Priests and Their Wives in Folkloric Pontos

Priests and Their Wives in Folkloric Pontos Thursday, May 11, 2023 Today I translated most of two folktales of unknown provenance from a 1938 issue of Pontiaka Fylla, which was a monthly journal of Pontic culture put out by Nikolaos Kapnas and George Fokas, in Athens. When it comes to folktales, sometimes they note where they're from, or who collected them, or who told them, but more often than not they don't. Both of today's folktale are of unknown provenance. They are told in different subdialects, so they are unlikely to originate from the same village, is about all I can say about that. I haven't yet finished with the story of the adulterous wife ("<a href="https://www.cyberpontos.com/folktale/he-who-doesnt-think-while-sitting-amazed-when-he-gets" hreflang="en">*He who doesn't think while sitting, is amazed when he gets up</a>"). I had to leave off with the Qadi trapped in a cupboard that was in the process of being sold at the market.  The other tale is one of six stories (collected so far) in the database that have "priest" in the title. One is lodged in the Academy of Athens and I don't yet have access to it (The Priest's Walnuts, ATU 210 The Rooster, Hen, Duck, Pin, and Needle on a Journey" of unknown provenance). Richard Dawkins collected one in Imera called The Bad Priest (ATU 759A "The SInful Priest") which is about a priest who gives good sermons but commits evil deeds, so that an angel has to come from the skies to teach his disgusted parishioners that fresh water can spring from the skull of a rotten dog's corpse. In a story from Kotyora/Ordu called The Priest, the She-Bear, and the Fox (ATU 181 "The Man Tells the Leopard’s Secret"), a priest sees a she-bear cavorting with male jackals and foxes, and she swears him to secrecy. He betrays her to his wife, however, so the bear decided to make good on her promise to eat him. During a grace period, the priest meets a fox, who promises to help him with the bear if he'll give her one of his testicles. The fox tricks the bear to her death, and then the priest finds a way to scare the fox away.    Three other stories are called some version of The Priest and the Popadia. Let's look first at the two from Stavrin and Kars (both ATU 1380 "The Faithless Wife").  In the version from Stavrin, an irascible priest is very difficult for his wife to live with. He is very fussy about his food. She sees that other men give their wives less to complain about, especially a man called “The Peacemaker.” One day the priest, standing behind an icon in church, overhears his wife praying to an icon that he be blinded and, pretending to be the saint, he tells her how to “blind” him with food. Pretending to be blind, he sees her begin an affair with the Peacemaker. He later kills the Peacemaker by “accident.” When he and his wife take the body to throw into the sea, he pushes her over the cliff as well, and returns home to live happily ever after. In spite of the ample provocation that the priest gives his wife, he goes unpunished—his crimes of unreasonableness and honor-murder are less wicked than infidelity, presumably. The narrator also provides nice details about the insufficiencies in the wife’s cooking: she either forgets to salt the food or doesn’t clean the wheat properly, etc.; he also gives us a rare look inside a worship service. As in the story of Paul the Son of Ill Fortune, the marriage ethic here seems a little odd to western notions. The mother and the wife in the Paul story betrayed him utterly without wanting to, but they had to die of shame anyway. Here, the priest is wicked in his own way, but the wife’s wickedness is the only one that is punished. The creativity comes in the kind of homely details that the narrator picks out to make the story pop. In the version from Kars, a priest has a wife who is always ill, so he sets out to light candles for her at a monastery. He meets a villager plowing with a team of oxen who tells him that his wife is fooling him. The farmer disguises him as a bundle and himself as a beggar, and takes him back to his house to spend the night. Her lover comes, they eat, get drunk. While she is getting water to revive her lover from a faint, the priest cuts his throat. She calls to her snoring guest to help. They bury him in a dungheap, and the farmer leaves with the priest disguised. The priest returns home openly. He tells her he wants to get rid of the dungheap. He uncovers the dead lover, they take it to the river to get rid of it, the priest pushes her in to drown with the dead body and returns home. The version from the unknown provenance is different. The priest and his wife aren't on cordial terms. He is unreasonably jealous and refuses to allow her to set foot out of the house whether he is on the premises or not. It has some unusual features. The priest is a terrible husband, so jealous that he keeps his wife locked up in the house whether he's on the premises or not. There's an old woman, a neighbor, who is the only person to take pity on the wife, who has been going stir-crazy. When a young man comes to town looking for a wife, the old woman turns into a trickster figure. She suggests that the wife and the youth meet. She creates a hole in the outside wall of the priest's storeroom large enough that the popadia can escape the house to meet the youth and agree to marry him. They trick the priest into marrying them even though the bride is the spitting image of his wife. When they go to the boat to sail away after the wedding, the old woman creates a dummy wife to sit in the window so the priest thinks she's still there as the boat sails away. The newlyweds escape. The old woman is unpunished. The priest ends the story by weeping and howling for his loss.  It's unusual that tricksters who are not establishment figures get away with their misdeeds. It's a rare instance of "divorce" in a folktale. It's unusual that a folktale ends merely in tears. The wedding itself is unusual, probably because this isn't a magical adventure, because it takes place over maybe an hour, instead of forty days and forty nights. What's not unusual, however, is the poor relationship between the priest and the popadia.  Although the priest isn't a particularly positive character in most of these stories (he may be a cuckold, an unreasonably jealous husband, a murderer, or a semonizer with evil intentions), he is enough of an establishment figure, "one of ours", that he doesn't suffer the kinds of death or disfigurement that a villain figure who comes from outside the village would. He's a liminal figure. As a male insider, a villager, he can't be treated as a true villain, but as someone set apart from the rest of the villagers by his profession, he also isn't entirely trustworthy or sympathetic.  (It would be useful to compare the priest figure to that of the Qadi, the Islamic judge who shows up in some tales, such as the other one I was translating today.) PS: we do have on record priests and bishops as narrators or collectors of tales. I believe Dawkins collected from a blind priest in one of the villages he visited. They would have undoubtedly have grown up hearing these kinds of stories. PPS: The story of the Gourd Calendar has a village joker playing a prank on a half-competent priest who doesn't seem to be able to mark the weeks of Lent through church services alone.