Life on the Road: Inns

Life on the Road: Inns Thursday, July 27, 2023 One of the overarching structures of a Pontic Greek magical adventure tales--like somany other Indo-European tales--has a hero (and sometimes heroine) leaving home to go on an adventure. Sometimes they end up at an inn. <ul><li>The Prince and the Fish (Nikopolis, c1885): <ul><li>A king falls sick and sends his son for the doctor. When the son can't find one, the king hears that there is a fish in the sea that can cure him. The son nets the fish, but it is so beautiful that he sets it free. The king is outraged and sends him away. The prince goes to a city and hires a servant. He sends the servant to distribute any food of his that he doesn't eat himself. The servant sells the food instead, so the prince fires him and hires another, a pauper begging at the roadside. This man does distribute the prince's leftovers as he should. They go on the road and reach an inn. At the inn they find a box of money. They go to the king, who takes them on as servants. That king has a daughter who, whenever she marries, her husband turns up dead. They decide to marry her to the prince. The servant accompanies them to the bridal chamber. After the meal, nine scorpions issue from the bride's mouth and the servant kills each. They return to the boy's home after a forty-day wedding. As are passing the sea, the servant becomes a fish and dives into the sea: he was the fish that the boy had set free.</li></ul></li><li>The Farmer and the Florins (Kotyora, 1939)--admittedly, this is more a comic tale than a magical adventure!: <ul><li>A farmer finds a trove of gold coins in his field. A passerby takes some and rides away. The farmer’s wife veils her daughters and goes to find him in an inn. She introduces her daughters to him under silly names, including “Dances at Inns.” They entertain him through the night, take the stolen money, and leave. When the man tries to pursue them, the innkeeper believes he is asking whether he danced at the inn.</li></ul></li><li>The Snake Prince and His Wife (Kerasounta, 1885)<ul><li>A king begs God to give him a son even if it be a snake or a frog. When the snake is born, he puts it out in the garden to grow. When grown, he asks his father to marry him off. The king asks a widow for her oldest daughter. The widow refuses, but gives him her youngest on condition that he make her a coat of hedgehog skins. She wears it on her wedding night. The snake tells her to undress; she tells him to undress first. He becomes a handsome youth. A servant sees them together in the night and tells the queen, who tells her to bearn the snake skin. The youth is transformed into a nighbird and ells his bride to make an iron staff and bronze shoes and to come find him. She searches for seven years without finding him. She builds an inn at a crossroads and asks every comer about her husband. An old man tells her of a magical place where springs run with milk and honey. She hides near the spot and recognizes her husband with two other men. They see the stream of tears that she cries, and her husband realizes she must be near. She seeks him out when he is alone, they both weep, and return to his father's house an hold anther wedding.</li></ul></li><li>Blockhead (Kars, 1987)<ul><li>The husband of a childless couple goes to seek his fortune. He comes across a man under a bridge who gives him apples for himself and his wife to help them have a baby, if he promises to name it Blockhead. On the way home he eats both apples and gives birth to a giant head, Blockhead. He wants to abandon it, but the baby head says, "Take me with you, father." He uses a stick to help roll it home. It grows up among the icons on the wall and asks his father to get the king's daughter for his wife. The king sets three impossible tasks: remove a mountain that is blocking the sun from reaching the palace, build another palace like his own, and plant flowering trees along the road from the palace to the church. Blockhead does them all. He is taken to the church on a tray. When he and his bride get to the bed, he becomes a comely youth, but he swears his wife to secrecy about his nocturnal transformation. He asks his father for a white horse, later a black one, and finally a red one so that he can go hunting with the king's other sons-in-law over three days. Each time his father gets one from the place where he was born and Blockhead is transformed into a doughty youth. His wife finally betrays his identity. He disappears, and she begins the search for him with bronze shoes and staff. When they break, she builds an inn so that she can listen to the stories of travellers. She finally gets wind of him and takes him back to her father's house, where they have another wedding.</li></ul></li><li>The Ascetic at the Well (Imera, 1914)--this one functions as magical adventure and as fable--<ul><li>An ascetic saw a horseman leave a purse of gold by a well. A passerby found it, but the horseman killed a poor man who happened to be by the well when he returned. An angel explained: the horseman had stolen the money, the finder had been its owner, and the poor man had murdered the horseman’s father. The angel also shows him that the man who left an inn first in the morning was evil but that the same man in the evening was good in the meantime, he had told his son that God’s compassion is greater than the sands of the shore. Moral: “Our paradise can be taken with one word, and with one word lost.”