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Exiles on Stage: Greek Pontian Theater, 1922-1972 
Patricia Fann Bouteneff 

Abstract: Greek Pontian playwrights produced a unique refugee theater after they arrived in Greece in 1922. Obsessed with the lost homeland, they use nostalgia to evoke the phenomenon of virtual space on stage. This obsession makes them favor the Pontian dialect, as well as heroes who appear as liminal figures. Their plots show how individuals are reincorporated into society, reinforcing the continuity of the Greek Pontian community. They turn their back on mainstream Greece in order to portray Greek Pontians, a minority in real life but a majority on stage. 
Over one million Greeks were forced to leave their Asia Minor homeland in 1922-1923 during the Greek-Turkish exchange of ethnic minorities. Many of these refugees dealt successfully with their relocation in Greece, making their mark in Greek politics, industry, or the arts. They expressed their frustrations and hopes in novels, autobiographies, lyric poems, hagiographies, folk tales, folksongs, and plays. 

These refugee authors and artists must be distinguished from those Greek authors and artists who used exile to express their alienation from Greek society. Some Greek playwrights--Nikos Kazantzakis among them--felt so estranged from their society that they imposed self-exile upon themselves, living abroad as expatriates. Other "exiles," often homosexual playwrights, saw themselves living as aliens in their own country. 

The exiles to whom this essay refers are, however, exiles in the true sense of the word: those who have been forcibly uprooted and denied repatriation. Such exiles lose their homeland, culture, language, and former position in society; they must begin anew in a different society and usually in a different language. As Edward Said has observed, 

Exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by [End Page 47] choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or "restored people." (1984:163) 

The Greek Pontians are descended from the Greeks who settled on the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor around 1200 B.C. Since they were culturally isolated from other Greeks, their dialect and customs developed along different lines. Mostly peasants, farmers, miners, with only a handful of successful entrepreneurs such as merchants and bankers, they had a considerable adjustment to make as refugees in order to understand the customs and language of the other Greeks in the 1920s. Remaining a tightly knit group, they organized ways to perpetuate their ethnic identity as soon as they arrived in Greece. They began to write down their traditional tales, to research village histories, and to compile glossaries of their dialect. In 1928, the Epitropκ Pontiakτn Meletτn began to publish the Archeion Pontou and it has since issued nearly fifty volumes. 1 

It took the Greek Pontians twenty years to develop community theaters that performed plays written in their dialect. This hiatus between their arrival in Greece and the emergence of their theater proper was caused by the innumerable difficulties of survival that confronted the refugees. In the 1920s, organized community events to celebrate holidays included amateur theatrical entertainments. Performances were sometimes utilized for raising funds for social causes (Mouratidis 1991:25). Pontian refugees in Sitagroν, a village near the city of Dhrama, began to stage various kinds of sketches, as did the villagers in Yerakαrion in Kilkis (Zerzelidis 1951:130ff.; Kontoeidis 1980:257). In the late 1930s, they began to include revues (epitheτrκseis) and re-creations (anaparastaseis) of traditional events, especially weddings. 

Greek Pontians such as Yorgos Tsoulfas, who had been active in the Pontian theater in the U.S.S.R., began to straggle into Greece in the 1930s. Tsoulfas transcribed from memory Thodoros Kanonidis's Oi prosphuges sκn Ellada. In 1933, a group of young Greek Pontians from Kalamariα produced this play under the auspices of the fledgling Euxeinos Leschκ (Tsoulfas 1987:59, 214). Polykarpos Haitas, who came to Greece in 1929, wrote Κthκ kai ethima tou pontiakou gamou and adapted Alexander Ostrofsky's The Dowerless Bride for the Pontian stage with the new title Κ phtτcheia entropκ k en (Tsoulfas 1987:20). 2 

The progress of the Greek Pontian theater was temporarily impeded by Greek involvement in World War II; plays were produced only sporadically from 1940 to 1944. 3 Gradually, by abandoning the translations and adaptations after the Civil War (1944-1949), the Greek Pontian theater became interested in ethnic realist drama. In Stathis Efstathiadis's autobiographical drama Kourpan, set during the Civil [End Page 48] War, a character laments, «Laskoumai apes sκn politeian kai t ommatai m nt elepne, pherne me eikospente chronai opis! Prosphugia atote kai prosphugia atτra!» ("I wander around the country and what I see takes me back twenty-five years! Refugees then and refugees now!"; 1985b:544). Conflicting political loyalties during the Civil War tore asunder Greek Pontian families and communities. Nevertheless, most plays portray the solidarity of the traditional village or the return of marginal characters to full membership in society. The community adopted an ethnicist slogan affirming the inevitable regeneration of Pontian Hellenism, Rτmania ki an perasen anthei kai pherei ki allo (Even if Romania is gone, it will flower and bear fruit again). 

