity, especially during the decades when the port served as the western terminal of the overland route from India through Persia (the boom ceased abruptly when the Suez Canal was opened in
1869).
There were European consulates in the city, and half a dozen Greek banks. The whole Pontos benefited from a surge of school-foundation, and with modern education came an entirely new, lay generation of teachers trained in Constantinople or Athens for whom the Greek language was not Pontic but classical.

For the first time, intellectuals set out to give the Pontians an ethnic national consciousness. That required 'origins' and 'roots'. Anthony Bryer relates how 'Triantaphyllides, a Chaldian schoolmaster ... christened his son Pericles and sent him to Athens, whence he returned after
1842
to teach Xenophon and classical Greek at the Trebizond Phrontisterion ... By
1846,
schoolmasters had renamed Gumushane a fancy "Argyropolis'V In a typical example of cultural nation-invention, the teachers proceeded to graft the Pontos onto the stock not just of Byzantium but of Periclean Athens itself. All round the Greek world of the Black Sea, the same process was going on. The teachers and the school curricula came from Athens, bringing with them a new concept of Greekness which linked the Greek-Orthodox communities of the Black Sea and the 'nation' of Greece.

This was in no way a 'Little Greece' nationalism restricted to the arid peninsula in the Aegean Sea. A speaker in the Greek parliament in
1844
expounded this newly designed identity: 'The Kingdom of Greece is not Greece. It constitutes only one part, the smallest and the poorest ... A Greek is not only a man who lives within the Kingdom, but also one who lives in Yoannina, Serrai, Adrianople, Constantinople, Smyrna, Trebizond, Crete and in any land associated with Greek history and the Greek Race ... There are two main centres of Hellenism: Athens, the capital of the Greek Kingdom, and the City, the dream and hope of all Greeks.' Here was 'The Great Idea', the vision of a restored 'Romania' with its capital in the City, reaching from Athens to the borders of Georgia and Ukraine. But 'The Great Idea
'
had now acquired a far more impressive myth of origin, which led back to the Parthenon and the stoa and the battle of Marathon.

This is why, in
1923,
it was possible for Chrysanthos, last Metropolitan of Trebizond, to lead
164,000
Pontic Greeks 'home' to Greece - a country alien to them physically, climatically, politically and linguistically. By then, admittedly, there was nowhere else for them to go. The Russian Empire had become the Soviet Union, suspicious of Greeks ever since a disastrous
occupation of Odessa and Sevastopol by the Greek Army in
1919.
Georgia, where hundreds of thousands of Pontic Greeks had settled, had become an independent state after the Russian Revolution but had been reconquered by the Bolsheviks. Attempts at the Versailles Peace Conference to gain international support for an independent 'Pontic republic', or for an Armenian state in Asia Minor which would include Trebizond and give the Pontic Greeks internal autonomy, had come to nothing.

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 countries 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.'