constituted the centres of growth of a Minor Asiatic, of a refugee if I can it call thus- culture. With this formulation I do not only mean the cuisine and the foods, I do not mean the songs, I do not mean the particularity of language, the customs, the house decoration, the gardens, etc. I mean another more general perception for life, another perception of culture itself. They developed an enormous collectiveness in their daily life, a collectiveness that was expressed outside their houses: in the squares, in the taverns, in their joints, but also in the pavements of their settlements. In the frame of the refugee’ settlements therefore was developed a folk like culture, an alive and extrovert culture, that it began from “Karagiozi” and reached to the habit to eat outside even the simple common daily persons. This culture began as refugee’ and progressively became Greek popular culture. However, in the émigré settlements progressively another perception of culture was shaped. Through official, national narration and the “national” civilization was risen a Greek Asia Minor, a nationalised Asia Minor that did not make anything other than to supply us with a Greek culture, homogeneous, diachronic and tragic, full of national pain, where the Turk was the sovereign rival form. Asia Minor of refugees was full of variegation, multi-religious aspects, multi-nationality.
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That Asia Minor was a world where a new horizon was opened: a horizon of cosmopolitanism, a horizon in the frame of which you could be a Greek and live peacefully together with a Turk without any problems. I was given birth in the first of the four émigrés settlements of Patras, roughly forty years after 1922. In my childhood but also in my adolescence many of the refugees of my first generation were still live, and I lived with them. My grandmother was from the Nikomidia, she came to Greece by the Asia Minor Tragedy, in 1922. My grandfather, from Ikonio, came with the population exchange, in 1924. To them and all the refugees of Patras I owe another Asia Population Exchange
Minor. I owe another perception of life and culture.
TURKISH-SPEAKING REFUGEES FROM PONT2 IN GREECE:
PROBLEMS OF INCORPORATION ................................................................................................
by Nikos Marandzidis
This particular article is supported in my older research that took the form of book was published in the Greek with the title “Jasasin Millet- Viva the Nation: refugees, possession and civilian, national identity and political behaviour in Turkish-speaking Greek orthodoxies the Western Pont”. The populations that the present work examines lives in the hinterland and in coastline of Western Pont, mainly in the administrative provinces the Sivas (Seva’steja), the Kastamonou and the Tsanik. According to Kitromilides and Alexandris, in 1911 roughly 120.000 Greek that lived there spread in 336 unmixed Christian communities. From this population, the Turkish-speaking communities were 246 and represented more than 80.000 persons. Turkish-speaking populations lived, also, in the limits of metropolis Neokaisareia (Niksar), which included, in 1910, roughly 102.563 Greek Orthodoxies. The majority of these persons were living in rural communities, isolated from the rest of the world and with few contacts with the central authority. These persons were much attached to their region, in their village and in their mahalle (district). The language of an important part of the Christian population of Western Pont was Turkish. The use of the Turkish language, that was widespread and in other Christian Orthodox populations in the Asia Minor (Kappadokes), showed, after all, the limited effect of the educational institutions controlled by Greece that were implanted in these communities of Pont’s inhabitants. Generally, the distance that separated these populations from the intellectual centres of Hellenism appears to be big. It is characteristic that, while in Smyrni 13 Greek newspapers were being published in the dues of 19th century, in the Sevasteia and in the Kastamonou none was published.
The term “Pontus” evolves from “Pont-Euxin”, which in ancient Greek denotes the Black Sea, the term currently refers to eastern Black Sea region of Turkey 2
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