opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

This story picks through the ashes.

When I was finishing my undergrad and moving through to linguistics in 1993, the war in Abkhazia was underway. There was plenty of grubby conduct on both sides, and Abkhazia was in the end thoroughly ethnically cleansed; but outsiders with no stake in the Caucasus had sympathies for the most superficial of reasons. As a linguist, I wished the bizarre consonants of Abkhaz well. Yes, it was that superficial—though I did also know someone who knew Viacheslav Chirikba, Abkhaz specialist on Abkhaz, linguistics lecturer in Leiden (and now in Sukhumi), and representative of Abkhazia to Europe for years.

Robert Haupt was the Soviet Union/Russian correspondent at the time for the Fairfax newspaper group (The Age, Melbourne, and the Sydney Morning Herald). This was a pre-Web age, and his dispatches, which I consumed with pre-Web leisure, alternated between leisurely whimsy and urgency, from a correspondent in the midst of the disruptions shaking the Soviet Empire. When he finished his five year stint, Haupt published a memoir of his time in Russia, Last Boat to Astrakhan (see review 1, review 2).

Halfway through his time in Russia, Haupt wrote an editorial on the Abkhazian War. My sympathies were with the Abkhaz consonants; his sympathies were with a sustainably-sized polity, which meant Georgia, and he treated Abkhazian independence as “a sort of Ruritanian joke”. His sympathies led him to diss Abkhaz consonants:

The amazing thing is that even in Abkhazia the Abkhazians are a minority. In fact, they constitute 17.1 per cent of the region’s population, Georgians making up 43.9 per cent. The total number of Abkhazians anywhere is just over 90,000. Put together, they are a football crowd. About half the Abkhazians are Sunni Muslims, but judging from my meetings with some of them before the civil war it was a lightly-worn faith, with few mosques and veils and with the prohibition on alcohol honoured not so much in the breach as by the barrel.
The Abkhazian language is an issue. A strange tongue, apparently related to Circassian, it sounds like the noise a Chinese speaker might make on the point of being strangled. When the Soviet Union existed, mandatory Russian obscured the problem of whether the official language here was to be Abkhazian or Georgian. As Moscow’s grip slackened, disputes arose, particularly over what was to be the language used at Sukhumi University. Georgians point out that their language, having a written literature going back to the 5th century BC, has some claims to precedence as a means of instruction over a tongue that achieved a fully written form only in 1928.

I’ve said worse a decade later about Montenegrin, but I was scandalised at the time. Given the practicalities of bureaucracy and business and scholarship, Georgian does have more of a claim as an Ausbausprache than Abkhaz—spoken by only two thirds of that “football crowd”; the current moves to make it the language of government business in Abkhazia are not meeting with success, and the business of Abkhazia is being conducted in Russian.

But what had happened at the start of the Abkhaz war was no Ruritanian joke. Abkhaz would have had more Ausbau in place, if Georgian paramilitaries had not torched the Abkhaz national library and national archives.

Abkhaz is a small language, with a small written footprint—much smaller than Georgian. Burning down the place where all books in Abkhaz were deposited made it even smaller, and was intended to. The National Library has since managed to restore a lot of the 40% of books burned—in no small part because Soviet Abkhazia had made sure a copy of every Abkhaz book also went to Moscow. The library is still damaged and scaled down, but basically functioning.

It is otherwise with the National Archives (account in Russian). Its fate is heartbreakingly documented by Thomas de Waal:

• Abkhazia’s archive: fire of war, ashes of history
• Abkhazia: Cultural Tragedy Revisited

Of the 176,000 archival documents in Abkhazia, 168,000 are estimated to have been destroyed. What the Georgian paramilitary did not burn in the National Archives (despite the efforts of both Abkhaz and Georgian neighbours), was in the archives stored in the Communist Party Archives. Georgian and then Abkhaz troops did away with those archives as the war went on.

There is a Greek component to this blotting out. Abkhazia had a substantial Pontic community before the Stalinist purges and deportations, as documented by Daniel Müller: 7% of the population in 1926, 10% in 1939 (as ethnic Abkhaz started to leave the region), but just 2% in 1959. As I noted in the Other Place, the historian Vlasis Agtzidis has recently published his doctoral dissertation on the Greek press of the Soviet Union. His focus is Κόκινος Καπνας, Red Tobacco-Worker, the Greek newspaper of Sukhumi.

