Authors: Neal Ascherson
This is a trade route. It is part of the network of markets and caravans of travelling merchants which reappeared from antiquity in the late
1980s,
spreading all over Eastern Europe and western Eurasia as the Soviet Empire began to fall apart. Like most trade routes, it is dangerous. The danger is worst on the journey home, as the merchants return across the frontier with bales of Turkish leather jackets and cheap computers and bundles of greasy Western banknotes. Near Kabuleti, a few miles into Georgia, bands of armed robbers in military uniform ambush the bus convoys and strip the passengers of their treasure.
To the east of Trabzon, the green mountains grow steeper and press towards the sea. Tea-bushes cover the slopes. The road passes through the port of Rize, where the tea is packed, and then comes to a bridge just before the town of Arde§en. Here I turned off. This is the outfall of the river Firtina, blue-green and ice-cold, which has
run clashing and foaming over its stones all the way from the summit of the Pontic Alps, from the comb of bare stone peaks at the watershed which is called the Kaqkar Dagh.
It is not a Turkish place-name. But the Lazi and their neighbours the Hemsjnli are not Turks. Tucked into the north-eastern corner of Turkey, between Georgia and the Black Sea, these two peoples form a small precinct of different and more ancient ethnicity. They have their own spoken languages, which are non-Turkic. They have their own myths and customs and ways of dressing, and their own magic (although both peoples are now Moslem). Until now, they have kept these differences to themselves, like some ancestral wedding dress which is of no interest to anyone outside the family. Given the paranoia of the Turkish state about differences, this has been prudent.
Kemalism, as an ideology, drew on some of the more extreme concepts of 'modern' nationalism which were current in late-nineteenth- and early-twenticth-century Europe. Homogeneity -one language, one religion, one
Volk —
was considered to be the prerequisite of a strong and independent state. It followed that nothing could be more offensive to this scientific spirit, with its blind drive to categorise and segregate, than the multi-ethnic, decentralised and in certain ways tolerant Ottoman Empire.
The scholar Effie Voutira has put this very prettily. For her, the unreformed Ottoman state 'looked like a Kokoschka painting where the plurality and diversity of the different points of colour is such that there is no clearly discernible pattern, though the picture as a whole does have one . . . ' The different groups within the Ottoman Empire were roughly identified by religion — Orthodox, Christian, Armenian, Jewish — but even that criterion was made highly elastic by the option for any Ottoman subject to become a Moslem (as many Pontic Greeks did).
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By contrast, the modern world map looks more like a Modigliani painting, where all shapes and colours have clearly circumscribed boundaries and well-defined surfaces with no ambiguity or overlap . . . ' In Voutira's sense, the Turkish revolutions of the early twentieth century were therefore the overthrow of Kokoschka in the name of Modigliani. The reformers, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk above all, lusted after those single, well-circumscribed blocks of primary colour, and their 'Turkey for the Turks' offered no security for minorities. The genocide of the Armenians during the First World War, followed by the expulsion
of the Greeks and the other Orthodox Christians, were precedents for the bitter struggle against Kurdish nationalism which flamed up again in the
1980s
and
1990s.
Smaller minorities, watching these horrors, learned how to avoid the fatal Kemalist accusation of 'separatism'. The Lazi, numbering perhaps
250,000,
have been infinitely discreet and unprovocative about their own identity. The tiny Hemsjnli group, a mere
20,000
strong, has especially compelling reasons to keep its head down; its members are the descendants of Armenians who converted to Islam in the distant past and who - though they still speak old Armenian -escaped the massacre of the main Christian-Armenian community eighty years ago.
Both groups have been loyal Turkish subjects. They have taken an unobtrusive part in society as tea-farmers and fishermen or - in the case of the Hem§inli — as talented pastry-cooks. They have their own little diasporas in Istanbul and western Anatolia, and they take a cheerful interest in the fortunes of Istanbul football teams. Until now, they have made no claims for themselves as communities. Most Turks do not even have a clear understanding that they exist. They confuse them with the popular term 'Laz', which means no more than the provincial Turkish-speaking culture of the whole south-eastern Black Sea coast as far west as Samsun.
The valley of the Firtina became a gorge, winding up between forests cobwebbed with mist until the tarmac stopped and the road degenerated into a stony mule-track. When I could drive no further, I parked the car under trees and walked on. Far above me, on either side, I could see black-painted wooden houses built into the mountain slopes, each perched over a grassy clearing like an Alpine meadow. Long cables ran down the hillside to the bank of the river, attached to travelling boxes in which goods could be winched up to the farms overhead.
Presently two haycocks with human legs appeared, staggering down the track towards a stone-built barn. A young man laid down his burden to show me how I could cross the river — by squatting in another large box, suspended from wires and drawn slowly and shakily across the Firtina torrent by a boy winding a handle.
Across the river, there was bracken, brambles, long meadow grass and a scent of Scotland. In the woods, among wild strawberries and stinging nettles, the dew began to condense on my hands as I walked; the whole valley is heavy with the vapour of river-spray and with skeins of mist which rise as the sun stabs down into the wet forest.
In a clearing, a Hemsjnli family were making hay with wooden forks and rakes. The women were wearing the black and yellow, leopardspot scarves which identify Hem§inli people outside their own country. Some people think that these scarves first reached the Pontos from India in the fourteenth century, when the Trebizond branch of the Silk Route opened up. Ruined towers standing above the track as it mounts towards the Kacjcar Dagh passes suggest that the route was sometimes diverted down the Firtina valley, in times when the usual road through Gumushane was blocked. At the little town of (^amlihemsjn, where these scarves can be bought in the grocery store, they say that they are made in Iraq and traded up to the Pontos through Kurdistan or, when the Kurdish war is too intense, across the Turkish border with Syria.
