User:Kravk/sandbox

Template:Pontic Greeks

Template:Pontic Greeks, based around Template:Armenians, Template:Assyrian people, Template:Laz people

Use File:Sinopeagle.png as the header image, which links to Pontic eagle

Location

• • Pontus (region)
  • Greece
  • Russia
  • Turkey
• Culture
  • Cuisine
  • Music
  • Folk dance
  • Clothing
• Languages
  • Romeika
  • Urum
  • Turkish
  • Greek
• Religion
  • Greek Orthodox Church
  • Sunni Islam
• Related ethnic groups
  • Caucasus Greeks
• Persecution
  • Greek genocide

Pontic Greeks (page)

Clothing

• The tradition male costume from Pontos consists of a black long-sleeved cotton shirt that featured a row of bullets, highlighting the warlike traditions of Pontos. The pants (zipka) were 'made from black woolen cloth and ended at the knees. The sash was typically fashioned from wool or silk and was made to be 3-4 meters long. The boots that accompany this costume were called tsapoulas"^[1]

Pontians in Greece (WWI refugees)

• 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.^[2]
• 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.^[3] Pontians, as a group, were also more likely to have communist/leftist affiliation.^[4]
• "ethnically impure invaders"^[3]
• 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."^[5]
• 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.^[6]
• "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."^[7]
• "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."^[8]
• 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."^[9]
• Pontians did not really fully integrate into Greek society until the 1980s^[10]
• "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)^[11]
• Pontic Greek adults, growing up in the midcentury, report being beaten for speaking Romeika in schools^[12]

Pontians in Greece (Soviet refugees)

• 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."^[13]
• 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.^[14]

Pontians in Greece (modern day)

• Some regard Greeks and Pontic Greeks as separate ethnicities^[15][16]
• 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."^[17]
• 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."^[9]
• 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.^[18]

Other Asia Minor Greeks in Greece

• 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?"^[9]
• 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.^[9]
• 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.^[9]
• 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.^[9]

Greek genocide

Factors leading up to genocide

• Ottoman society was divided into millets based on religion and ethnicity, with Sunni Muslim Turks as the ruling class.^[19]
• Religious minorities (dhimmis) were forbidden from wearing certain types of clothing and certain colors of fabric, although these rules were frequently flaunted. They were also forbidden from building tall houses, new churches, and from ringing church bells.^[20]
• Talaat, one of the rulers of the empire during the 1910s, described the Christian subjects as giaours ("We have made unsuccessful attempts to convert the Ghiaur into a loyal Osmanli...There can therefore be no question of equality, until we have succeeded in our task of ottomanizing the Empire.")^[21]
• Christians were more highly educated than Muslims in Anatolia^[22]
• Christians made up the majority of merchants, importers, moneylenders, and bankers; they developed a petit bourgeoisie that led to resentment by Muslim neighbors^[23]
• The Tanzimat reforms, intended to provide all Ottomans with human rights and equality in the eyes of the law, caused further division among Muslims and Christians. Some Muslims felt that equality deprived them of their dominant role as the conquerors of Anatolia, e.g., Ahmed Cevdet Pasha.^[24][25]
• continued warfare between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century; the Megali Idea^[26]
• CUP and Turkish ethnonationalism^[27]
• Cretan question. Crete voted to join with Greece in 1908; Cretan officers and political leaders were required to swear fealty to the Greek king in 1910. Crete refused to allow the Ottoman Empire to appoint Muslim judges in Crete. In spring/summer 1910, there was an organized boycott of Greek businesses in Crete and the west coast of Turkey, especially Smyrna. Muslims in Smyrna threatened Greek business owners, telling them to close their shops and abjure their loyalty to Greece, beating them if they refused.^[28]
• Turkish protestors in Constantinople called for war: “We want war, war, war, war;” “Down with Greece! Greeks bow your heads.” (In response to the First Balkan War). Armies on both sides of the conflict massacred civilians; massacres of Muslims by Christian armies further inflamed the Turks' animosity toward their Christian neighbors.^[29]
• Boycotts continued in 1913 and 1914; Muslims who entered Christian-owned shops were beaten. The CUP organized the boycott. Those doing the beating were generally hired by the government for that purpose. The main goal was to destroy the Christian merchant class and replace it with a Turkish petit bourgeoisie.^[30]
• In 1913: "Posters, placed in schools and mosques, called on Muslims to exterminate the Greeks. Turkish newspapers published violent and inflammatory articles arousing their readers to persecution and massacre. These articles were said to be obviously instigated by the authorities. Cheap and crude lithographs were also produced showing Greeks cutting up Turkish babies or ripping open pregnant Muslim women, and various purely imaginary scenes. These were effective in provoking violence against the Greeks of Asia Minor."^[31]
• In 1913 and 1914, the Ottoman government began large-scale deportations of Greeks from their homes in Western Anatolia. Massacres followed in May and June 2014. Venizelos, the Greek PM, got wind of this and threatened to massacre Muslim civilians as revenge. Shirinian argues that these threats (and the fact that the Anatolian Greeks, unlike the Armenians and Assyrians, had a foreign power looking out for them) prevented a large-scale genocide early in the 1910s.^[31]
• WWI began in Europe on June 28, 1914. The CUP conscripted all men into the armed forces on July 21. Greeks and Armenians, including teens and old men, were sent to labor battalions.^[32]
• Deportations of Greeks resumed in 1916, under the guise that Greeks were aiding enemies of the Empire (namely Russia and Greece)^[33]
• Greeks subject to house searches & seizure of weapons^[34]
• minorities were viewed as seditious, a fifth column likely to ally with Europeans and betray the Empire^[35]

Events

• July 16, 1916: Sinope, Kastamonu, and surrounding areas deported^[34]
• December 1916-January 1917: Villages around Sampsounta are burned to the ground and looted; women are raped.^[34]

Later stages

• "Even before Kemal’s landing at Samsun [May 19, 1919], deadly bands of çetes (organized brigands), especially those led by Topal Osman, had been engaged in continuous shooting, plundering, and raping of the defenseless Greek villagers in the Pontus region. With Kemal’s support, they stepped up their campaign with the objective of clearing the Greeks from the region by massacring the Greek population in cities such as Trebizond, Amasya, Pafra, Merzifon, and many others. By the spring of 1922, the bulk of the Greek population in the Pontus region, which was far from the war zone, had been deported to the interior. Along the way, tens of thousands perished from exposure, starvation, and disease. The dead and dying were thrown into rivers and ditches."^[36]
• Greece invaded Anatolia (Greek-Turkish war); Greek soldiers committed atrocities against Turkish civilians^[36]
• To end the war and keep the peace, the Greek-Turkish population exchange occurred. The Turks had previously suggested a population exchange to get rid of their Greek minority.^[37]
• "The argument that there was a mutually signed agreement for the population exchange ignores the fact that the Ankara government had already declared its intention that no Greek should remain on Turkish soil before the exchange was even discussed. The final killing and expulsion of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire in 1920–24 was part of a series of hostile actions that began even before Turkey’s entry into World War I."^[38]

Saved citations

• Pontian ethnic ancestry, in addition to the original Greek colonists: Hellenized ancient Anatolians and migrants to the area,^[39][40] Caucasian peoples,^[41][42] Turks^[43]
• History of ethnic/genetic diversity in the region^[44]
• Pontian genetics: high prevalence of haplogroups L, G2, and J2;^[45] similarity to Lazes and Armenians;^[46] genetic diversity indicating history of mixture^[47]
• Pontians are indigenous^{[48][49][50][51][52]}

References