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  • Rhythms of a Trebizond pilgrimage

    Rhythms of a Trebizond pilgrimage

    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/ europe/8488238.stm

    Published: 2010/01/29 16:58:10 GMT

    The Ottoman empire was home to many nationalities and religions - a
    cultural mosaic that was splintered by nationalism and war in the 20th
    Century. But a new spirit of tolerance may be emerging in modern
    Turkey, albeit slowly and unsteadily, reports Thomas de Waal.

    For almost 90 years, the monastery of Soumela, situated at
    eagle-height in a gorge in eastern Turkey, has been an echoing ruin.

    Worship ended here in 1923 when modern Greece and Turkey exchanged
    their Christian and Muslim populations and the local Christian Greeks
    from this region left en masse.


    But in the last decade, Greek pilgrims, calling themselves tourists,
    have started coming back here on the old feast-day of the Virgin Mary.

    Last August I was at the monastery, officially a state museum, as a
    Greek Orthodox service sounded out again outside its walls - but it
    lasted just 30 seconds.

    A black-cassocked monk began to sing the liturgy in deep tones before
    a Turkish museum curator broke up the service. A fight threatened to
    break out. The gathering broke up in recriminations and grandstanding
    speeches.

    Old homeland

    One step forward, one step back. The story of the-service-that-wasn't
    at Soumela is a suitably Byzantine tale that takes in Turks, Greeks
    and Russians and plenty of different factions amongst them.

    The background to it is that the government of the moderately Islamic
    AK Party is challenging tenets of the modern secular Turkish state and
    reviving memories of the multi-ethnic Ottoman era.

    The new foreign policy of "zero problems with neighbours" is building
    bridges with old enemies, including Armenians and Greeks and that has
    been welcome for curious Black Sea Greeks who want to revisit the old
    homeland which they call the Pontus.

    Musicians have led the way. Both the Black Sea Turks and the Pontic
    Greeks play an instrument they call the kemenje or lyra and in English
    you might call a lyre.


    It is small, light and three-stringed, made of cherry-wood, played
    with a bow and held against the knee. Its visceral music sets the
    rhythm for the round dances that both Greeks and Turks seem to know
    instinctively.

    Two musicians in particular, the Greek anthropologist and lyre-player
    Nikos Mikhailides and Adem Erdem, a local Turkish player, have blazed
    a trail.

    The album they recorded together in the Pontic Greek dialect has
    become a smash hit with Pontic Greeks from Thessaloniki to Tashkent.
    Although not on sale in Turkey, it has been a hit too in Trabzon in
    thousands of pirate copies.

    One of the secrets of this part of Turkey is that tens of thousands of
    local Muslims, whose ancestors were once Christian, still speak and
    understand this archaic version of the Greek language.

    Festive frenzy

    Trabzon is more famous to English ears as Trebizond, the city of Rose
    Macaulay's novel The Towers of Trebizond.


    Nowadays Macaulay's magical city is a functional Turkish Black Sea
    port. But last August its past stirred into life again. The day before
    the feast-day of 15 August, half the valley seemed to be talking
    Greek.

    At a Turkish wedding feast we watched a middle-aged blonde woman with
    a string of pearls round her neck step smoothly into the dance. It
    turned out she was a professor of law at Athens University. We were
    the strangers here, not her.

    The next morning we ascended the valley to Soumela.

    It was a heady Alpine summer's day. From a distance it could be a
    Tibetan monastery, a yellowing beehive high above the gorge. Hundreds
    of people toiled up the path.

    The atmosphere was both excited and tense, with watchful Turkish
    policemen at every corner. Outside the monastery gate, a Greek
    lyre-player with a fine set of pointed moustaches was whipping a crowd
    of dancers into a festive frenzy.

    The beaming Sotiria Liliopoulos had come from Earlwood, New South
    Wales - her father, now aged 98, was born in Maçka and came here as a
    child. In an accent veering from Greek to Australian, Sotiria said,
    "This is the happiest day of my life."

    But politics was humming in the background.


    A wealthy member of the Russian parliament of Greek descent named Ivan
    Savvidi, who is making a pitch to be the leader of the Pontic Greek
    community, had chartered a ferry to ship Russian Greeks here across
    the Black Sea.

    The nationalist local authorities in Trabzon were nervous of his
    intentions. When Savvidi's Russian party made it to the top of the
    path, they were an incongruous mix - there were attractive young women
    in yellow T-shirts and baseball caps with Byzantine eagles on them,
    and a bearded man dressed in white shirtsleeves and shades (a priest
    ordered to remove his cassock) carrying a large icon, which Greeks
    stopped to venerate and kiss.

    Radicals

    The politician himself waved to the crowd and persuaded a Greek priest
    to start a service.

    The priest began to sing, but the Turkish museum curator had orders to
    stop any religious ceremony on her territory. She pushed out of her
    ticket booth into the crowd, shouting in Turkish, and tried to wrest a
    lighted candle out of Savvidi's hands.


    Greek and Turkish television cameras whirred. The divides between the
    Greeks came to the surface. Some of them, the radicals, started a
    provocative rendition of the Greek national anthem. Others shushed
    them.

    There seemed to be only two winners here, the Turkish curator and the
    Russian MP, both of whom had played heroes to the cameras.

    Standing on a wall, Savvidi told the Greek crowd that the Turks had
    offended civilisation and he would complain in Brussels.

    He said that he had informed the Russian foreign ministry of his
    plans, but failed to mention if he had permission from the Turkish
    government.

    As Savvidi spoke, other Greeks - ones who have spent years quietly
    building bridges with the locals - were drifting away, angry at the
    way the feast day was being taken from them.

    At the bottom of the valley, my mood lifted again. The lyra-musicians
    were performing and a couple were dancing in extravagant rhythms. The
    crowd clapped and whooped.

    Music is irrepressible and it draws people together, even when the
    politicians cannot manage it.

    Tom de Waal presents Songs of Trebizond on

    at 2150GMT on Sunday, 31 January. He is a specialist on the Caucasus
    with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington.
    Photos by

    staff photographer at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA.
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