order, in Pontic tales, tend to be represented either by poverty so extreme that
the family makes bread from ashes, or by the fact that the hero or heroine is a
widow’s child or the offspring of a king’s unacknowledged wife. But there are
exceptions. The hero or heroine may be the only child of a well-to-do couple
(“The Rich Boy,”28 “Giannitson”29). The Pontic hero or heroine, like European
and Middle Eastern counterparts, is guided by gifts, advice, assistance; he or she
is also occasionally moved by impulse or conscience. Desire for a wife or husband
may be the motivator, or sometimes perhaps a less tangible goal—Giannitson is
overcome by his vocation to be a monk, Kyrlovits is moved by pity for his wife,
the hero and heroine want to find and reassure their parents (in the final section
of “The Rich Boy”). Poverty becomes a motivating force more frequently in tales
told after the Greek-Turkish population exchange forced the Pontians out of their
homeland and into exile in Greece.
Although a villain is common in Pontic tales, there may be more than one to
a tale, or there may be none. When the tale does involve one or more villains,
revenge is not always exacted. Pontian narrators set things straight in their tales
differently than did their European counterparts. For example, revenge in German
tales may involve the evil-doer’s being burned at the stake, drowned, forced to
dance in red hot shoes, or stripped naked and put in a barrel studded with nails and
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harnessed to a horse. These punishments are often described in even greater detail
than the final good fortune of the heroes. By contrast, punishment is not inevitable
for Pontic villains, nor is it often a dose of his or her own medicine, through the
use of their own evil methods, the way it so often is in European tales. Where the
punishment is not entirely omitted, it is often either left to God to mete out justice,
or to natural consequences (with divine agency left tacit). On the occasions when
the villain is punished in the folktale, the description is usually perfunctory: he
may be chopped into small pieces or may burst from ill nature, or she may be
offered death by the sword or the horse. By no means can it be said of Pontic
tales, as Tatar does of German stories, that the villain’s death in the most painful
possible way is a precondition for the hero’s happiness.30
Almost all Pontic folktales end with the hero or heroine in a modified and
elevated version of his or her original condition; however, they may or may
not include a wedding. When weddings do occur, they last forty days and forty
nights. Some Pontic tales seem to end almost perfunctorily with such a wedding;
others have weddings as the true culmination of the story. In still others there is
no reason for a wedding, or the wedding is left out even when one would have
expected it. Especially when the protagonist is a girl, a wedding may also occur
midway through the narrative and lead to still other adventures.31
Tale Characteristics of Different Villages
While it is useful to consider Pontic folktales as a group, they harbor important
differences from village to village, and from narrator to narrator—especially
when the narrators are of different sex—within a given village.
What we know of the folktale repertoire of Imera comes from two collectors,
Despoina Fostiropoulou and the British philologist R.M. Dawkins. The former
collected her tales from an unidentified woman, and the latter from two eighteen-
year-old men, Vasilios Vasiliades and Haralampos Fotiades. They told no tales in
common. Taken as a whole, these thirty-eight tales give us an idea of the character
of the Imeran folktale. It is down-to-earth, and contains a stronger religious
element than was common in Pontos. The characters come almost entirely from
within the Greek community.
Both female and male sets of narratives often express a reliance on God to
rectify injustice. The widow is told not to seek vengeance against the thief who
stole her hen’s eggs (“The Undying Sun”); Maritsa decides to leave the matter
of her sisters coming to live with her in the palace in God’s hands (“Cinderella
Maritsa”); a traitorous servant is left to await his just deserts (“The Scaldhead and
the Chance Find”). There is very little of the type of magic found in most wonder
tales. Birds descend to sort grain from ashes or to donate feathers for a mattress, a
river and a rock speak, angels appear, and a devil deceives a blacksmith, but there
are none of the magic cudgels, sacks producing entire dinners, man-eating ogres,
or talking crows that appear in other Pontic tales.
Folktales from other villages also have their individual character. Those
from the seaside town of Kotyora feature more elaborately worked-out plots
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
55
and include more Middle Eastern monsters and character types than those from
Imera. Some of those differences might be explained by differences in population
size and geography. On the other hand, the village of Santa was similar to Imera
in terms of geography and size, but its tales are very different. Santan folktales
contain many fantastic elements and are more violent than the average Pontic
Greek tale, some of its women are given greater equality with men, and some
of its men are fiercely proud and defiant of the king’s authority. Internal family
relations are somehow much tighter: women are less likely to betray their men.