Ethnicist Pontians also defended their community against charges of non-Greekness, or communism. Playwrights emphasized the Pontian contribution to Greek national conflicts. Xenophon Akoglous wrote Akritas in order to "sketch . . . Pontian Hellenism's contribution to our national struggles" (Akoglous 1949:117). Both Akritas and Filon Ktenidis's Patrides were produced in demotic Greek as well as in Pontian dialect. Both plays depict the historical role of the Greek Pontians as defenders of Hellenism in Asia Minor. In addition, ethnicist journals published tales of Pontian hospitality and of Greek admiration for Pontian culture. 

Ktenidis's O xenκteas was first produced in 1946. The play established the conventions of realism that have continued to influence the Greek Pontian theater to this day. Simos Lianidis's first play, Κ sebta nika, was produced in 1949, as was Kourpan, Efstathiadis's first. Ktenidis had eight plays performed by the turn of the decade: Xenκteas, Maurokorts, Klκdonas, Maranton, Proxenia, Patrides, Chτretes and Κ gunaika tou prτtomastora. Akoglous's Akritas (originally produced in standard demotic in 1945) was first performed in dialect early in 1950. From 1946 through 1950, nine other plays were written and produced by seven other authors: Hatzipanos Zarotiadis's Κ tragτdia tou Tsampasκ and Κ kardia m en t eson, Polykarpos Haitas's To sursimon tκ Tzophoula, Th. Argyropoulos's and Th. Kriezis's Allou t orτman ki allou to thaman, C. Dimarhou's and Yorgios Lampsidis's Elaten, polla tha gelaten, and Yorgios Lampsidis's Epistrophκ, Enas kalos marturas, Opis son chτrion, and Κ upodochκ. 

The actors, directors, and producers of the theater soon were organized into troupes, most of them concentrated in Athens and northern Greece. The first of these theater companies was the Ellinikσs Pontiakσs Theatrikσs 'Omilos. It was founded by Nikos Spanides in March 1949, and at its peak had one troupe in Athens and one in Thessaloniki. The Fαros Pontνon in Thessaloniki obtained exclusive rights to produce Efstathiadis's plays. The Efxeνnos Lιshi of Thessaloniki [End Page 49] and the Akrνtes tou Pσntou of Stavroupoli also organized troupes in northern Greece, while the Kallitehnikν Orgαnosi Pontνon Athinσn supported one in Athens. These threatre groups, among others, performed regularly in their own neighborhoods and also toured other communities, sometimes participating in weekend or week-long festivals. 4 

The exile is home-loving by nature: "Home is locus, custom, memory, familiarity, ease, security, sanctuary" (Seidel 1986:10). An exile's ability to "stay" home is linked to his or her ability to protect an internal home in which his or her own history, family traditions, language, and native land reside (Vladislav 1990:15). Much exilic literature has the homeland as its obsessive point of reference and often attempts to recreate or reinhabit that homeland, as do Ilias Venezis's Aiolikκ gκ and Dimitris Psathas's Gκ tou Pontou. 

In the following pages I discuss three forms in which this obsession with the homeland appears in the Greek Pontian theater: allegiance to the past (nostalgia and virtual space), allegiance to the language of the past (dialect), and allegiance to themes of survival (underdogs and liminal characters). 

Nostalgia and virtual space 

Nostalgia is not confined to exiled authors: Proust and Cavafy, among others, both make much use of it. But as expressed in Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory or in the Israelite lament of Psalm 137 (Psalm 136 in the Greek Old Testament), it is a feature of exilic writing. Nostalgia is often seen as a kind of faithfulness to the lost land. As a result, memory is used as a connection to the lost time and place. To forget is to deny the homeland and all that it symbolizes, as well as the exile's own identity (Wiesel 1990:9). 

