Black Sea (35 page)

And it was reassuring to the diaspora because it demanded little of the emigrant. There could of course be strong moral pressure to 'return' — intense in the case of Zionism, perfunctory in the cases of Ireland or Poland. But for the most part the emigrant could both have his cake and eat it. He or she could remain in the relative comforts of Chicago, New York or Melbourne with the extra sentimental empowerment of a second passport and a flag to carry on the old country's independence day parade.
⁴

At the same time, the cultural gap between diaspora and 'homeland' could widen very rapidly indeed. Less than two centuries have been enough to make the average Illinois Pole into a foreigner in Warsaw, where, if he speaks Polish at all, he usually baffles his listeners with remnants of extinct peasant dialect. In Budapest, the Szekelyi women from Transylvania, wearing peasant costume and selling embroidered linens in the underpasses, are not exactly emigrants - their country left them, when Hungary lost Transylvania to Romania, rather than the other way round - but their culture is now remote from that of late twentieth-century Magyars. The German
Einsiedler,
now arriving in the Federal Republic after hundreds of years of village life in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Russia and Siberia, often speak little or no German and bring with them an idea of Germany - pious, servile to authority, repressive - which was already obsolete when Bismarck was chancellor.

Two different processes operate here, apparently contradictory but actually complementary. As the cultural gap widens, so the subjective importance of national identity — in the narrow sense of nation-state membership - intensifies. This new diaspora patriotism may remain little more than a luxury of the imagination, but there are times when, suddenly and desperately, these cheques on the Bank of Symbolism are presented for payment. We have been living through such times for fifty years. Twentieth-century anti-Semitism in Europe, followed by the rise of Arab nationalism, brought the Jews of Europe and the Middle East to Israel. As the Soviet dictatorship weakened, the Volga Germans (also deported by Stalin to Central Asia) set out for Germany announcing that they were 'returning home\

The Pontic Greeks were doing the same thing. Perhaps
300,000
are left in the territories of the old Soviet Union, more than half of them in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Most now intend to 'return home’, and nearly
200,000
have already done so in the last few years. And by 'home’, they mean modern Greece.

Even Zionist Jews cannot match the extravagance of this statement, as a remark about history. It is nearly three thousand years since the first Greek colonists passed through the Bosporus and set up trading-posts around the Black Sea. Most of them originated from the Ionian cities, on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, rather than from the Peloponnese. Since then, their culture and language have steadily diverged from those of the peninsula we call 'Greece'. And yet now their descendants head for Athens or Salonica as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

After Stalin's death in
1953,
the deported Greeks who had acquired Soviet nationality were allowed to return from Central Asia. (Most went back to Georgia, although their houses and farms had been sold off or confiscated after
1949.)
The rest, those who held Greek papers issued by a country which they had never seen, remained in exile. At this stage, it seems, their concept of their status and of their relationship to Greece began to change. They had accepted their first great uprooting, the flight from the Turks in Pontos, as an emigration, a move to new shores on the same sea. But Stalin's banishment turned the Pontic Greeks, in their own estimation, into refugees.

Dr Effie Voutira has pointed out that the modern use of the word 'refugee' - especially in English - predicates the existence of a nation-state. By the mid-twentieth century, everyone was assumed to be a member of a national community. Everyone was at home somewhere, each with his or her passport. The great and growing number of human beings who had become internationally
'homeless' - the refugees - were therefore people whose primary plight was that they had been separated from their rightful nation-state. This is why we almost always add a national adjective to the term, as in 'Bosnian/Polish/Zairean refugee'. The refugee is somebody who once had a nation, but lost it.

This is an odd, inadequate way of designating the millions of displaced individuals and families carried back and forth on the tides of the world, but the displaced themselves are increasingly inclined to adopt it - precisely because 'refugee' implies membership of a state community. This was not always so. The Gaelic-speaking Highlanders who were removed from their townships and transported to Canada considered themselves emigrants, rather than refugees, although their departure (the 'Highland Clearances') was not usually voluntary. The Pontic Greeks who fled from Trebizond to run beach cafes at Sukhum, or print newspapers in Odessa, or plant vineyards in Georgia, grieved for their lost homes but prepared to put down fresh roots. But when Stalin snatched them away from the Black Sea and dumped them in the steppes of Central Asia, threatening their whole community with physical and cultural extinction, they could no longer consider themselves emigrants. This time, they had been not merely transplanted but condemned.

In Central Asia, the Pontic Greeks faced two extreme alternatives. One was to assimilate to Soviet society, and to seek to climb the Party ladder - which many Greeks did. The other was to reject the whole new environment. In the end, the choice was effaced. The Communist Party and then the Soviet Union capsized and sank, leaving climbers and rejectors together in the same leaky boat: all were now non-Kazakh or non-Uzbek 'colonialists' in newly independent Moslem states. The 'natives', who understandably drew no distinctions between outsiders who had arrived in their land as conquerors, imperial settlers or banished victims, contemplated the farms and bureaucratic posts occupied by Russians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Volga Germans, Chechens and Meshketian Turks, and began to close in. By
1990,
ethnic rioting between locals and incomers was spreading across the Central Asian republics. Now, with fresh desperation, the Pontic Greeks appealed to 'their nation': Greece.

In the first years after the Russian Revolution there had been some outflow to Greece, and more Greeks contrived to escape in
1938—9,
after the Great Purges. But then the Soviet external
frontiers closed tightly. They did not open again for almost fifty years, when Mikhail Gorbachev began to lift the ban on mass emigration.