The entire print run of the Red Tobacco-Worker was one of the many items to go up in flames in October 1992, after Agtzidis had already been to Sukhumi—though as the introduction notes, the print run had been microfilmed in Moscow just in time. The newspaper was of course only one of thousands of testimonies of the Greek history of Abkhazia that was destroyed.

As de Waal’s accounts tell, the archive’s last custodian was himself half-Greek (and spared deportation in 1949 through his German mother): Nikolai Ioannidi. Ioannidi was the director (or deputy director) of the archive, and was working on a history of the Greeks of Abkhazia. He published the first volume of Греки в Абхазий in 1990, the first published account of the Stalinist purges of Greeks (see comment #15, Pontus and the Left). The manuscript of the second volume turned to ash in his office safe, before his eyes.

And Ioannidi spent his last days in an empty room in the University of Sukhumi, drinking Greek coffee and brooding over the remnants of the National Archive, uncatalogued, unrestored, unrecognisable. De Waal reports Ioannidi’s death on 1 July 2007, eight months after he had interviewed him.

De Waal paints a tragic picture of Ioannidi, but I will take his epitaph instead from the Pontus and the Left blog, in the discussion about the historiography of the purges of Greeks. Ioannidi did manage a second book shortly before he died, about the exile of the Abkhazian Greeks to Central Asia in 1949; the discussion on the blog was about the opinion of some historians that the exile was connected to the defeat of the Communists in the Greek Civil War. Commenter M-P (one of the blog owners) attributes the opinion to Ioannidi in his first book (comment #20). (Agtzidis also mentions that as Ioannidi’s position in an article on the purges, fn. 188). Commenter Dimitris (comment #21) retorts that Ioannidi was merely posing it as a question, and rejected it in his second book.

Yet even while disagreeing with Ioannidi, M-P paid him tribute—the kind of tribute Ioannidi would have welcomed:

Ioannidi was a Soviet historian. He wrote during the Soviet era, relied on Soviet archives, and because of his age and circumstances, he was not influenced by post-Soviet ideological trends. Until the end of his life he struggled with other comrades of all ethnicities against the nationalisms sweeping through Abkhazia.

Robert Haupt died on his way back to Australia in 1996, just before his memoirs were published. A few years later, the columnist Peter Ryan was writing a told-you-so piece about the scandal surrounding Prime Minister Keating’s investment in a piggery while in office. The teaser starts with:

IT IS A STRANGE SENSATION when you feel that a dead man is trying to send you a message, but it happened to me a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Australia’s Attorney-General announced that no further inquiries would be pursued into the circumstances of Paul Keating’s piggery. The dead man was Robert Haupt, one of the ablest and most respected journalists in recent Australian media history.

From the teaser, it looks like Haupt had written something prescient about the scandal. Haupt’s analysis about Russia is challenged in Jennifer Marohasy’s blog, just as Ioannidi’s analysis was challenged in Pontus and the Left’s blog. But the dead do still send us messages, through what they have left behind; and they do not ask that they be right all the time, merely that they be remembered.

The fires in Sukhumi denied others their rememberance. Haupt and Ioannidi have not been so denied. Requiescant.

I have been wanting to write, since reading of it, about the deaths in Athens. And unhealthily (because of such recursion is our society enmeshed), I have been wanting to write about the reactions to the deaths. What I would write would be reactionary, and vindictive, and uninformed. I don’t particularly want to say I’m not entitled to my own opinions about what happened, or that I cannot identify with class struggle because I am, after all, the class enemy. But the dead deserve more respect than that, and better reasoning than I can come up with on the other side of the planet. It is as offensive to make them a departure point for my sloganeering, as it is for the parties that I took offence to.

The following article by Stratis Bournazos, which I am translating with permission, appeared in the Sunday issue of Avgi [Dawn], the newspaper affiliated with the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), on May 9, and is republished in the column’s blog.

“What is a diamond worth
when people’s souls are coal.
Once you’re in Dante’s Hell,
there’s no way back to Earth.”