Unlike other Greek or Pontic stories, heroes who rescue a sister or a mother are
not subsequently betrayed by her; rather, they usually end up working together to
survive their adventures.32 A witch hired to get rid of one hero ends up marrying
him and being loyal to him. Even in the tale of “The Drooling Fool,” where the
wife is embarrassed by her husband and always hopes he will die in his adventures,
she takes no steps actively to get rid of him.33
Four Tales Told by Both Women and Men
In Pontic folktale collections such as those of Simos Lianides, Xenophon
Akoglous, Ioannis Valavanis, and Ioannis Parharides—all men—women are
usually depicted as liable to betray their households and their men. The tales by
Haralampos Fotiades, another man, also fit this mold. On the other hand, those
by Fostiropoulou’s narrator, a woman, do not. In Fotiades’s tales, the women
are more to be censured than pitied; just the opposite in Fostiropoulou’s. In
his, man is set against God’s demands; he is God’s pawn. In hers, men measure
themselves against society’s demands, while women are men’s pawns. In his,
trouble originates usually from the workings of fate; in hers, it originates within
the household, usually with a mother-in-law or traitorous servant.
If we had only the collections of folktales from Imera to go by, we might have
postulated that there were two different Pontic folktale repertories, a male and a
female. Such a conclusion could be supported by evidence from elsewhere in the
Middle and Far East, where women and men participate to different degrees in
the narration of folktales, and often have different
repertoires from one another.
In Afghanistan and India, women have rituals at which they tell folktales and in
which men do not participate.34 In Egypt, boys are expected to leave folktales
behind when they attain manhood; Egyptian women tell their folktales primarily
for children and for other women.35
In parts of Europe as well, women and men can tell very different versions of
the same basic tale, and Alan Dundes shows that this tendency persists even when
the folktales are transformed into literature.36 In his study of Spanish folktales of
courtship and marriage, James Taggart even found a kind of “gendered dialogue”
in Spanish villages.37 He psychoanalyzes this dialogue, and to that end assigns
“meanings” to the tales to show where they fit within the dialogue. He might
have read the differences between the tales told by women and men in the Pontos
as a kind of conversation between the sexes, in which each side justifies its own
position and shows how it is betrayed or falsely accused by the other. A similar
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dialogue, in a Turkish context, is made literal in Sheykh Zada’s The History of
the Forty Vezirs, in which a man convicted of rape and condemned to death and
the woman who accused him of the crime each argue the merits of their case
through storytelling. As early as 1926, the Russian researcher Mark Azadovskii
also remarked on the differences between folk poetry and narratives performed by
women and those performed by men.38 “Even if the emphasis lies elsewhere,” he
writes, Vinokurova “put the female theme in the foreground and treats it carefully,
even if it is not the main concern.”39 He shows how Vinokurova’s time working
as a maid led her to emphasize the work of servants in her narratives. Azadovskii
makes a similar observation comparing a Siberian woman’s narratives to those of
other raconteurs in the region: “The fundamental trait of Vinokurova’s disposition
is her sensitive, soft delicacy, and this soft coloration, this delicacy permeates
all her tales. Thus … there are no obscene instances at all. She did indeed tell
me the tale of the four Popes … but this tale, which I repeatedly recorded in
the Verkholensk region, is scarcely recognizable in her rendition (in regard to
manner, not in regard to content).”40
Despite the existence of two Imeran repertoires, one male and one female,
men and women in the Pontos seem by and large to have told the same stories,
but with different emphases. Each tale is easily recognizable as the same version
when told by a man or by a woman: they take the same framework and clothe
it slightly differently. We find a fictionalized description of this phenomenon
in a novel, Aioliki Gi [Aiolean Land] by Ilias Venezis, which is set in a Greek
farmstead on the western coast of Asia Minor. Venezis contrasts the folktales told
by a grandmother with those told by a grandfather. For example, the grandmother
consistently softens evil-doers: ogres become benevolent demigods of the woods,
the wolf in “Red Riding Hood” a beast that tries to do good but falls into evil ways
in spite of himself. The grandfather’s wolf, on the other hand, is a ravening beast
who slakes his hunger greedily first with Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, then
with the child herself.41 The picture that he draws of the differences between the
grandmother’s and grandfather’s narrative styles are exaggerated versions of the
differences we find in tales told by Pontic female and male narrators.
Below are examples of four different Pontic tales for which a female version
can be contrasted with a male version. No context for the telling of the tales was
recorded. In no instance did they originate in the same village, and it is unlikely
that the narrators knew each other or had heard each other’s tales.