Memory is important because the exile lives in two different time frames simultaneously: the physical present and the mental past. The mental, internalized past is more intense than the physical, "external" present. Although exiles speed forward in their actual lives, mentally they move backward (Wittlin, quoted in Tabori 1972:32). Jan Vladislav recognizes the pitfall of this escapist device. "With some effort, or nostalgia, we can evoke our country's true geography," he writes. "Slowly, but correctly, we can redraw its faded contours. But it is impossible to return there in reality. Not only has everything changed, but we ourselves are also different, and above all, time has changed--ours, as well as everyone else's" (1990:14ff.). Seferis, too, seems to recognize this pitfall of exilic memory in «O gurismos tou xenitemenou»: [End Page 50] 


κ nostalgia sou echei plasei 
mia chτra anuparchtκ me nomous 
exτ ap tκ gκs ki ap tous anthrτpous. 

Banishment wrenches the exile out of compressed time in which past, present, and future weave the mythology of home life; the exile is forced into an "irremediably secular and unbearably historical" state of being (Said 1984:160) where he or she is cut off from the past, doubtful about the future, and uncertain even about the present. 

Greek Pontian drama evokes rather than reproduces a reality, therefore relying on the cultural memory of its minority audience. Bogatyrev notes that theatrical costumes, props, gestures, and actions generally do not replicate the real world (1976:33). The physical presence on the stage is only one part of a greater effect. "The stage depicts or otherwise suggests a domain which does not coincide with its actual physical limits, a mental construct on the part of the spectator from the visual clues that he receives" (Elam 1980:67). Reviews of performances of Greek Pontian plays suggest that spectators are led by the verbal clues they receive to complete a mentally hypothesized homeland. Virtual space is the term for this domain. Larger than what is represented on stage, it is evoked through signs. 

In the Greek Pontian theater, virtual space is created primarily from non-visual cues. Like many playwrights, including Shakespeare, Greek Pontian playwrights depend on narrative, especially on verbal scenery, which causes the minds of the homesick Greek Pontian audiences to fill in details from their own experience. As Chatman observes, "narrative evokes a world, and since it is no more than an evocation, we are left free to enrich it with whatever real or fictive experience we acquire" (1978:120). In other words, the verbal signs on stage are supplemented by the spectator's knowledge (Elam 1980:103). 

Greek Pontian theater has been written by first- and second-generation refugees, who also constitute its most sympathetic audience. The nostalgia of the first-generation refugees was so intense that they passed it on to their children and grandchildren. In his pamphlet on the Pontian theater, the director Takis Mouzenidis (1909-1981) writes of his experience: 

I left that immortal soil when I was very young and, as might be expected, was raised outside of its climate and far from the immediate influence of its environment. Nevertheless, I myself experienced my parents' nostalgia, a nostalgia that for Pontians is incurable, incomparable, profound, and above all genuine. Thus I, too, came to love everything that reminded me of our lost homeland. (1959:13) 
[End Page 51] 

Each succeeding generation of refugees brings with it to the theater a different kind of yearning for the homeland. Of those born and raised in the Pontos before the exchange of populations, Odysseas Lampsidis writes (1978:19), "at theatrical performances they experienced the same climate of the homeland and, owing to the performances' illusory play, forgot completely that the geographical domain had become different and alien." For the second generation, uprooted from the Pontos when still young, "the performance by the Pontian Theater constituted an attempt at a nostalgic reconstruction of their now lost homeland." Finally, for those born and raised in Greece, the performance "is moving much more as a theatrical work that contains within itself not only the answer to the always intense question, 'What was it like, the homeland of my grandfather or of my aged father?' but also an entire universe of ideas and of the human condition and the condition of human society." Lampsidis posits a basic theatrical premise: that every member of the audience seeks some communion with the lost homeland through attendance. The play is designed to answer the audience's need. As Mouzenidis says, "It offers the relief of an illusion to those nostalgic for that life" (1959:20). 

The playwright's success in inspiring his viewers to reconstruct the homeland in their minds is also evident in the following review of Ktenidis's O xenκteas: 

Extending through Ksenitιas is a resplendent but at the same time sweet, pale light that wells up directly from the sun of sweet-smelling Kromni, from her deep green hillsides, the infinite height of her mountains, the murmuring of her limpid waters, the idyllic life of her inhabitants. In Ksenitιas the playwright transfers us to the beauty and the fragrant air of the Pontian landscape, and places there the entire atmosphere of Pontian life with its customs, traditions, and rituals, giving that life its own pulse, tone, and rhythm with a solemn disposition and appeal that is the hallmark of his strong, spontaneous talent as a writer but also his nostalgic thought's reverential adoration of our far-away, forever lost homeland. (Koulaouzidis 1950:313) 