It’s Wednesday night, and I’m listening to the Winter Swimmers (Χειμερινοί Κολυμβητές). They wrote that piece for another reason and another time, but I’m thinking: what are words worth, when three people have burned? So our souls don’t turn to coal as well: that’s what they’re worth. That’s why I’m writing this, with an unbearable sense of burden. For the dead. But also, and mainly, for us.

A lot happened on Wednesday, a whole lot. We could say even more. On the huge crowd that deluged Athens. On the rage. On the savage joy. On people’s laughter. On the gas that choked us. On the crowd surging, shouting “burn the whorehouse, burn the Parliament” (a harbinger of an uprising? or the prelude to a dangerous backlash against representative government?) On the fluidity of things. On how we got from the sadness of the First of May to the enthusiasm of Wednesday. On that, and a lot more. Until we learned of the dead. From that moment, nothing is the same. For all of us, the three dead have haunted our day. Their names: Paraskevi Zoulia. Angeliki Papathanasopoulou. Epaminondas Tsakalis.

It is a horror that three people found such a death. Because it was no accident, it was the result of a process of blind violence, of a conscious indifference for human life. It was going to happen. It was almost predictable—just as it is predictable that we will in the future mourn deaths from the indiscriminate use of tear gas. In protest marches for the past few years, a certain party has exalted and exercised violence for violence’s sake—sometimes to the protesters’ reproof, sometimes with the protesters standing aside. They have done so without caring whether there are people in danger—inside, next door, upstairs, further down.

So for the first time in our entire recent history, people have died in a demonstration not because of State violence (the case of the K. Marousis store in 1991 remains controversial), but because of anti-State violence, because of the actions of people who took part in the march, who were part of it in a way—however marginal, and who acted in its name. The Molotov cocktails and fires had a pretext: they were an act of protestation, an act of anti-State, anti-capitalist, anti-government violence. We can disagree with them, but how can we deny it?

A little after the news was confirmed, various items started circulating. That the bank had no emergency exit. That there was no fire security. That the employers forced the workers not to strike. That the door was locked. Even if all that is completely true, it is politically and morally shameful to resort to it as an alibi, to claim that Vgenopoulos [the bank owner] is ultimately at fault, or to adopt the statements of Rizospastis [the Communist newspaper], enraging in their ridiculousness, that “the three employees were killed by the urban class, whatever sheepskin their instruments may have been disguised with.” Let our judgement not be clouded: this time the ongoing scandal of employer irresponsibility is not what matters. It wasn’t a lightning bolt or a cigarette butt that started the fire.

Thousands of stores throughout Greece lack fire security and emergency exits. It’s illegal, and it’s terribly wrong. But if it was the riot police that had thrown tear gas into one of them, or the Golden Dawn [neo-fascists] had thrown in an incendiary device, and we were now mourning the dead—would we be blaming the lack of emergency safeguards then? We should not trample on our common sense or our decency.

And as for the other opinion heard—that the bank should have shut down beforehand because it was a “target”: public opinion can say that, but we don’t get to say it. We, who have been shouting “To the street, to the street, break the terror of the State”—we don’t get to say that stores should close down, barricade, become impregnable forts, or else they will turn into deathtraps. We certainly don’t get to blame the owners responsible, because they failed to regard the protest march like an earthquake, a hurricane, a looming storm, a mortal peril. If we think like that, we have fully capitulated to a perversion of the meaning of protest: we have yielded to the dominion of fear and terror.

We left-wingers of all shades, anti-government, anarchist, libertarians, we are all struggling for social emancipation, for the spread of freedom, against the capitalist barbarism which crushes peoples’ lives and dreams, against the exploitation of people by people. Aren’t we? So what do our values have in common with the fetishisation of violence, violence which is raised to an utmost and unitary goal in itself, and—most terrifying of all—has contempt for human life? In dismissing human life, there is no emancipation: there is no service done to the struggle for freedom, justice, and a better life. We cannot but stand face to face against this, making no excuses.

