Iordanis Pampoukis

Iordanis Pampoukis Thursday, August 17, 2023 There are several notable Pontian literati who were known by more than one name. Among the major folktale collectors, three that immediately spring to mind are Xenofon Akoglous (Xenos Xenitas), Georgios Kandilaptis (Kanis), and D. K. Papadopoulos (Stavriotis). And then there's Iordanis Pampoukis, who, as Iordanis Vamvakides, was well known in Athens and mainland Greece as the director of the Library of the Academy of Athens.  He was born in 1914 in Oinoe, one of the oldest cities in Pontos (it dated back to the 5th century BC and lay between Amisos and Kotyora), which comprised some 10k inhabitants in the year of his birth, with about a quarter of them being Greek Orthodox, 10% Armenian, and the rest Muslim Turks. Pampoukis received his earliest education in Oinoe, went through the Population Exchange around age 8, ending up in Greece, where he finished school and graduated from the School of Philosophy in Athens.  He collected Pontic folklore and published some of his collection as texts in Arheion Pontou and Hronika tou Pontou. He also published some 200 fables, arranged by subject in Mythoi tis Oinois tou Pontou (1963). The scholarship of that book isn't immediately evident, until you page to end of the book, where he lists 126 variants for 96 of the 200 fables included. His memory or filing system was outstanding, because he located variants in Arheion Pontou (1928-present), Astir tou Pontou (1884-1886), Istoriki kai Statistiki tis Trapezountas (1870), Laografika Kotyoron (1939), Pontiaka Fylla (1936-1938), and Hronika tou Pontou (1943-1954). He identified many variants of the fables among "anecdotes," which were short tales told about specific persons usually in specific locations (fables are told about generic people in generic locations and usually include a moral at the beginning or end of the story). He doesn't say so, but his work, more than anyone else's, lays the groundwork for a study of generic porosity (the ability of a folktale to be told in more than one format) in Pontic folktales. I'd already noted that the genres were porous to some extent—we have “The Twelve Months”<a name="_ftnref34"> (ATU 480) </a>and “The Three Liars” (ATU 1920) told as magical adventure and as fable/mythos. But with something like 90 fables that have variants that are anecdotes or other genres, the tendency now appears much more common than I had thought.