Once upon a time there was one, and then there was none…
"My Lost Motherland Pontos" is a project that reexamines the history of the Pontic Greeks in the Black Sea region through rituals, fairy tales, and archival research. By intertwining staged photographs with archival images, the project challenges official historical narratives and aims to preserve the heritage of the Pontos region. It reflects on themes of memory, displacement and identity, bringing to light erased or forgotten stories of the Pontic Greek people, my motherland.
Yıldıran’s work on Eleni Çavuş, a rifle-wielding Pontic guerrilla, who spent a year in the Nebiyan mountains in Samsun in 1924, before Turkish soldiers captured her in a cave there. According to legend, a Turkish sergeant had killed Eleni’s child, so she killed him, wore his jacket and gun, and climbed the mountain, from whence her dead body returned. “What happened to the Pontus people is rarely talked about. It’s a really dark history,” said Yıldıran. “It’s not part of the public conversation, and that pisses me off.”
Kaya Genç, A Photographer Captures the Experience of Dispossession in Turkey, Aperture, 2024
My Lost Homeland Pontos, it bears the scars of attempts made at depriving subjects not only of physical property but, on a broader scale, of local ways of proceeding, of collective knowledge and skills. As we know, as a consequence of the nation-State and settlement policies pursued in the early Republican period, local ethnic communities dwelling in the Black Sea region, such as the inhabitants of Çaykara, who spoke the Romeyka language, otherwise known as Pontic Greek, were stripped of their language, land and culture. Such a strategy of dispossession disrupts daily life and social relations, eventually obliterating not only the languages being repressed, but the entire geography as well. Thus, not only does the sense of belonging particular to that area sustain heavy damage, but the very possibilities of site-specific history, experiences and remembrance are also taken away from us. Fortunately, however, this possibility never entirely disappears, nor can it ever be expunged. The names that have been chiselled, and the characters whose eyes have been carved out on the frescoes amid the ruins of churches voice the traces of this past, which still endure despite all attempts made to erase them, while the women still clad in the costumes of the past voice the currentness of this loss. As we walk through this door of possibility, we begin to realise, for instance, that the knowledge of the poisonous and potent plant now designated as pontic rhododendron although it used to be referred to as forest rose since the times of the kingdom of Pontos, far from having been forgotten today, still circulates across this land, and thus that the past has nowhere else to take refuge but in the present.
- Begüm Özden Fırat and Ayça Yüksel, 2024
Blossoms of Farewell, Solo Exhibition, Hara Istanbul, TR, 2024