In watching the play Ksenitιas, the critic has clearly been vouchsafed a vision of his «chamenκ gia panta Patrida». But it is noteworthy that none of the topographical details that he recollects actually appears in the play; the action takes place entirely indoors. The play somehow caused its viewers to envision a re-created homeland. Ktenidis himself has described the reactions of three members of the opening-night audience: 

Me stamatκsan treis grκoules Ponties, ap tκn Krτmnκ, to chτrio tou « Xenκtea», to chτrio mou. Κ neτterκ tha κtan panτ apo exκnta pente [End Page 52] chronτn. Κsan bourkτmenes. Oi duo m ankaliasan kai me philκsan: den eipan lexκ, giati klaigane. Κ tritκ ebale ta duo tκs kokkaliarika cheria panτ stous τmous mou kai koitτntas me mes sta matia mou eipe, --« Nai, rizam! Pτs eporeses kai enkes mas apes sκ Krτm, k ezκsame me t apothamments kai me toi zτntanous emoun;» (1947:5ff.) 

Three little old Pontian women from Kromni, the village of "Ksenitιas," my village, stopped me. The youngest of them must have been more than sixty-five years old. They were brimming over with tears. The two of them embraced and kissed me; they didn't speak a word, because they were crying. The third put her two bony hands on my shoulders and, looking me straight in the eye, said: "So, my dear! How ever did you manage to take us back into Kromni, so that we lived with our living and our dead?" 
These viewers saw not just the play on the stage in front of them but also «t apothamments kai . . . toi zτntanous emoun». The Greek Pontians employ memory and nostalgia to reinvent the past on stage and to re-create their community, however imperfectly. The audience enters the virtual space of a conceptual homeland. 

Dialect 

A vital aspect of this conceptual homeland is the language with which it is evoked. As the exiled author Horst Bienek has said, "loss of language is probably the most decisive factor in determining exile; it is what makes exile so wretched for the writer. In the process you lose almost everything: childhood, upbringing, mentality, myth" (1990:41). Although their dialect is disappearing in urban areas, the Greek Pontians have chosen to make proficiency in it a passport to the world of their theater. While speakers of standard demotic can usually follow the plot, they find the language so unintelligible that they have difficulty in following the dialogue. 5 Thus the theater's use is mostly limited to the Greek Pontian minority, who cling to their dialect as a device less for communication than for marking social difference. It has become what the sociolinguist John Edwards calls "an emblem of groupness . . ., a symbol, a rallying-point" (1985:17). 6 Or, as Odysseas Lampsidis has written, use of the dialect "was an indication of the self-existence of an aggregate of people who felt isolated in the surroundings in which they were living but who also did not consider the surroundings to be similar to the other elements that constituted those surroundings" (1978:170). 

Literary use of the dialect reflects the Greek Pontians' social situation. Pontian texts are almost invariably framed by Greek texts since collectors who record folk tales and folksongs in Pontian dialect write their prologues, footnotes, and glosses in demotic or katharιvousa. [End Page 53] Similarly, playwrights compose the performed parts of their work--the dialogue and the songs--in dialect but write stage directions and prologues in standard Greek. 7 On stage, however, there is no such framing. The language of the Pontian dramatic world is almost exclusively the Pontian dialect, which has been slowly standardized to a kind of pan-Pontian from a bewildering variety of sub-dialects. 8 

Greek Pontians thus find themselves obeying a fundamental impulse in the use of language. Each group requires its own version of a language to set itself apart from its neighbors. Considering the proliferation of languages, George Steiner has written that through language we construct what he calls "alternities of being." 

Different tongues give to the mechanism of "alternity" a dynamic, transferable enactment. They realize needs of privacy and territoriality vital to our identity. To a greater or lesser degree, every language offers its own reading of life. To move between languages, to translate, even within restrictions of totality, is to experience the almost bewildering bias of the human spirit towards freedom. If we were lodged inside a single "language-skin" or amid very few languages, the inevitability of our organic subjection to death might well prove more suffocating than it is. (1975:473) 

In short, languages proliferate because groups need to differentiate themselves from one another. This need to differentiate lies behind the declarations of allegiance to the Pontian dialect that commonly appear in Greek Pontian ethnicist periodicals. The editor of the periodical To Pontiako Theatro gives the following arguments for retaining dialect as the language of the Greek Pontian stage: 

The Pontian dialect in the theater was a true revelation. It manifested itself as a linguistic instrument rich in expressive power, with clear-cut lexical definitions, with a strong--you might say "sparkling"--descriptive capability, thanks also to the skillful exploitation of proverbs with a suppleness and agility that permit an easy playfulness and a true rendering of the characteristic elements of Pontian life. (Yorgios Lampsidis 1950:2) 

This is not an objective statement of fact; it is an assertion of loyalty that suggests that the most appropriate medium for conveying Greek Pontian life as lived in the homeland was the Pontian dialect. Thus the dialect also served to distance the viewers from the Greek world in which they were living. Its use in literature was one method enabling the Greek Pontians "to escape from everyday harsh, tragic reality" (Odysseas Lampsidis 1978:170). 

