Parharides, Dawkins, and Ofis

Parharides, Dawkins, and Ofis Thursday, June 8, 2023 The Ophites were Greek-speaking Muslims of Greek ancestry who had converted in the mid-17th century, which explains why the baker who is brought before a qadi in one of the tales is clearly a Turk (his Turkish eye is worth twice as much as a Jewish one).  The town was long considered a Cryptochristian stronghold. In 1880, Parharides put together a grammar of the dialect of Trebizond for a contest of the Ellinikou Filologikou Syllogou of Constantinople and won a prize. (The manuscript is lodged in the archive of the Academy of Athens, as the rest of his manuscripts seem to be.) Parharides' main loci in collecting folktales were Trebizond, Kromni, and Ofis. He published them in the sadly short-lived periodical Astir tou Pontou in 1885 and 1886; they were reprinted in Arheion Pontou 16 (1951): 80-14, with glosses by linguist A. A Papadopoulos. We have ten tales from Ofis. Three of them were collected in the early to mid-1880s by Ioannis Parharides, and the other seven by Richard Dawkins in July 1914 (see last week's blog post). Parharides, as was the practice at that time, did  not record the names of his informants, and Dawkins--unusually for him--also did not.  Three of the stories in the collection are animal tales, four are magical adventures, four are mythoi (two of the animal tales can also be counted mythoi), and one is a tale of xenitia (working abroad).  They tend to be very funny. Ioannis Parharides was born in Trebizond in 1858, born into a Kromniot family. He studied philology at the University of Athens and taught for many years as gymnasiarhis at the Frontistirion of Trebizond. He died in Trebizond in 1910. His son Athanasios edited and published some of his materials as Istoria tis Kromnis in 1911 (it was reprinted in 1986 by the Adelfotita Kromnaion Kalamarias), and became a folklorist in his own right.