Authors: Neal Ascherson
Feurstein does not believe that the Lazi
Volk
is merely subjective. 'This is not something invented in a European head! In every village, I saw this lighting-up of faces and eyes when they understood that I valued their culture. Call them a nation, a folk, an ethnicity — I don't care.' Knowing only too well the problems of non-conformity in Turkey, he is careful not to explore political perspectives; the centre at Schopfloch is only a
Kulturkreis
- a cultural working group. But the journey has begun, all the same, and its first years of travel are already heading in a very familiar direction.
To his critics, who include some Western academics, what Feurstein is doing is morally and scientifically wrong. Their crudest argument is that nationalism is in all circumstances evil, and that to encourage it is therefore unpardonable. The second, more formidable line of objection is that any student of another society has an obligation to do no more than study. It may be inevitable that the very presence of a foreign researcher will to some extent contaminate and modify the behaviour under examination, but to take sides in that society's disputes, still more to set out to change its attitudes irrevocably, is a monstrous intrusion and a violation of scientific responsibility.
Feurstein, however, believes that events have already justified him. The alphabet which was sent from the Black Forest to the Black Sea is alive and walking now, out of his hands, precious to a small but growing band of young Lazi who discover fresh ways to use it every day. He is impatient with those who say that he should have stood by, recorded and remained silent as one more human language made its exit from history. He says, 'I did not wish to write about a people, but for a people. In that sense, my own personality was only a means to an end.'
This is a dilemma as old as the social sciences — which are not very old, but already battle-scarred. It sounds like a dispute over professional ethics, but it is really an argument about cognition. One side defends the idea that 'facts speak', and that the scholar must therefore listen to them in impartial silence. The other side retorts that facts say almost anything the investigator wants, and that what he hears in the silence is no more than the mutter of his own unacknowledged prejudices. The student is part of the study,
acting inside the situation rather than peering at it through some imaginary window, and to admit that fact is the precondition of knowledge.
In that spirit, Feurstein's interventionism has found backers. Dr George Hewitt, Reader in Caucasian Languages at London University, shares his feelings about another imperilled culture: Mingrelian.
Those who seek to reprimand Feurstein and myself for meddling in others' affairs and not being satisfied with letting the Mingrelians (and the Svans) decide for themselves conveniently forget what happens to those Mingrelians who do dare to raise their heads above the parapet in order to try to initiate a debate -[their heads are] metaphorically, and in the conditions currently prevailing in Mingrelia perhaps not merely metaphorically, shot off... Is it not reasonable for interested and concerned Western linguists to suggest to colleagues ... that untaught, non-literary languages are in danger of ultimate extinction in the conditions prevailing at the end of the twentieth century, and to try to encourage a calm and rational debate as to how their viability can be best safeguarded?
Hewitt knew the last speaker of Ubykh.
I regard myself as immensely privileged to have met and worked with Tevfik Esenc, in
1974,
and ever since I have not deviated from the belief that it behoves all of us with an interest in the languages of the Caucasus to do all we can to prevent any of the rest suffering the same fate as Ubykh, whether by language-death through accidental or deliberate neglect or by the threat of physical annihilation...
This is the real answer to the last charge made against Feurstein -that by encouraging the Lazi to defend their language and culture, he is actually reducing their freedom. At present, this critique goes, the Lazi have the option of multiple identities: they are full members of the wider Turkish community, with all its possibilities, and at the same time they can enjoy a private Lazi existence at home. But if Lazi nationalism develops, rejecting assimiliation, these two identities will become incompatible, and the Lazi will be forced to
choose between them. To this, Feurstein and his supporters retort that dual culture is no longer an option. Unwritten, the Lazuri language is dying as surely as the Ubykh, and with it the heart of a small but unique human group will cease to beat.
What Feurstein has done is not to narrow choice but to enlarge it. For him, as for Hewitt, a scientist is not a camera, and the scientist's duty to a vanishing culture is not only to record but to offer wisdom and to say: 'This end is not inevitable. There is a way to survive, and I can point you towards it.'
Where does this journey end? Common sense, wringing her hands, cries desperately that one thing does not have to lead to another. A decision to write a school-primer in a certain language does not have to lead to demonstrations, broken heads, sedition trials, petitions to the United Nations, the bombing of cafes, the mediation of powers, the funeral of martyrs, the hoisting of a flag. All the Lazi enthusiasts want is to stabilise their memories, to take charge of their own culture. That is not much, no provocation. Logically, the journey should stop there — a short, peaceful journey to a more comfortable place within the Turkish state.
But the rougher the journey, the further it goes. In
1992
Feurstein's alphabet was seen for the first time on student placards, in an Istanbul demonstration. Early in
1994,
a journal named
Ogni
y
written in Turkish and Lazuri, was published in Istanbul by a group of young Lazi. The editor was arrested after the first number, and now faces charges of 'separatism'. A second issue of the journal appeared a few weeks later. It called, more clearly than before, for an end to the assimilation of Lazi culture. One of the publishers said: 'A new age has dawned!'
Cadmus, first king of Thebes, brought the alphabet to Greece. But he also planted dragons' teeth, which sprouted into a crop of armed men.
Chapter Eight
The deputies do business there [in the Polish parliament] with sword in hand, like the old Sarmatians from whom they are descended, and sometimes, too, in a state of intoxication, a vice to which the Sarmatae were strangers.