On the Greek Pontian stage, acquisition of other languages represents loss of cultural identity. The misunderstanding of other languages or other varieties of Greek, and especially the inappropriate use of katharιvousa, is a frequently exploited comic device. 9 Traditionalists, [End Page 54] who constitute the vast majority of characters, relish expressing themselves in dialect, while those who yearn for the city attempt to speak a higher register of Greek but rarely with great success. In the play To maurokorts, a woman who despises village ways instructs her niece to welcome a guest in a "sophisticated" style of dialect studded with inept attempts at katharιvousa (Ktenidis 1960:19). Her clumsy use of language signals not only that the village does not suit her but also that she cannot adapt to the city. 

Another character whose use of language signals inability to fit into one's environment is Toton, the ksenitιas, who switches unconsciously from Pontian to Russian: «Nto n ephtτgτ! Pτgτ na legata rτmeοka k ebgainne Rousika» ("What can I do! I start to say it in Greek and it comes out Russian"; Ktenidis 1947:45). A vital part of Miton's campaign to help Toton regain his native status is the correction of his speech, illustrating the idea that it is better to stay home and be poor than to forfeit one's identity by seeking foreign gold. 

Only one play portrays the possibility of freedom in learning "the other language." In Ktenidis's Chτretes the barrier of privacy afforded by dialect is lifted to admit newcomers. When a refugee village permits a number of mixed marriages, the initial confusion of dialects and mutual incomprehension gives way at the end, through good will and study on both sides, to understanding and a kind of communion. All the characters can now speak both standard Greek and the Pontian dialect interchangeably, and all feel free to participate in both Greek and Pontian customs: the Greeks become Pontians, the Pontians become Greeks. But in this play, as in the others, everyone conforms at the end. Whatever else occurs on stage, the language of the Pontian world is and remains almost exclusively Pontian. 


Underdogs and liminal characters 

Exile authors, especially when their city is destroyed or their country overrun, tend to be concerned with the subject of survival. Pontian playwrights are no exception. They display a near obsession with the survival of individuals and of the community. This interest surfaces in a number of ways: in the kind of hero that predominates in the theater, in the development of a triumphal catch phrase, and in plot structures that show communal revival and the reincorporation of individuals into society. Above all, the individual and community on stage are shown overcoming liminality. 

Liminality is a part of many rituals, especially rites of passage (Van Gennep 1960:10ff.; Turner 1969:94ff.). 10 The term designates the condition of a person making a transition from one state of being to another. [End Page 55] Marginality, on the other hand, is a condition in which an individual or a group has been shunted onto the periphery of society--a state of being from which one may or may not be liberated. Although marginality and liminality should not be confused, they may be associated. Both suggest an ambiguous relationship to the main sector of society. Turner has hypothesized that, within a given social structure, people in a liminal condition tend to be treated in much the same way as those on the margins (1969:125). It should be noted, however, that although the notion of liminality de jure suggests transition rather than stasis, de facto it is possible for one to become stuck in liminality, unable to be incorporated fully into one state or another. Ruth Mandel (1983) has provocatively suggested from her reading of a Greek folksong that Greek women are never fully separated from their natal families, nor are they ever fully incorporated into their marital homes. 

The most characteristic hero of exilic literature is the marginal being, the underdog. This hero often appears as the youngest son, the impoverished employee, the migrant worker, the widow, the orphan, the exile. In folkloric or other traditional literature, such a hero survives thanks either to some sort of supernatural helper or to his or her innate wisdom or strength. Many of the heroes of Greek Pontian folk tales are underdogs: the widow-woman who must seek the advice of the Undying Sun to solve her problems (Fostiropoulou 1938:181), the youngest son who has to marry a frog (Dawkins 1931:84), a young girl whose guardian tries to murder her (D. K. Papadopoulos 1946:183), κ Sachtaritsa κ Maritsa, a Cinderella figure whose stepsisters threaten to eat her (Fostiropoulou 1938:184), and orphans who triumph against all odds. 11 

