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HISTORY
At the Edge of Civilization The ancient world's earliest contact with the area goes back to sometime around 1000 BC. Its tale was told in the epic of Jason and the Argonauts. Jason, seething with rage at the usurpation of his father's kingdom in Thessaly by an uncle, was persuaded to leave his homeland to seek the Golden Fleece in "cloud-bedecked Colchis" at the far end of the Black Sea where few ever went and even fewer returned. He set out aboard the argo with a band of young rowdies, the heroes of generation before the Trojan War. Bold, greedy and desperate, and like Columbus's crew outcasts for various reasons, they banded together to undertake the ultimate journey. They faced murderous moving rocks /the Symplegades, at the Northern end of the Bosphorus) violent women (Amazons, inhabiting the land around the estuary of Yeşilırmak, near today's Terme), killer birds (at the Isle of Arethias, now Giresun Island) and an endless array of hostile tribes. Against all odds they succeeded in capturing the Golden Fleec, somewhere near today's Hopa, by enlisting on their side the terrible passions of Medea, daughter of the king of Colchis. The story of Medea's desperate illicit love for Jason was told by Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica (circa 200 BC). It is considered the earliest account of a "romantic" love affair, replete with infatuations and a growing recklessness leading to a midnight escapade followed by the betrayal of her father and murder of her own brother. It makes nice reading. By contrast, the Medea of Euriphides deals with a later phase of the life of the barbarian princess, where, betrayed and homesick, she turns to violence ance again. The tragedy uses her to make ascathing commentary, the earliest known, on the social condition of women. It is fascinating to think that Medea was in effect a Laz princess and her birth. It is the only pre-Hellenic tongue of Asia Minor surviving today. In 400 BC an army of ten thousand mercenaries led by the Athenian Xenophon made its way through the Pontic Mountains in retreat from the Battle of Cunaxa in Persia. In the Anabasis, Xenophon recalls fighting against no less than seven indigenous nations; the Taochi between Erzurum and Artvin, the Khaldi/Khalibes around Gümüşhane, the Scyteni further west-ward, the Macrones in the hinterland of Trabzon, assorted Colchians at the coast, Mossynoeci near Giresun and Tibareni around Ordu. The Mossynoeci struck him as particularly exotic: "Some boys belonging to the wealthy class of people had been specially fattened up by being fed on boiled chestnuts. Their flesh was soft and very pale, and they were practically as broad as they were tall. Front and back were colored brightly all over, tattooed with designs of flowers. They wanted to have sexual intercourse in public with the mistress whom the Greeks brought with them, this being actually the normal in their country." During the Mithridatic Wars of 66-63 BC, Roman legions were lured to their deaths by bowls of hallucinogenic mountain honey left for them by Heptacomete tribesmen in the passes of the Kaçkar range. 600 years later, the Byzantine historian Procopius had this to say about the people of Trabzon mountains:" From ancient times the Tzani have lived as an independent people, without rulers, following a savage manner of life, regarding as gods the trees and birds and sundry creatures besides, and worshipping them, and spending their whole lives among mountains reaching to the sky and covered with forests, and cultivating no land whatever, but robbing and living on their plunder." Similiar sentimets were echoed eleven centuries later by the Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi : "The people of the Trabzon region consist of Laz who are truly savage people, and exceedingly obtinate." Greeks and Natives Of course such "facts" were tainted to no small extent by colonialist prejudice or imperial arrogance. It seems that long before the arrival of Greeks a sophisticated commercial culture existed in Colchis, the fertile "elbow" of the Black Sea that extends between Trabzon and the foothills of the Caucasus. The region prospered in the Bronze age through marine trade betwenn Anatolian cities and the Eurasian steppes, and later between Persia and the Greek west. Like the tales of Eldorado in Early Spanish America, its welath may have risen to legends such as the Golden Fleece. Gold came from the north, while copper was mined in the Pontic Mountains in the 3rd millenium BC. It supplied most of Asia Minor during the Copper and Bronze Ages. The Colchians were a branch of Georgians and spoke the same language before their dialect evolved in to Laz/Mi,ngrelian. They set up a unified kingdom in the 6th century BC but more often lived in seperate tribal units. Sadly, they left no written record of their achievements. The Khaldi, their western neighbors, mined iron and silver near modern Gümüşhane (Argyropolis, or Silvertown), where rich silver ores continue to be exploited to the present say. The first Pontic Kingdom was created around 300 BC Mithridates 1 , a Hellenic adventurer who reigned over a Persianised local aristocracy at Amasya . His descendant Mithridates 6 Eupator expanded the kingdom in to an empire covering the entire Pontic basin as well as half of Anatolia .At the turn of the 1st century BC Mithridates Eupator, the Hellenized King of Pontus, created an ephmeral empire stretching from Heraclia (Ereğli) in the west to the Caucasus Mountains. Ruling from Sinope, he battled the rising power of republican Rome for a half a century before he was defeated by Pompey at Zela (Modern Zile, near Tokat). A final snow of resistance by a follower was crushed on the same battlefield by Julius Caesar, who dismissed the event with the laconic ipgram: vei, vidi, vici.
