PETER JASONIDES AND EPIRUS

 

My first conversation with the late Peter Jasonides relating to Epirus took place at a Pontian «παρακάθ’». The traditional Pontian song «Τρυγόνα» was playing and we were comparing lyrics, as there is also an Epirotic version.

“Let me explain the song for you,” Peter offered, his face flushed in pride. “The turtle dove (which symbolises a beautiful girl), is in the forest, gathering wood. She is described as wearing an apron and socks and is likened to a crown, which probably denotes that she is of marriageable age and also acts as proof that Pontians consider their women to be royalty.”

“Fascinating,” I replied. “In the Epirotic version, the turtle dove is just that. A woman asks the turtle dove, since she can fly and perch on high, whether she has seen her husband. The turtle dove replies in the affirmative, confirming that she spotted him just yesterday lying in a field, with black birds pecking at his eyes.”

“Oh my god,” Peter exclaimed, choking on his drink. “Can you Epirotes be any more morbid? What is it with you people?”

It is a question I have always asked myself and I told him of my long held belief that Epirotes are obsessed with dead owing to the fact that the entrance to Hades was traditionally held to have been at the region’s Acheron River, by classical accounts, including Pausanias  and later Dante's Inferno, with Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across it. According to folk etymology, the word Acheron meant “joyless,” which is exactly how the uninitiated describe Epirotic music. Proving that Epirus occupied a liminal space where the boundaries between life and death are blurred, close by near Parga, is the Necromanteion, or Oracle of the Dead, where the living would go to speak to their dead ancestors.

“That would make sense except for one thing,” Peter responded. “We Pontians also had a Necromanteion. It was in Pontoheraclea, and we are still not as morbid as you are.”

“Actually,” I corrected him, “Pontoheraclea was in Bithynia, so it really isn’t a part of Pontus at all”

“Yes it is.”

“No it isn’t…”

When Peter was firmly convinced of something, it was exceedingly difficult to disabuse him of his misapprehension. He attributed this to his «Ποντιακό κεφάλι» a form of unique psychological brachycephaly that did not easily permit the permeation of ideas that challenge one’s world view. I believe that he was extremely disappointed when I informed him that the Epirotes talk of «Ηπειρώτικο κεφάλι» and he spent the next hour trying to identify the nuances that would distinguish between the two afflictions, only stopping to give me a death stare when I had the temerity to utter a Pontian joke: Γιατί οι Πόντιοι έχουν μεγάλο κεφάλι; Γιατί τα παίρνουν στο κρανίο». I never repeated the same mistake ever again.

One of the reasons that Peter was drawn to Epirus was because like Pontus, it is situated on the margins of Hellenism, the regions that in Greek we call “Acritic” which is just another way of saying extreme. Both of us espoused extreme forms of Hellenism and he was particularly enthused that members of the same Byzantine imperial family, the Komnenoi, established the Despotate of Epirus in the West and the Empire of Trebizond, in Pontus, in the East. Often he would call me to compare the parallel trajectories of both entities, both struggling to assert a variant form of the Romaic identity, both sandwiched between aggressive powers that wanted to call them their own. It was this idea, of being away from the centre of power and yet established an alternative narrative of one’s own that intrigued him, not in the least because he could appreciate how a similar process could be developed in Australia, which is about as far from the cultural centre he paid homage to as you could go.

It is also for this reason that he was immensely proud of his relative, Leonidas Jasonides, who was present at the declaration of the Autonomous Republic of Pontus in Batumi in 1919. My argument, that this fledgling state could never have been viable owing to the inability of Greece to defend it, the competing interests of foreign powers and the demographics of the region he brushed off derisively. When he learned of my fascination with Autonomous Epirus, a state that was declared in the face of Albanian repression in Northern Epirus in 1914, he studied it closely, comparing its armed struggle with that of the Pontic Guerrilla movement and lamenting at how, according to him, the motherland betrayed the aspirations of both. The only difference between the two entities in his mind, was that when we commenced these discussions, the Greeks of Northern Epirus were still largely to be found in their ancestral homes whereas the Pontians were not. As the years progressed, the Northern Epirots began to migrate en masse to Greece and elsewhere, leaving Peter shaking his head. “Why on earth would you leave your country?” he would shaking his finger at me accusingly. “We were forced, we had no choice. But you guys do.” His voice then assumed a plaintive tone: “Why would you leave your country?” I said nothing. A few weeks later though, I was woken in the middle of the night by a telephone call. Peter was on the other end sobbing. He had stayed awake all night, reading an account of the suffering of the people in Hoxha’s Albania and the destruction of their religious and national identity.” It’s a form of genocide he repeated over and over again.

