My Lost Motherland Pontos

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, genocide, and identity, bringing to light erased or forgotten stories of the Pontic Greek people, my motherland.

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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. Yıldıran’s mother Ayşe Durgun played the role of Eleni. 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