Tombs of the Pontic Kings Roman Centuries
The new
masters of Asia Minor attached great importance to the western
Black Sea cities of Heracleia, Amastris, Sinope and those of the
transmontane interior like Amasia, Comana (Tokat), Neocaesara
(Niksar) and Colonia (Şebinkarahisar). They were perfectly
content to leave the eastern coast to local potentates and
client kings. The Greek colonies here remained on the margins of
the empire and of history until Byzantine times. Some of them
prospered from trade but none showed significant cultural
achievement or the political muscle to dominate the native
peoples of the hinterland. The overall Hellenization that
occured in other parts of Asia Minor did not take place on the
eastern coast of the Black Sea. There seems to have been more of
a movement in the opposite direction.
During the Roman and Byzantine centuries the Pontic seaboard
slumbered in provincial oblivation.In the 2nd century AD Arrian
reported that inscriptions in Trabzon were full of mistakes
"because they were written by barbarians" .Somewhat later the
church historian Epiphanios refers to Trabzon as " a city of the
Laz ", using the term in the deragatory sense that is still
employed today . Virtually no monuments of Hellono- Roman
Antiquity survive in the Pontic cities . Very few pre-Christian monuments survive from Pontic cities. All we have is bare knowledge that Cerasus had an Acropolis where the Byzantine fortress now stands, that Trapezus had a fine temple of Mithra, or that a temple of Athena existed at Athinai (modern Pazar). If there are few records from the Greek colonies, there are even fewer about the surrounding nations. We have only passing and inaccurate comments on their subdivision and customs. Except for Laz, a deritative of Georgian, little is knowwn about the languages of the region. According to Strabo, the Tzani, who dominated the mountains between Trabzon and Giresun, spoke a related Caucasic language. The remaining dozen or so tongues are altogether obscure, even though some survived until Ottoman times. A big step in the direction of greater integration between natives and colonials came with Christianity. The Greek-Sppeakingn cities seem to adopted Christianity in the century alongwith the rest of the Roman Empire. The Laz and other tribes of the mountains embraced the Byzantine church in the 6th, when the Laz King Tsatse converted. Thereafter they became, in Procopius words, "Christians of the most thoroughgoing kind". They began to have closer contact with the Greeks and acquired various Hellenic cultural traits, includingin some cases language.