We. I’m talking about us. Each of us, wherever we have staked our ground. Representatives of the government and the establishment can see the dead as an opportunity to get out an awkward spot. Investors can fear for the consequences in tourism. Scholars and scientists have to analyse the sociological, psychological, and other causes of the phenomenon. But the question is, what do we do. All of us, who have protested worker “accidents”, army suicides, the attack against Kouneva, the violence of the riot police, the murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos, the deaths of immigrants, and so much else, all with the common theme of defending human life and dignity: we don’t get to forget the three dead, or offload the blame anywhere we can, as quickly as we can—on Vgenopoulos, on the State, on “agents provocateurs”. We don’t get to speak cynically of collateral damage, and we don’t get to tally them up against the other dead. And that is nothing to do with bourgeois niceties: it touches on the core of our stance, in politics and in values. After all, what were we shouting in the march on Wednesday? “You’re talking about market dives, we’re talking about people’s lives!”

If we have a sense of how tragic what happened was, if we feel contrition, if we allow ourselves to mourn without looking to drown our sorrow in a sea of analyses and excuses—that would be a start. Even if it is belated, because many of us—and I include myself—should have thought of all this much earlier. Even now, we must convert this tragic experience into both individual and collective thought; each of us must acknowledge their responsibilities, different though they may be. We must try to understand. We must speak with honour. We must stand up where we ought to, morally and politically. Without trying to deceive the Others—or above all, ourselves.

PS: of the many texts circulating online, I’d like to refer readers to two: Kostas Svolis’ (indy.gr/analysis/tria-fantasmata-planioyntai-pano-apo-to-kinima), and Radical Desire’s (radicaldesire.blogspot.com/2010/05/greques-encore-un-effort-si-vous-voulez.html).

The Mariupolitans are a distinct group of ethnic Greeks living in the Ukraine, who formerly lived in Crimea. Like I explained in the Other Place, a minority of Mariupolitans speak not Greek, but a variant of Crimean Tatar they call Greek: Urum.

They are not the only people who consider themselves Greek but speak a Turkic language. As the Wikipedia article notes, the Pontians of Tsalka in Georgia who speak Turkish are also called (Tsalka) Urums; and a large number of the refugees from the 1922 population exchange were Karamanlides, who spoke Karamanli Turkish (and wrote it in Greek characters). When the refugees of Salonica waxed sentimental about their football team PAOK, they didn’t just say ο ΠΑΟΚ μας in Standard Greek. They also said τεμέτερον ΠΑΟΚ in Pontic—and bizim PAOK in Turkish. Nikolaos Contossopoulos is the foremost researcher on Cretan dialect of the 20th century; but his folk were Turkish-speakers. He concluded, he told me once, that Pontic has undergone syntactic influence from Turkish (an obvious but not necessarily a popular conclusion), because Pontic syntax sounded just like his elderly relatives trying to speak Greek.

Which goes to show something blindingly obvious, but lost in the modern East European process of nation-building: language is not the same as ethnicity (and neither is the same as nationality).

Turkic languages are the languages of Muslims, as far as everyone in the region is concerned, and a Christian speaking Turkic violates the easy dichotomies of nation-building. Which means that if Turkic-speakers internalise an ideology of being ethnically Greek—or indeed, of being Rum, Christian, as an ethnicity—then they won’t take nationalist pride in speaking Turkic. They will see themselves as speaking the “wrong” language. That’s not untenable in an Ottoman or Russian context: after all, the Turkic-speaking Greeks did continue speaking Turkic for centuries. But if they find themselves in a majority Greek-speaking context, they will be pressured to drop Turkic for Greek, and they won’t have much of a motive not to.

And indeed, that’s what happened with the Karamanlides in Greece. Greece was never well-disposed to minority languages to begin with, and the Turkish that used to be spoken by the refugees is barely mentioned in scholarship: it never became an emblem like Pontic, or even a bugbear like Macedonian Slavonic. It was quietly, and efficiently, dropped.

The Turkish of the Karamanlides passed unlamented—and unrecorded. Greek linguistics had its own priorities, being practiced after all by Greeks who saw the world in a particular way. Contossopoulos spent his career on someone else’s dialect—which is after all what most linguists do; but working on his own family’s dialect was not an option. Nor, I venture to say, would he have been dismayed that it was not.

