Friday, January 11, 2019 <p>The broad characteristics of the Santan folktale show men defying authority and women being unfailingly loyal. There is lots of violence, and the heroes or heroines find themselves elevated and transformed by that violence, not by marriage. The strong moral sense throughout the Santan repertoire is that injustice can be rectified, that wickedness can be set right.</p> <p>This was a sense that resonated throughout Santan culture. From at least the seventeenth century, Santans had stood up for themselves against any perceived wrong-doing by their neighboring townships or the Ottoman government. They were quick to defend their rights and to demand accountability for injustices, and not only through the court system. An often-cited example was an incident that happened in January 1879.</p> <p>Around thirty Santans who were traveling home from Trebizond were ambushed by forty or fifty Turkish bandits. Three Santans were killed. Certain that the local gendarmerie would be ineffectual, the Santans immediately demanded that the regional government arrest and punish the murderers. They threatened to take justice into their own hands by burning down the villages where they thought the bandits lived. Because of their well-earned reputation, the Santans’ insistence--and their influence in the region—prevailed. Within a month, the Ottoman authorities had caught and punished twenty-five of the Turkish outlaws. (The speed of the government’s reaction was considered extraordinary by international observers.)</p> <p>Unlike virtually any other Pontic Greek township, Santa’s defiance in the face of difficult odds continued until the end of its existence. In the years after World War I, the Pontic Greeks’ situation vis-à-vis the Young Turks was deteriorating and non-Muslim villages were the victims of escalating atrocities. At that time, many Santan men and women went into the mountains to form bands of guerrilla fighters, undertaking a series of harsh reprisals—unfortunately atrocities in their own right--against the formerly Ottoman villages, officials, and militia for every atrocity committed against their fellow Orthodox.[1]&nbsp;Even after peace was declared and the Greek-Turkish Exchange of Populations had begun, they refused to abandon their hideouts. Like no other group of Asia Minor Greeks, they only agreed to depart once they had obtained international guarantees of safe passage in 1924.</p> <p>Thanks to pontosworld.com, you can take a look at what Santa, now known as <a href="https://pontosworld.com/index.php/pontus/places/207-santa-dumanli">Dumanli</a>, looks like.</p>