Christianity spread in the 4th century .It supplied a common
cultural ground for the previously unmixed peoples of the region
: the valley dwellers embraced Greek manners and often the Greek
language along with the Greek religion . The last to convert
were the Laz , a client kingdom of ferocious fighters who lived
in the frontier territory beyond Trabzon and spoke a language
related to Georgian. Later , when they wavered and sought
Persian help, they unleashed a 50 year conflict the Lazic war-
betwen Byzantium and Persia . An extraordinary chain of
fortifications along the empire's eastern borders, running
roughly from Rize to Diyarbakjır, is the survaving reminder of
this war .They served as the model for all subsequent Byzantine(
and Turkish) fortress architecture . The Empire of Trebizond The Empire of Trebizond was already foreshadowed in 1080s by the exploits of Theodore Gabras, a local nobleman, received from Emperor Alexis Comnene the title of Duke of Chaldia and made a knightly career fighting the encroaching Turkish Beys. His son and grandson maintened virtually independent status until 1140. The limits of their fiefdom, defined by the fortress of Oinaion (Unye) in the west, the southern outposts of Colonia (Şebinkarahisar) and Bayburt, and undefined zone beyond Rhizaion (Rize) in the Laz country, corresponded exactly to the later frontiers of the Trebizond Empire. In 1204, the armies of the Fourth Crusade, consisting of the Venetian navy and a motley force of European knights, captured and sacked Constantinapole. They murdered the Byzantine Emperor and crowned one of their of own. Baudouin of Flanders, Emperor of the East. A few days later Alexis Comnen, a descentant of his namesake of the 11th century, landed at Trebizond with an army of Goergians upplied by his aunt Thamara , the queen of Geoergia,and declared himself the lawful Emperor of Byzantium, Basileus and Autocrator of the Romans. Unfortunaley, there were also other contenders for the lost throne: a Lazcaris in Nicea (Iznik), and another Comnene in Epirus (Albania). Their internecine fighting delayed the Byzantine recapture of Constantinapole until 1261. Evetually it was a ruler of Nicea who carried the prize, but by that time the self-styled Grand Comneni of Trebizond were too well entreched to give up their claim to empire. After a while they consented to downgrade their title to a humbler "Basileus and Autocrator of All the East, of the Georgians, and of Lands overseas". They retained as their banner the single-headed Comnene eagle rather than the Byzantine double-headed eagle. Surviving against all odds for two more centuries, they outlasted the fall of Byzantium in 1453 by eight years.
Good
connections with the Mongol and Muslim masters of Asia , on the
one hand , and the Italian city states that dominated the Levant
trade, on the other , formed the basis of Commenian policy .
Trabzon
became a terminus of the Asian caravan routes . The fabled Silk
road carried the riches of East Asia , through Samarkand,
Tabriz and Erzurum , to the port of Trabzon, where Genoese and
Venetian ships took them to points west .The city prospered .The
dome of the Panagia Chrysocephalos (Our lady of the Golden hand
now Fatih mosque) was reportedly plated in gold .
Separate
Genoese and Venetian colonies were set up in the district of
Leontocastron ( now Kale Park by the sea ) .Their residents
included the illustrious names of Lercari ,della Volta ,Ugolino
-perhaps great uncles of Christopher , the future explorer .
Marco Polo wintered with them in 1295 .
An array of
Turkish states encircled Trabzon on the south and west . The
Turkish beys of Erzurum , Bayburt , Şebinkarahisar , Niksar ,
Amasya and Sinop sometimes fought, but more often traded ,
intrgued and allied with the Greeks of Trabzon .In 1311 Alexios
2 went to war jointly with the Candaroğlu lord of Sinop against
the Genoese colonies .In 1358 the chief of Chepni Turks, who
were settled near Unye as Byzantine auxilliaries, married a
daughter of Aleksios 3. When the Ottomans grew mencing in the
west , Ioannes 4 ( 1429 -1458 ) married his daughter off to a
rival Turkish dynasty to secure an allience against the Sultan
.His gambit failed , but the story of a Christian princess held
"captive" in partibus infidelium fired the European imagination
. It spawned an entire genre of popular romances in the 15th
century. Among others, Don Quixote launched his chivalric career
to save the captive Queen of Trebizond .
The
Ottoman era
The Ottomans
were one of many Turkish emirates that carved up mediaeval
Anatolia among yhem. From their early base in Bursa , they
created in two centuries an empire ranging from Vienna to Bagdat
.They took Amasya in 1389, turning it briefly in to their
eastern metropolis; in 1428 they descented to the Blacksea at
Samsun .Then in a single sweep in 1461 , Mehmet 2, surnamed"
Conqueror" , seized the entire Pontic coast, subjugating the
Genoese city state of Amasra , the Turkish emirates of Sinop and
Kastamonu, and the Greek "empire " of Trabzon .
The mountains
of the Pontic interior finally submitted to Ottomanrule during
the governorship of the future sultan Selim 1 in Trabzon (
1490-1512). The Laz clans were converted to Islam at that time ;
others followed suit after the collapse of Georgian power in the
Artvin valleys in mid-16th century .The Greek speaking valley
dwellers of Of and Chaldia ( Gümüşhane ) and possibly the
highlanders of Hemşin, too, came around ca .1680 .Some became
Muslim without losing their ancestral languages . Others who had
earlier adopted Greek now learned Turkish, developing their own
inimitably accented version of it .Crypto-Christianity and
bilinguilism remained common in some areas until the 19th
century . Elsewhere , as in the valleys of Of the new creed was
adopted with fervour .