Karamanlides speaking Turkish was a paradox to nationally-minded Greeks; Karamanlides dropping Turkish might seem a paradox to cosmopolitan-minded non-Greeks. The mother tongue, we assume by default, is the driver of identity and its rallying point and its emotional centre: how sad it must be to hate your own mother tongue.

And I admit to being troubled at the notion of hating one’s mother tongue. Yet loving one’s mother tongue, chosing to value it as identity, is as much a construct as valuing religion or culture, or what Greeks nebulously call ethnic consciousness, εθνική συνείδηση. It’s innate to seek out one’s own, but who one’s own are is something learned, and acquired.

And engineered. The Christians of the Ottoman Empire had to be taught they were Bulgarians, or Greeks, or Macedonians, or Albanians. What the people of village X thought they were 500 years ago is different to what they thought they were 100 years ago, and often what they think they are now. And the change was often enough initiated, because someone from Athens or Sofia came to town, and told them so; or because the local landlord made a choice, and his villagers followed suit.

But the question of what people “really” are, of how their language or quirks or DNA contradict their current self-identification, is pointless. If for whatever reason the villagers of X or Y now consider themselves Greek, well, they’re Greek; telling them a hundred years on they’ve been brainwashed means nothing. (The same goes for the search for Greeks in FYROM, it should be said: the Vlachs there in particular have changed their minds too.) Telling the Karamanlides they should have held on to a Turkish-speaking identity in Greece means even less. They suffered for being Christian in Turkey, they suffered for being aliens and speaking the wrong language when they fled to Greece: if they’ve come to hate their mother tongue, they aren’t obligated to hold on to it for my linguistic edification.

That’s problematic for me to say: the Karamanlides have had to jettison their linguistic heritage, because they were told to, and they found themselves in the coercive linguistic context of a monolingual nation-state. All Other Things being equal, maybe they shouldn’t have had to make that choice. But All Other Things were not equal; and it’s hard to know how much of an attachment they’d formed to Turkish while in Turkey. Love Of Mother Tongue, like everything else, is taught, and they wouldn’t have found many such teachers.

And that’s all terribly confused, because on the one hand I don’t seek to be an apologist for nationalism, let alone to presume how the Karamanlides felt at the time; but on the other what the (former) speakers themselves now think should not be dismissed either. On the one hand, I can’t get over the notion that hating your mother tongue is dysfunctional; on the other, it’s as dysfunctional to expect Greeks in Greece to speak Turkish. The essentialism of nationalism—or at least, of unreflective, pitchfork-yielding nationalism, is not just hateful, it’s counterproductive; and not just counterproductive, but obscuring. There’s a reason linguists don’t want to hear about the political dimensions behind what counts as a separate language: the flags get in the way of seeing the isoglosses.

Yet flags matter too, and “Nationalism Bad” is itself an unreflective stance. People are invested in their identities. No less genuinely so, because the identity is changeable, and engineerable. I responded negatively to the commenter at Sarantakos’ who was happy that the Muslim Greeks had to leave Greece, because they had a family tradition of national fickleness, having converted in the first place. There was enough fickleness in the other direction, or alternating between the two, to make such atavistic purity tests contrary to the national interest—and not merely inhumane. Patriotism is not a matter of genetics, it is cultural, acquired, and contingent. That doesn’t mean it’s not real; and it doesn’t mean either that the descendants of the Karamanlides are somehow lesser Greeks, or that their Greekness doesn’t matter to them.

I got started on this post because I’m posting at The Other Place about the Urum. The Urum, like the Karamanlides, are Greeks Speaking The Wrong Language. As I’ll explore there, they seem to have sensed in the ’20s that they Spoke The Wrong Language: so they didn’t pursue Ausbau like every other minority in the USSR did. That may be a pity and brainwashing; or it may be redressing an historical anomaly (as Pontus And The Left put it). But it was real. Now, there are signs at least some of them are taking pride in their language after all—with the support of the Greeks Speaking The Right Language. That’s real too. Both groups are now turning into Ukrainians Speaking Neither Of The Above (Russian): the Greeks there, Greek-speaking and Tatar-speaking, now have different Otherness and different threats to their identity to deal with.