The huge 'temperate rain-forest' which still covers the mountains of the eastern Pontos has wild animals: boar, bears and deer. The Lazi, or perhaps only the older Lazi in their more remote villages, think that it also contains monsters. The Germakoci, for instance, is a giant creature, human in form but covered with fur, which sometimes approaches hunters in the high forest. Slow-witted, the Germakoci reacts to human beings with curiosity rather than aggression, and likes to imitate whatever they do; the way to be rid of him is to set fire to a twig and wave it around, so that the giant, seizing the burning brand, sets light to his own fur. Roaring with alarm, he plunges downhill and runs until he reaches the Black Sea and leaps into it. A more dreadful monster, ancient and female, is the Didamangisa, who lives closer to human settlements. In the season when cucumbers are ripe, she crawls over the earth like a ground-mist, shapeless and sack-like, armed with a long iron hook with which she snatches children picking cucumbers and drags them away to her underground lair.
To ask 'Who are the Lazi?' is to be at once lost in the chaotic building-site of nationalist definitions. European linguists and social anthropologists have been fascinated by this little people for more than a hundred years, and they provide their own type of answer. The language, Lazuri, is a survival from a previous, almost lost deposit of human speech. A pre-Indo-European tongue, it belongs to the Kartvelian language-family of the Caucasus whose other members are Georgian (much the largest), Mingrelian and Svanetian. Mingrelian is the closest to Lazuri, and it would appear that both peoples were living as neighbours along the eastern shore of the Black Sea as long ago as iooo BC. This coastal region around the river Phasis, near the modern Georgian ports of Poti and Batumi, was the land which the Greeks called Colchis, in mythology the home of Medea and the destination of the Argonauts who stole the Golden Fleece from its Colchian shrine. But it is unlikely that a single Colchian nation ever really existed. It was said that more than seventy different languages could be heard in the market at Dioscurias, the Greek colony on the site of Sukhum in modern Abkhazia, and 'Colchian' - like 'Scythian' or 'Celt' - was probably one of those generic Greek terms for peoples of broadly similar culture living in a particular region of the world.
At some point, a large part of the Lazi abandoned their country. They left 'Colchis' and the Caucasus, and moved round the southeastern corner of the Black Sea to their present territory in what is now Turkey. The Mingrelians, in contrast, stayed much where they were; most of them retained their Christian religion, like the Georgians, while the Lazi and the much larger Abkhazian language group living further north along the Caucasian coast converted to Islam in the fifteenth century. Why and when this migration took place is not known for certain, but it seems to have happened about a thousand years ago, in the middle Byzantine period, and the Lazi may have been displaced by an Arab invasion of the Caucasus.
In
1864,
the Russian armies finally broke tribal resistance in the north-west Caucasus. Much of the Moslem population of Abkhazia and coastal Georgia fled or was expelled into the Ottoman Empire, and many Lazi were swept along in the disaster. A small number still remain in Georgia. But their distinctiveness - like that of the Mingrelians — is resented by Georgian politicians and intellectuals who insist, inaccurately, that Georgian is their 'mother-tongue' and that Mingrelian, Lazuri and Svanetian are mere 'dialects'. Arguments to the contrary, and attempts to provide these languages with a written literature and grammar, are shouted down as tokens of Russian cultural subversion, designed to undermine and divide Georgian culture and independence.
But the 'Who are they?' question is not properly answered by scholarly research into the origins of a language. Who do the Lazi think they are?
Until very recently, this question did not seem important to the Lazi. Some accepted, out of a mixture of prudence and indifference, the Turkish fiction that they were a Central Asian nomad people who entered Anatolia with the Turks themselves. Most Lazi are aware that their language is not Turkic but Caucasian, and close to that of the Mingrelians across the border. At the same time, they are remarkably vague about 'where we came from', and some trace their origins not from the Caucasus but from further west along the Anatolian coast, which is plainly wrong.
This is the portrait of something now rare in the world: a
pre-nationalist
nation. The Lazi, with their distinct language and folk-culture, are perfectly aware of their distinctiveness. But they have been content with the statement 'We are', rather than being drawn on towards the question 'Who are we?' They have felt no imperative to discover 'roots', or to externalise their collective identity by researching or inventing a history of the Lazi people. Nor, until the last few years, have they been concerned with the very European idea that the disappearance of their language would lead to the disappearance of their Lazi identity, and that these two processes would amount to a bad development which ought to be resisted.
The pre-nationalist attitude to the national language can, in fact, be quite hostile - especially in the case of small ethnic groups. Professor Chris Hann of the University of Kent, who has worked as a social anthropologist in the eastern Pontos, recalls that 'our very limited attempts to learn Lazuri were often greeted with amusement and mild ridicule: it made sense to learn a foreign language such as English or Russian, which could help you to communicate in the outside world, but Lazuri was "no use" anywhere outside the area of the Lazi.'
In this view, there are two different categories of language. There is 'our' tongue, which is spoken at home and which is not appropriate for formal learning or teaching. In contrast, the language of the wider society in which 'we' participate requires not only to be taught and learned but also to be written. It follows that any demand for 'our' language to become a taught and written one is a serious misunderstanding. In practical terms, it could actually hinder 'our' participation in that wider society, and be harmful to the whole community.