We campaigned together for many years for official recognition of the Pontian Genocide. During that time, I was able to convince him that it was not only a Greek Genocide, given that its scope was broader than just the Pontian region, extending to Christian populations in Asia Minor in general. One evening, while in a meeting discussing the reliability of statistics as to the victims, he interrupted the speaker, looked over to me and said: “Did you know that when the Romans conquered Epirus, they took away 150,000 Epirote slaves with them?”

“Yes, and the population of the region never recovered,” I agreed.

“Well, that is a form of Genocide. Why is this not recognised by anyone? I move that this meeting recognise this event right now. Genocide is something that should concern the Panhellenion, not just the affected regions.”

Whereas I tended to be excoriatingly critical of the motherland, Peter’s love for it was all encompassing. One of his greatest sources of pride was his tremendous command of the Greek language and the fact that he could generally not be distinguished as an Australohellene while on many of his sojourns to the home country, largely because he was a linguistic magpie who could assimilate all the latest jargon and patois into vocabulary. He believed it was his ability to establishing a rapport with Greek politicians by speaking to them on their level and register that allowed him to campaign effectively on issues relating to Pontian Hellenism and he castigated me for being antagonistic and excluding them from our calculations and field of action altogether, for his was a broad and generous view of Hellenism.

“Be that as it may,” I responded. “Your situation is different to ours. The motherland has gathered your people unto its bosom and has made them into voters and tax-payers. Our people across the border are neither of those things.”

“What they need to do is rise up,” Peter determined. “Did you know that there are one million crypto- Pontians in Turkey ready to assert their ethnic and linguistic rights?” I dismissed this form of wishful thinking, telling him the story of the mullahs of the village of Of, who in the nineteenth century, petitioned the Ottoman government not to allow the Ofites to register themselves as Greek, as they had only recently converted. “But that is it!” he enthused. “They have never forgotten! They are ready to rise up!”

Peter died and there still is not a Pontian state. He was right about the national awakening, though. A good number of the current inhabitants of Pontus are embracing their heritage, displaying an interest in learning Romeika, the Pontian language and preserving a purer form of it than that spoken in Greece, or the diaspora, as it lacks the permeation and influence of Modern Greek. Having taught himself the Pontian dialect, he would often call me to discuss the differences between Romeika as spoken in Pontus, and the dialect he knew. On most of those occasions, the conversation would end when he would hang up the phone, incensed at my maintaining that a term which he swore was ancient Greek, was actually a Turkish loan-word. Nonetheless, it was his concern that the linguistic diversity of Greece was dying out that encouraged me to write literature in the Epirote dialect. One of those stories, which he was the first to read and critique, is now an act in a play that is currently touring his beloved motherland.

The last time I spoke to Peter was a few days before his death. He called me excitedly to inform me that he had read somewhere that itinerant Epirote stonemasons were responsible for the construction of many of the bridges of Pontus in Ottoman times. For a person that spent his life building bridges between communities, the past and the present and the chasm of political and ideological divides, I thought this to have been eminently fitting. Then for some inexplicable reason he turned the conversation to the Epirote custom of playing a funereal lament on the graves of the dead, usually on the clarinet. It was only as I saw his Greek flag draped coffin emerge from the church and inch closely to the hearse, when the kemenche began to rasp its lament and a hundred Pontic voices joined in unison to send him on his way that I understood. He had the soul of an Epirote.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 July 2024