The Undying Sun
(AT 461A; Eberhard-Boratav 126; El Shamy 461A.)42 The two stories under
consideration here would both have been collected in Greece; their tellers
originated in different Pontic villages. The version from Imera was collected by
Despoina Fostiropoulou from an unidentified female narrator before 1935; the one
from Kotyora was collected by folklorist, historian, playwright, and army officer
Xenophon Akoglous from a male narrator before 1952. As mentioned above,
Bouteneff, Persecution and Perfidy
57
Imera was a mountain village, Kotyora a coastal city. In Pontic, Fostiropoulou’s
story is called “The Undying Sun,” Akoglous’ “The Sun’s Mother.”
Greek variants of this story can be found in Crete and the Caucasus, and there
is a Turkish variant from South Siberia.43 In each case, advice is asked of the sun.
Dawkins also located it among the Gagauzy of Bessarabia, in Persia, Armenia,
Russia, and Italy.44 The Aarne-Thompson tale type index refers to only one tale
of this type, from India; the motif of a thief being punished by having feathers
stuck to his head (J1141.1.5) also appears in India. The Eberhard-Boratav version
is thematically related to “The Undying Sun” and is found throughout central
Turkey. Arab versions have Moses asking advice of God on behalf of a destitute
brother and sister. In a Spanish version, “The Griffin Bird,” the requests are made
of a traveler seeking the advice of a frightful monster, and the story includes a
river that must be crossed before the advisor can be reached.45
In the Pontic female version, an old woman sets out to visit the Undying Sun
to ask who is stealing her hen’s eggs; in the male version, a poor man cannot earn
enough to feed himself and his three daughters, so he goes to ask for advice of
the Sun’s mother. Along the way, the widow meets three spinsters who want to
know why they cannot get married; the widower also meets three old maids. The
widow next encounters a woman wearing three fur coats who wants to know why
she cannot get warm; the widower meets a man buried to his waist in the ground.
The widow then meets a raging river that wants to know what it must do to be at
rest and a boulder teetering on the edge asking the same question; the widower
meets only the hanging rock. When the widow finally finds the Sun, he answers
all these questions and concludes by saying: “The one who steals your eggs is
your neighbor, but say nothing to him; leave him to God and he will come to his
just desserts.” The Sun’s mother gives the widower advice for the others and a
magic piece of hide that will always fill his table with food. The widow conveys
the Sun’s advice to the others and returns home to find that the thief had sprouted
feathers on his face and died of the shock. After the widower passes on the advice,
he has adventures that revolve around the loss of his piece of hide to the king,
forcing him to return for help to the Sun’s mother.
The female narrator sets out her story as a morality tale whereas the male
narrator makes the morality tale a prelude to an adventure tale. The male narrator
pauses for a cigarette immediately after his main character does; no such pause is
mentioned in the female tale.
Both stories have a widowed protagonist who is having difficulty getting by,
the
widow because of the malice of a neighbor, the widower because of the burden
of providing for three daughters. Neither widow nor widower is a common Pontic
protagonist. Widows in Pontic tales usually have a son who goes on adventures,
or a daughter who is sought in marriage; widows lived on the margins of society.
Widowers—such as the father in some variants of Cinderella—usually die off
early.
The widow and the widower each consult a mythical sun-figure. Along the
way, other characters ask them to consult the sun on their behalf. The humans they
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meet have moral problems (laziness, selfishness, blasphemy), the supernatural
characters have magical problems (inability to be at rest). The characters who obey
the sun’s directions go on to live happy lives, those who do not are destroyed.
Neither of the widowed protagonists takes direct action against the villain. The
widow lets natural justice (perhaps delivered by the sun) deal with the thief who
stole her hen’s eggs. When the widower returns to the sun’s mother for help, she
supplies him with the tool he needs to persuade the king to return his property.
These details reflect the storytelling characteristics of the villages from which
they come. The Imera story has the sun telling the old woman to trust God to
punish her neighbor. The Santa story has the widower engaged in a successful
struggle against the king.
In both tales the narrators emphasize to an unusual extent certain humanizing
characteristics about their atypical protagonists. The widower takes breaks to
smoke cigarettes and whets the desire of his audience before telling a story: “He
sat down and rested, he asked [the girls] to bring him a little water, he also … lit a
cigarette, and while he was looking at them one by one in the eyes, he smiled, and
began very slowly” to tell them what the Sun’s mother had recommended. In the
story from Imera, the widow is equally human: when she approaches the Undying
Sun with her questions, she offers him a kerchief-full of pears from her garden
and a basket full of bread; she slaps her bottom to defy the fury of the boulder;
soon after she crosses the river, she sees the roofs of the village, sees the smoke
rising from the chimneys, and smells the food cooking. In fact, this return from
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