The underdog may also appear as a trickster figure. The trickster succeeds through conning others, deceiving or tricking his or her opponents. Susan Niditch observes in her study of biblical tricksters that they may not fully achieve their goals: "they never gain full control of the situation around them and often escape difficulties in a less than noble way. Their tales do not end with unequivocal success, but they survive to trick again--and, indeed, are survivors par excellence" (1987:xi). In the Old Testament, we find such exilic underdogs as David slaying Goliath, Joseph surviving in exile to triumph over his brothers, and the widow Judith defeating Holofernes. In Afro-American slave tales, we find Brer Rabbit and Anansi the Spider deceiving their neighbors, often only for the fun of stirring things up (Abrahams 1985:179-180). In Greek Pontian tales, we find a woman who outwits the devil (Kandilaptis 1950:111), the wily Dekatrionts, youngest of thirteen brothers (Kandilaptis 1948:112), and the widow's son who tricks the beardless man (Dawkins 1931:108). 

Although Greek Pontian theater is popular literature rather than [End Page 56] traditional or folkloric, it continues to use a preponderance of underdog or trickster protagonists who are usually impoverished, often socially marginalized heroes. The eponymous heroine of Trugona, Stathis Efstathiadis's play of 1969, is an underdog drawn from folk tradition. Since she is a battered wife with an alcoholic husband, the odds against her mount rapidly. Not only has she been saddled with a scatterbrained daughter and a feckless husband, but her one-time suitor reappears to harass her. She has to fend off his advances and save her daughter from him as well (because her husband decided to marry off the girl to him). Trygona triumphs only because of her essential virtue; when she finally capitulates to her suitor's demands, he is so shocked that he reforms! 

In Polykarpos Haitas's Κ phtτcheia entropκ k en, we find two underdog figures. The protagonist Dimitrαkis is extremely poor; he is bereft of a father and is struggling on meager wages to support his aged mother. Gorgorts, the brother of Dimitrαkis's boss, has marginalized himself by his drinking and homelessness. When Gorgorts finally persuades his flint-hearted brother to readmit him into the family, he persuades him simultaneously to accept Dimitrαkis as a son-in-law. The hero of another of Haitas's plays, To sursiman tκ Tzophoulas, is more of a trickster. When he is rejected by the parents of the girl he loves, he announces that he is going to marry another only to abduct their daughter when the parents' guard is down. 

In Anna Vafeiadou's Seiran ki chalanτ, we find both an underdog and a trickster. The mother of the story is determined to marry off her daughters in order of age. Both are lovely girls, but the elder, Eirνni, had her face badly scarred when she was young. Her mother must find her a husband by a trick. When yet another suitor comes round for the younger daughter, she presents that girl for his approval and then substitutes Eirνni at the wedding ceremony. The trick is made possible only because of traditional Greek Pontian headgear: each girl wears a kind of kerchief wrapped around her face and head. By the time the deception is uncovered, her husband and father-in-law are already smitten with Eirνni's beautiful nature. Eirνni's mother is not the only one in the Greek Pontian theatrical repertoire to resort to trickery to achieve her ends. A mother in Ktenidis's play Xenκteas tricks the poor returnee into agreeing to wed her daughter, who is far too young for him, a fact he would have known had he stayed home. Marriage on the Pontian stage is a caveat procus affair! 

The hero of Ktenidis's Xenκteas is Miton, an underdog by virtue of poverty and celibacy who is also a trickster. He deceives the returnee Toton in a deal for a horse and then deceives the unscrupulous mother who would cheat Toton by arranging for her daughter to be abducted by [End Page 57] the youth who loves her. Significantly, Miton's underdog status is directly related to his love for his native land. He refuses to work abroad to earn money, and presumably his penury keeps him from marrying. He uses his tricks to define Pontianness. Inspired, he is able to deceive Toton because Toton's mind has been befuddled by years of living abroad. 

In folkloric and popular literature, trickster tales have an anti-establishment quality at their core and, as Jay Edwards says about Afro-American tales, "often capture and express the social and moral dilemmas of people living under conditions of enforced political and economic marginality" (1978:72ff.). 12 The anti-establishment nature of Greek Pontian theater is not at first apparent. The characters reaffirm traditional values of the stage world and almost all plays end with a wedding--a symbol of continuity. However, the very existence of this ethnic theater opposes the status quo, in which "scholarly and political Greek ideology has until recently exhibited a smothering disregard for minorities among its Christian peoples; it expects them to conform to a single cultural standard" (Bouteneff 1991a:107). 