</li></ul></li><li>The Groom and His Mother-in-Law (Kotyora, 1939)<ul><li>An childless elderly couple adopts a serpent as a son. He asks his mother to request the king’s daughter’s hand in marriage. After mocking her, the king agrees to set the snake a series of challenges: survive cannon fire, find a carpet large enough to seat the army and feed the army. When the snake succeeds, the king’s daughter marries him and is happy to find that he transforms into a young man at night. When the two of them return to the palace to live, the queen persuades the princess to burn the snakeskin, causing him to sprout wings and fly away. In her search for him, the bride finally builds an inn so that she can ask all customers whether they had seen her husband. A child playing in the courtyard tells her to follow his ball. It rolls into a hole and she follows it to the world below and finds her husband. His strength was lost with the snakeskin and only the smell of her mother burning can restore it. Back at the palace they compromise by burning a goatskin; he returns and they hold another wedding.</li></ul></li><li>The Pasha's Daughter's Dead Lover (Imera, 1914)<ul><li>One day a lord came home unexpectedly and his daughter hid her lover in a chest. The father sat on the chest and suffocated the youth. The girl asked the coachman to help her hide the body; he later tried to blackmail her into serving drinks to him and his friends. She burned down the inn where they were sitting and they died. She later went to a priest to confess and he absolved her. The priest told the boy's father of her confession. The father went to Russia to bring her to trial. The court set her free and had the priest shot. The moral: “Thus suffer those who do not keep the secrets entrusted to them.”</li></ul></li><li>The Three Words of Advice (Ofis, 1914)<ul><li>A poor man has a wife and ten-year-old son. He decides to go abroad to work, and stays away for ten years. His master pays him 100 liras for his ten years of work. As he starts to leave, his master calls him back for three words of advice at the cost of five liras each: "If you something amazing en route, don't stop to ask about it," "Don't get off course," and "Don't act without thinking." On the road, he meets a Moor in front of whom is a heap of heads. Remembering the advice, he doesn't stop to ask. The Moor tells him the heads belonged to people who asked; he grants the man his life and stops doing his task. The man then meets two men with laden camels. At night they decide to go off route to stay at an inn, which ends up burning down, so that the man--who remembers the advice and stays on the road--is left with their camels. He arrives home after dark and finds it locked up tight. He puts his camels in the underloft and in the morning sees his wife sitting by the hearth embracing a youth. He takes out his gun to kill them both, but remembering the advice pauses and hears the youth calling her Mother. He reveals himself and they welcome him home.</li></ul></li></ul>Here's what those inns, or khans, would have been like, according to Raphaela Lewis in her useful Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey (New York: Dorset, 1971):“[Caravan] halts might take place at one of the main crossroad towns, where the composition of the caravan could change and new groups form to continue the journeys, or they might occur along the roads, where, at the intervals of twenty to twenty-five miles which made up a day’s journey, stood the famous khans, or caravanserais” (p177).“All the exterior decoration of the khans was concentrated on the gateways, in which were set great double doors of wood covered with iron plates secured with huge-headed nails; in one door was a small wicket-gate, through which men could pass singly, while the doorkeeper lived by the entrance and kept watch on all who went in and out. In the simpler khans there was little privacy. The open courtyard in the centre was used for the animals, baggage and wagons. Set against the wall that surrounded it was a ledge, about three feet above the ground and four feet deep, with a number of hearths on it, and here the travellers made their little encampments, singly or in small groups. They cooked their meal on the fireplace against the wall and slept on a rug with their saddle for a pillow and a cloak for a blanket, and the animals tethered at the foot of their master’s pitch would put their heads over the ledge for a crust or a piece of turnip. But the large, splendid khans provided separate private rooms with hearths, as well as dormitories, bathrooms and lavatories; around the open courtyard in which the animals were tethered were also the arched, vaulted storerooms for baggage and fodder, and beyond it a covered hall for the animals’ winter quarters, the domed roof pierced for light and ventilation. In hot regions, a stairway led up to a flat roof where the travelers assembled and ate in the evening before the caravan moved off. In the centre of the courtyard, or over one of the rooms around it, was a small mosque, and by the gateway  were a coffee-room, a repair shop for vehicles, a smithy and stables” (p179).Inns function as liminal spaces in the folktales. For women, they are a kind of house away from the house where they can operate (generally disguised as men) when they are forced away from their homes to search for a disappeared husband. Inns are where the world passes through, where people of all sorts mix and mingle, so it is both a protected space and unprotected. For men, it was a place where anything could happen: they can come across a loaded money box and walk away with it as though they had found it in a forest; a man's fate can change between the time he exits and re-enters an inn's door; a pasha's daughter can burn an inn down around the heads of men who insulted her (and be absolved by a priest!, although she must have been Muslim); and the inn can simply burn down, killing all inside, except for the hero, who is left with a caravan's worth of camels to take home. It makes sense, in this folktale universe, that an inn would be a liminal space. After all, it is away from the village, which is the Pontic male protagonist's safe space (the village) and the female protagonist's safe space (the house--mostly--especially if it belongs to her father and not her in-laws). But it is also, importantly, a space where the protagonist, woman or man, can operate, can exercise agency, can turn fate in her favor or his.