In the Plaka bazaar in Athens last year, I saw this interesting poster about Pontos, the Black-Sea coast of Anatolia.
Here are the Pontic towns and cities that used to have significant Greek populations: Pafri, Amisos, Oinoi, Kotiori, Kerazonta, Tripoli, Trapezonta, Rizaion. Today, they are known as Bafra, Samsun, Ünye, Ordu, Giresun, Tirebolu, Trabzon and Rize.
Besides the names of the cities, the Greeks also left many important landmarks in the region. Perhaps the most important of all of these is the Sumela Monastery, perched high above the mountains near Trabzon. Once a Mount Athos-like citadel for priests, it is one of the region's greatest tourist attractions today.
Even though almost no Greeks live there now, a regional language, closely related to Greek, is still spoken by a few Turkish inhabitants of the region. Like many places in Anatolia where Muslims and Christians lived together, the lines between who is Greek and who is Turkish is blurry; some of these people have converted from Christianity only in the last century-and-a-half. Despite their differences, both the Greeks and Turks of Pontos still share a common heritage of weapons, macho attitudes and music played with the regional kemenche instrument.
But not all memories of Pontos are nice ones, especially not after the horrendous population exchange of Turkish Christians and Greek Moslems in 1923.A few years earlier in Salonika, I had visited a commemorative event in the name of the so-called Pontic Genocide that took place in 1919, which was supposedly as nasty as the Armenian one. Although I have different views on the plight of the Armenians, I think what happened in Pontos was more like what happened in Lebanon in the 1970s than what happened in Rwanda in the 1990s.
Despite the strong sentiments people on each side have for Pontiac culture and history, I don't think anyone except a minority of die-hard nationalists on each side still has dreams, or nightmares about Pontic Greece establishing itself as an independent country.