Much Greek Pontian cultural activity reflects the ideology of its repressed citizens. As we saw earlier, a folksong verse that predicts their cultural resurrection has been raised to the status of an ethnic slogan: Κ Rτmania ki an perasen, anthei kai pherei ki allo. Romania here refers to Pontos, a land dead to its former inhabitants but predicted to return fully to life some day (Bouteneff 1991b:343ff.). Oddly enough, the verse attracted relatively little attention in Pontian circles until Xenophon Akoglous referred to it as a prophecy in Akritas, his historical drama about the last days of the Pontian guerrilla movement: 


«S ekeina ta chronai oi christianoi etane polla amartτloi», elegen [o papo m]. «Gia tato kai monon o theos esteilen toi Tourks k erthan epκrane prτta tκn Pol, to tranon to basiloskamn. Epκran ustera kai tκn Trapezountan k echathen olon κ Rτmania. Ama tha ertai kairos», eleen, «kai tha pairom ata opis». Elegen kai tκn tragτdian athes: 
Κ Rτmania epethanen, κ Rτmania eparthen: 
κ Rτmania an pethanen, anthei kai pherei ki allo. 
(1949:15) 


"At that time Christians were great sinners," [my grandfather] used to say. "For that reason alone God sent the Turks and they came and first took Constantinople, the great capital. Later they also took Trebizond and all of Romania was lost. But the time will come," he said, "when we will take them back." He also sang its song: 
Romania is dead, Romania is taken; 
If Romania has died, it will blossom and bear fruit again. 
[End Page 58] 


This passage can be read in two ways: as an ironic commentary on the rest of the play, which ends with the family losing their land and fleeing the homeland, or, more likely, as a foreshadowing of the vow by Akritas, the guerrilla captain, to return to reclaim his land as part of a future Orthodox kingdom. The verse has been a catch phrase among Greek Pontians since 1949, and adorns ethnic pamphlets of all sorts. 

Liminal characters in the Greek Pontian theater are consistently redeemed from the fringes of society and drawn into the center as full members of the community. Anyone out of his or her proper place is labeled as damaging to the village. Unattached women, girls, and widows are called maisses (witches); roving bachelors are called devils. Outsiders and loners have to be readmitted to society in order to resolve the conflict. Nubile characters are married off, workers abroad are rehabilitated, and even drakoi are redeemed. Since the plots of the Greek Pontian theater rely heavily on courtship that ends in wedlock, this resolution is usually achieved by marrying the liminal characters off. 

Unmarried characters of marriageable age are liminal, and are so labeled in the theater. For example, in Efstathiadis's Rτxana kai Barbara, the widows Roxana and Varvara are ostracized as long as they remain single. Unoccupied by family demands, they are free to meddle in their neighbors' affairs. Once they submit to marital authority, the name-calling ceases. Likewise, in Ktenidis's Maurokorts, the old maid, Maria, is taunted until a suitable man finally presents himself. One of the only marriageable characters who is never betrothed is young Stαthion of Akoglous's Akrνtas. He ultimately dies in a guerrilla skirmish--because of the exigencies of the Pontian theater, he must die! Death is the only acceptable solution for a youth who loves his friend's wife, shuns the company of others, and spends his time alone in the mountains. Celibacy is undesirable, liminal. That is why, in Efstathiadis's Trygσna, we also find Yiannαkis, the village simpleton, comically appealing to the audience for a wife (1985d:52). 

The persistence of plots based on courtship arises not only from the Greek Pontians' need to de-liminalize characters but also from causes rooted in the social situation of the spectators. The primary concern of Greek Pontian refugees, after securing food and shelter, was to marry off their daughters. Eligible candidates were rare because most prospective grooms had perished either in Turkish labor camps, on White Death marches, or during conscription into the Turkish armed forces. 13 In addition, marriage on stage allowed the audience to witness the unbroken continuity of Pontian Hellenism. In spite of their frequent lamentations over the loss of the homeland, these playwrights never foretell the end of Pontian culture and, in the most popular plays, rarely call for a cast that spans fewer than three generations. Pontian playwrights [End Page 59] explore the subject of liminality only to suggest the variety of ways that characters may be redeemed from it. 

