Inflation

Inflation Thursday, August 10, 2023 Collecting and publishing Pontic folktales in the years after the Lausanne Convention and the Exchange of Population was no easy task for so many reasons. People who ended up in Greece were scattered, desperately poor, struggling to deal with a new environment, rebuilding their lives, resisting assimilation--the list goes on. They also faced WWII and a vicious civil war.   Iordanis Pampoukis lists the  parallel versions for the fables he collected in an appendix in Mythoi tis Oinoi tou Pontou (Athens: Myrtides, 1963). I spent the afternoon combing through, among other sources, the Hronika tou Pontou, which was published from 1943 to 1954 in Athens by the Pontic organization Argonauts-Komnenes, founded and helmed by Xenofon Akoglous. Like the most of the other Pontic journals produced in the decades after the Greek-Turkish population exchange, it maintains high quality of content from a wide network of contributors over years. But how did they do it, given the circumstances around them? Just looking at the cost of each issue will give a sense of how hard things were. Check out the inflation from MONTH to MONTH. All prices are in drachmas. 1: September 1943: 3,000 2: October 1943: 3,000 3: November 1943: 5,000 4: December 1943: 7,000 5/6: January-February 1944: 50,000 7: March 1944: 100,000 8: April 1944: 500,000 9: May 1944: 25,000,000 10 June 1944: 50 11/12: July-August 1944: 150 13: September 1945: 100 14: October 1945: 100 15/16 November-December 1945: 600 17/18 January-February 1946: 1,000 19/20 March-April 1946: 1,500 21/22 May-June 1946: 1,500 23/24 February 1954: 6,000 You can see that they sometimes had to skip a month, a year, or longer, just to keep things going. Amid such severe economic instability--and the social, civil, and environmental chaos that implies--it's hard to imagine how they succeeded in coming together to produce these cultural records with an astonishing level of persistence, coordination, dedication, and commitment.