Dawkins in Sourmena

Dawkins in Sourmena Thursday, June 1, 2023 I spend most of the day digitizing the tales from Sourmena that Richard Dawkins recorded from a series of mostly young men in the town of Sourmena on the eve of WWI. He had intended to do a study of Pontic Greek, much as he had done for Cappadocian Greek, but he never realized that project. World War I  broke out in 1914, the year he visited, and then there was the Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey that happened less than a decade later. During and immediately after the war, Dawkins himself was in Crete, serving as an intelligence officer for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He then took up the post of Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford in 1920 (which he held until 1939), where he was a fellow of Exeter College. In Sourmena, he collected 23 tales from July 11 to July 15, 1914. He published 16 of them in Arheion Pontou 3 in 1931; Peter Mackridge published another three in 1990 (Unpublished Pontic Stories Collected by R.M. Dawkins). His informants were Leonidas Adamides (5 tales), Hristos Eframides (6), a certain Elias (1), Hristos Haritides (2), Panteleimon Kazantzides (1), Panayiotis Lazarides (1), Alexandros Ioannou Tahtsides (3), Alexandros Georgiou Tahtsides (1), Ioannis Ger. Tahtsides (1), an unnamed blind man (1), and another unnamed man.  They told an anecdote, animal tales (4), a formula tale, magical adventures (12), mythoi (2), stories about a man/woman (2), and what might be a table story (I'm still working on what that means, even loosely).  Dawkins was by far the chief collector of tales from Soumena, but he wasn't the only one, or even the earliest.  That honor goes to Avraam Papadopoulos published "The Three Princes" (ATU 552 & ATU 302) in Astir tou Pontou in 1885. Soon after Dawkins' tales appeared in Arheion Pontou, Pontiaka Fylla published two magical adventures collected by A.K. Asiatides (1936) and a mythos collected by A. Moysides (1937). I haven't come across anything since, but something may appear in an archive.