At that time, in the mid
-1980s,
probably around
500,000
Greeks were living in the Soviet Union, almost all of them of Pontic origin. By the end of the decade, they were arriving in Greece at the rate of
20,000
a year, and by the mid
-1990s,
the Greek villages in Central Asia were practically empty. Some, a minority, went back to the Black Sea coasts in south Russia or Georgia. There was even some optimistic talk of reviving the old idea of a Greek autonomous region in the Kuban; a congress of Greek delegates was held at Gelendzhik, near Novorossisk, in
1991,
and a Greek-language newspaper
(Pontos)
appeared in the little port of Anapa. But the Caucasus grew much less attractive for Greek exiles in the next few years. Civil war in Georgia was followed by an even more violent struggle as Abkhazia, historically one of the centres of Greek settlement, fought Georgia for its own independence. Most Pontic Greeks headed 'home' - to Athens or
Salonica.

Travelling westwards from Central Asia by train and then by ship, they brought with them enormous wooden packing-cases, crammed not only with their own possessions but with every kind of cheap Soviet household goods they could buy before they set off. Arriving at a Greek port, the new immigrants levered open the cases and sold their contents on the stalls of suburban flea-markets. Finally, when the trade goods had gone, the packing-cases were recycled as shacks for Pontic families to live in.

They had come 'home' to a poor country, which had forgotten that they existed. Greece opened to them its door but not always its heart. Less than a third of these immigrants spoke any kind of Greek which their neighbours could understand, while their Soviet qualifications and educational certificates were meaningless. Work and housing were and remain hard to find. And although there has been a large Pontic Greek minority in Greece since
1923,
when Metropolitan Chrysanthos of Trebizond led his followers out of Anatolia, prejudice against Pontics endures. Right-wing Greeks often regard them as 'Russian' and therefore politically suspect. The Left, in turn, resents their nightmarish (and perfectly true) tales of persecution, poverty and corruption in the old Soviet Union. But the real problem, in a country which regards ethnic uniformity as the badge of Greekness, has been the Pontic insistence on maintaining their distinct cultural identity.

As Anthony Bryer writes: 'Pontic Greeks . .. will not lie down. They are perhaps the most astonishing of all survivors. But some seek a history, some seek a homeland, and some both.' It is not surprising that modern Greeks often feel baffled by the contradictions of Pontic attitudes. On the one hand, they have opted for Greece as 'home', but then — as soon as they have disembarked in •the promised land - they begin to weave together a wonderful, exotic bower of special tradition and private destiny which suggests that their home is, after all, entirely elsewhere. Their emblem is the Pontic eagle or the Byzantine peacock, perhaps the 'good bird' which flew from the City to proclaim that 'Romania is taken'. Their slogan is the last line of that song: the proclamation that dead Romania will 'flower and bear fruit again'. Their ceremonies are an intimate mixture of religious and cultural revivalism. The old icon of the Madonna from Sumela was lost after
1923,
but every August, on the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin, there takes place at Panayia Sumela in northern Greece a great procession of Pontic Greeks in traditional costume who carry down the street the icon of the 'refugee
'
Madonna of Sumela. At the core of this cultural revival is the Pontic Theatre. The scholar Patricia Fann describes it as a semi-religious ritual; the community itself considers it a baptismal font, a 'Pool of Siloam
'
whose holy waters open the blind eyes of actors and spectators alike to the true faith of Pontic identity.

The good bird mourns and prophesies again, but what will be the flowers and fruit? Once this tree of Romania, felled but rising magically from death to blossom once more, seemed to be a version of 'The Great Idea': the restoration of the City's imperium over all the lands and coasts of Byzantine Christianity. But now 'Romania' seems to have retreated into itself, contracting - rather like the modern Turkish state - from a universal realm into an ethnic defensiveness concerned with a single tradition and a single language. 'Romania' seems to have become less a kingdom of this world than the secret garden of those who keep faith with the past.

The bird sings that, one day, the glory and pre-eminence of the Pontic Greeks will be recognised wherever Greek is spoken. When that day of justification comes, the two-and-a-half millennia of
Anabasis
will at last be over. The theatre of transformations which made this people first colonists, then strangers in their own land, then emigrants, then exiles and then refugees will lower its curtain. The journey which led from the Ionian shore to Pontos, from

Pontos to Crimea and Kuban and the Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the nomad steppes of Central Asia and finally from Kazakhstan to Greece, will be complete.

To reach the country of the Lazi, you have to drive about fifty miles eastwards from Trabzon. It is a fast, dangerous road, a new coastal highway along the entire southern shore of the Black Sea which cuts off every town and village from the sea with a barrier of concrete. Every few miles, you pass the fresh, crumpled wrecks of cars and trucks, often brown with dried blood.

In the opposite direction come caravans of old red Ikarusz buses. They list to port or starboard and gush black smoke, like paddle steamers. They are heading for Trabzon, from the old Soviet frontier at Sarp which is now the border between Turkey and the independent Republic of Georgia. Their passengers - Russians, Ukrainians and people from every nationality in the Caucasus — bring with them anything they can pack and carry - tea-sets and busts of Stalin, toy tanks and lavatory seats, cutlery and clocks, garden furniture and surgical instruments - to sell in the new
'Russian
market' which stretches its stalls along half a mile of pavement beside the harbour at Trabzon. Many of the sellers have travelled for days and nights from as far away as Kiev or St Petersburg, paying bribes and protection money at one frontier after another, keeping a special wad of banknotes to sweeten the Caucasian mafiosi who allocate the stalls at Trabzon.