Christians
continued to exist in significant numbers too .Greeks formed
perhaps a fifth of the Pontic population at the turn of the 20th
century ; they held a near majority in cities like Giresun and
Sinop.The Armenian element was strong in the region , but spread
thinly along the coast .
The
maintenace of Law and order was entrusted in remote areas to
derebeyis, literally Lords of the Valley .Initially these served
as auxiliaries to the Pasha of Trabzon ; when central authority
waned in the 18th centurythey emerged as quasi-independent
warlords .They kept their private troops and fought their own
battles, as in the epic war of the Tuzcuoglus and Haznedaroglus,
whish devastated the Laz country in 1830s and 40s .They were not
avarse to a spot of robbery or seapiracy ,either .
Raiding for
slaves in Circassia formed the main source of revenue for the
Lords of Lazistan .
The rule of
derebeyi was at last broken in the reign of Mahmut 2 (1808-1839)
; a few of their stately residences survive ( barely ) as
landmarks of Pontic architectural history .
Modern
times
The growth of
Russia in the north market the 19th century .The Ottoman Empire
fought its predatory new neightbour no less then 1768 and and
1918 .On four of these occasions, Russian armies advanced as
far as Erzurum or Trabzon .Between the wars, Russian commercial
- nad political - pull was felt in the region . The rich hoarded
"Russian gold " the poor deramed of striking rich in Russia ; "
made in Russia " became the mark of quality. Trade revieved ;
fine public buildings , assertive churches and elegant
townhouses vaunted the new sources of wealth .Today, antique
Russian pianos and ceramic stoves bearing the imprint of St
Petersburg imperial works still turn up occasionally in the old
mansions of Hemşin and Trabzon .For Christians, Russia meant
more than economic clout .A treaty in 1774 allowed the Tsar to
take on the role of "protector" of Sultan's Greek Orthodoks
subjects .Concessions and reforms followed each defeat .Other
European powers joined the fray to exploit the "Christian issue
" .Christians were granted legal and economic privileges , which
upsetthe social fabric and led to Muslim resentment .
The early
years of 20th century saw the explosive birth of Turkish
nationalism in response these strains .The radical solutioncame
to be seen as the only possible solution to the "christian issue
". During the World War 1 , officially sanctioned gangs spread
terror to Greek villages around Sinop, Samsun and Giresun. Greek
and Armenian bands, in turn , wrough retaliatory havoc in the
wake of the Russian occupation of Trabzon in 1916- 18 .
The creation
of a Greek-inspired Pontic Republic seemed briefly a possibility
in 1919 , when Turkey lay defeated and seeming dead .The victory
of the nationalist goverment of Ankara ,led by Mustafa Kemal ,
put an end to that phantom .The Turkishj Republic was founded in
1923 .By the Treaty of Lausanne the same year ,allremaining
Anatolian Greeks were deperted from Turkey in exchange for
Turkish emigrants from northern Greece .The exchange was carried
out along religious rather than ethnic lines .The Greek speaking
Muslims of the Trabzon highlands were allowed to stay ; Turkish
speaking Christians ( e.g Gümüşhane and Cappadocia ) had to go .
The Pontic
region was effected badly by the upheavals . Economic crisis and
depopulation blighted the land through the early decades of thr
republic .Mass emigration created a "Laz " diaspora across
Turkey , until there were more people of Black Sea origin living
in the greater Istanbul area alone than in the Pontic region
itself . The region's fortunes only began to improve in the 1950's. The goverment-sponsored cultivation of tea ( east of Trabzon ) and hazelnuts ( west of Trabzon ) was a turning point .Prosperity returned in the last part of the 20th century , when the children of the region , having made their fortune elsewhere, began to return to the land of their birth and to reinvest their wealth at home- in shape of jaunty apartment houses, proud smokestacks and exorbitant houses of worship which now blanket the Blak Sea coast like a glorious mantle of economis success .
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