Folktale Collection as Cultural Strategy

Folktale Collection as Cultural Strategy Thursday, July 20, 2023 In the first century of collecting Pontic folktales, it seems the Pontians were always in the middle of some kind of political ferment or upheaveal. This is just an outline of my current thinking--it needs to be fleshed out.  The first tales were collected during the Sultanate of Abdulaziz (reigned 1861-1876), the first sultan to travel to Western Europe, and became an admirer of Western culture’s material progress (according to Wikipedia). He was interested in documenting the Ottoman Empire, so History and Statitistics of Trebizond fits in with that. He continued the Tanzimat reforms started by his brother. History of Trebizond (1870), fits in with Abdulaziz's goals to document the Empire; it was written by a native of Constantinople, who had moved to the Pontos to teach, and ended up researching the area and settling there.<o:p></o:p> Astir tou Pontou, a weekly newsmagazine, appeared during the era of Abdul Hamid II   (who reigned from 1876 to 1909). They seemed to be collecting as part of disseminating various kinds of cultural information to their readers, educational, religious, and entertainment. They probably also had an underlying political goal of beginning to establish their identity to the Western world, as we’ll see later. They are publishing around the same time that folklore was being used in Europe to define national cultures. Then Dawkins in 1914 who was looking for what (though in many ways his should be set aside, as his motives were very different, as an outsider’s would be). In 1919, there was a push for an independent republic of the Pontos, so the idea had been in the air--and shortly after that the Exchange of Populations that drove most of the Greek-speaking Christians of the Pontos into Greece.  Then we have the post-exilic journal  Arheion Pontou and its goals in 1928, and its later cousins Chronika tou Pontou, Pontiaka Fylla, Pontiaki Estia, etc. This was the era of when they were being presssured to assimilate into mainstream Greek culture, underwent WWII and the Greek civil war, and much later the Junta. During this time, the gathering of folklore among other elements of their culture into journals, among other tactics, was used to define their culture as different from that of mainland Greece. In the publications, especially in the first few decades after exile, collecting the folktales preserved them as the narrators were scattered from their original tightly knit communities into a Greece that wanted them to assimilate, but it also took the folktales from particular locations and defined them as “Pontic” supplying vocabularies not only to preserve the language but to give access to Pontians from other locations who might not speak that sub-dialect. <div style="mso-element:comment-list"> <div style="mso-element:comment"> <div class="msocomtxt" id="_com_2" language="JavaScript" onmouseout="msoCommentHide('_com_2')" onmouseover="msoCommentShow('_anchor_2','_com_2')"> <o:p></o:p> </div> </div> </div>