Although other groups of exiles seem rarely to write for the stage, theater has been a more successful medium for the Greek Pontians than any other form of literature. It lets them vent their nostalgia and call on memory to remain faithful to the homeland and to assert their allegiance to the past. The dialect remains the medium of their world view: happy endings always involve everyone speaking flawless Pontian. Such endings also show the Greek Pontians' concern with survival, as does the use of underdog and trickster heroes who must be rescued from liminality. Finally, the very act of attending a play gathers the Greek Pontians into a group in a way that other forms of literature do not. 

Pontian commentators often refer to the analgesic aspect of the theater, whose illusions are said to provide relief for the pain of nostalgia. Nevertheless, the Greek Pontians take for granted the theater's appropriateness for expressing their exiled condition. If only for the duration of the play, it sets them apart from other Greeks. To borrow a phrase from George Steiner (1971:11), the Greek Pontian theater is "eccentric, aloof, nostalgic, deliberately untimely." 

Princeton University 


Notes 
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank the students in my humanities course at Princeton on the literature of exiles, where many of these ideas took shape, and Stratos Constantinidis for his comments on an early draft of this paper. 

1. The Epitropν is not the only organization devoted to this activity, but it was the earliest on the scene and has stayed the longest; it is now in the process of opening a museum of Pontian history and culture in Nea Smyrni, Athens. 

2. Alexander Ostrofsky (1823-1886) wrote a series of realistic contemporary satires that startled his original audiences because of their simple and photographically exact representation of daily life. The best known of these was the one about the position of women in Russian society (1879) that Haitas adapted. Ostrofsky's ideology and realism seem to have made him popular among the Greek Pontian playwrights, who were looking for works to adapt. 

3. Other Greek theater during this period included traveling theater troupes, used by the resistance to stir up opposition to the Occupation and to raise funds and food for the andαrtes. For more on these troupes, see Myrsiades 1977. 

4. For some early itineraries and events, see "Theatrofilos" 1951:827, 1950:379ff.; "Ena theatrikσ gegonσs" 1950:246; Pontikσn Thιatron" 1954:2730ff. 

5. For descriptions of different aspects of the language, I refer the reader to Dawkins 1931, Dawkins 1937, Mackridge 1987, and A. A. Papadopoulos 1953. One critic complained of a Pontian performance: "Every now and then I could make out words here and there, but it was impossible for me to follow the entire meaning of even one sentence completely" (Thrylos 1947). Reviews of the Pontian theater by non-Pontians are rare but do exist; see Karthaios 1950, Myrat 1950, Thrylos 1950. 

6. On contrastive self-identification in other contexts see also Fasold 1984:3ff.; for a non-European example, see Finnegan 1988:47. 

7. Seemingly the only exception to this rule is the playwright Polykarpos Haitas, whose preferred language, spoken and written, was Pontian. He wrote all the elements of his plays, as well as an autobiography, in dialect. There do exist a number of ethographic tales in dialect, and Zerzelidis published at least three short novels entirely in Pontian between 1950 and 1972. Other novelists who use the dialect, such as Zahos in O xenos tκs Neas Kerasountas (1984), employ it solely in passages of dialogue and even then not extensively. 

8. This trend seems to reflect one occurring in Pontian communities throughout Greece (Mackridge 1987:120). Older writers--i.e., those born in the Pontos--tend to write in their native sub-dialect. Examples are Simos Lianidis in Santan, Filon Ktenidis in Kromniot, and Anna Vafeiadou in the idiτma tκs Chaldias. The Greek-born Stathis Efstathiadis and his contemporaries usually write in a grecified version of Pontian. 

9. E.g., Maurokorts (Ktenidis 1960:19), O Chτretes (Ktenidis 1956:11). One can compare this to the use of language in the kτmeidullio, another theater of realism in which differences in dialect register are exploited for comic effect (see Hatzipantazis 1981: 98ff). 

10. The definition of liminality that follows is a prιcis of one that I developed in Bouteneff 1992:273ff. 

11. The tendency of exiles to prefer this kind of folklore can be seen elsewhere as well. Japanese-Americans interned during World War II revived traditional tales of the Ninja, legendary warriors (Opler and Obayashi 1945; Opler 1950); the Karen tribe, Burmese refugees, have a folk hero who is an orphan (Kiste 1974:75, 90, cited in Smith 1989:88). 

12. Cf. Niditch 1987:49. 

13. Cf. Hirschon's observations about the Anatolians of Yerania and the economic consequences of the lack of able-bodied men in the refugee population. She suggests that one of its effects, among others, was to change the dowry provision (1989:39). 


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