Voltaire,
History of Charles XII
(1731)
FOR MORE THAN
a thousand years, between the eighth century BC and the fourth century AD, the Pontic Steppe and much of south-eastern Europe were controlled by 'Iranians' — speakers of the Indo-Iranian family of languages. The peoples whom the Greeks named 'Scythians' emerged from Central Asia and reached the Black Sea in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Four hundred years later, when the Scythians had come to dominate the whole northern shore of the Black Sea and its fringe of Greek colonies, another race of Iranian-speaking nomads began to appear with its covered wagons and herds of horses, moving out of the steppes around the Caspian Sea and the outfall of the Volga and pushing into the regions round the lower Don.
The Scythians and the Greeks both considered the newcomers to be non-Scythian, although their way of life was similar and their speech-so modern linguists say - was closely related. They called them 'Sarmatians', another vague generic term which was draped over one tribal group after another as it reached the Black Sea in the next few centuries. The Sarmatians gradually occupied Scythian territory, pushing the Scythians themselves westwards towards the Danube delta. They remained in the Pontic Steppe for some five hundred years, until the onslaught first of the Goths and finally of the Huns in the fourth century AD drove them in turn towards the West.
Because of Herodotus, the Scythians are much better known than the Sarmatians. They feature as the original 'barbarians', strange, fierce and free. Because it is more enticing to write about horse-bowmen and the royal death-ritual and the wagon fleets voyaging across the grassland, their enormously successful adaptation to settled agriculture and to the opportunities of the Hellenic Empire is usually ignored.
Only one novelist resisted that temptation to 're-invent the barbarian'. Naomi Mitchison's astonishing historical novel
The Corn King and the Spring Queen
is concerned not with 'otherness' but with multiple identity — with culture-switching. She introduces an
élite
of semi-Grecianised Scythians, living in the third century BC in a Black Sea village rather like a small version of
Olbia.
They still take the lead in the fertility rites which their tribe requires (the ritual death of the king, mass copulation in the fresh-sown furrows • .. Mitchison, as she admits, was much under the spell of Frazer's
The Golden Bough
when she wrote the book), but they also venture confidently into the Greek world. The two main characters, a Scythian princess with shamanistic powers and her brother, travel back and forth on Greek trading ships between the coast of what is now Ukraine and the Peloponnese. There they become involved in the politics of Hellenic ruling families. In Sparta, they are introduced to King Cleomenes III by his tutor, the Stoic philosopher Sphaeros (a historical figure who spent some years at
Olbia).
Informally adopted into the family of Cleomenes, they witness his doomed attempt to construct a communist
utopia
and to defend it against the Achaean League.
There are some problems of historical detail in Mitchison's novel. Given the tale of Scyles, for instance, it seems unlikely that Scythian chiefs and shamans could have moved between the two worlds with such immunity. But what she got right, by the sheer force of her imperious, empathetic imagination, was the adaptability of these Iranian peoples and their talent for assimilating to a different culture without any sense of surrender to 'civilisation'.
The Sarmatians — in many ways closer to Mitchison's characters than the Scythians - were especially creative with this talent. In the Bosporan Kingdom, Sarmatians became the guiding caste of a brilliant, wealthy, culturally hybrid empire which at its widest reached from the Dnieper estuary round to Colchis, in the southeastern comer of the Black Sea. Many centuries later, when the Sarmarians were driven out of the Pontic Steppe and when their separated nations found their way into central and western Europe, they used this innovative gift again. They entered the agrarian societies on the fringes of the disintegrating Roman Empire and grafted into their consciousness a new image of social leadership: the mounted knight in armour.
Nothing remains of the Scythians but their tombs and the memory of their nomad 'otherness', indelibly written into European consciousness by Herodotus and his successors. The
Sarmarians,
by contrast, survive unrecognised. This is something that scholarship has only recently begun to investigate: a fable which is turning out to contain elements of fact. Physically, there is one place where the Sarmarians are still present; the Ossetians of the Caucasus, descendants of the Alan group of Sarmatian tribes, have kept their Indo-Iranian speech and traditions. And culturally the Sarmarians survive in much of what we know about or have inherited from the Middle Ages of Western Europe. They hide in the decorative style which is misleadingly called 'Gothic'. They ride in disguise as the class of mailed horsemen who hold land and whose manner of living is called 'chivalrous'. To the extent that we have not yet completely escaped from that notion of aristocracy, the Sarmarians are among us.
We are on our way to the Bosporan Kingdom, by car to Panticapaeum. As a car-load, we resemble some overcomplicated ethnic joke. I sit in the back, the middle-aged Brit. Beside me is Lara, a young Russian expert on Caucasian ceramics, who believes in culture and science. In the passenger seat, resting his suppurating leg in bandages, is Sasha, a Cossack truck-driver who was injured in a road crash and is practising to be a tourism entrepreneur. The wheel is held by Omyk, who owns the car: a Lada. He is a Rostov taxi-driver, an Armenian for whom nothing is surprising and nobody is immune to persuasion. When we find a petrol queue, Omyk goes straight to the front of it and shows the 'administrator' his card as a Veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Omyk was not even born when the Great Patriotic War ended; this is his father-in-law's card, with his own youthful photograph glued into it. But it always works. We get served first; the other waiting drivers look at us with silent hatred. Why does it always work?