INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, the Caucasian Greeks present themselves as Pontic Greeks. The concept of the Pontic Greeks or Pontians has a relatively long history in academic Greek Studies as well as in Greek nationalist discourses; in both traditions it is linked with a certain region, the Pontos, and suggests a meaning of rootedness and continuation of specific cultural patterns. The Pontic Greeks can be characterised as an imagined community (Anderson).^[1] The core of Pontian-ness as a mental construction is assisted by a “Pontic myth” about the homeland, the Pontos.^[2] The concept of Pontos is a meaningful one; it supposes that all Pontians share one fatherland, one history (associated with the Byzantine era or the medieval Empire of Trebizond), one culture with compulsory elements and Pontic folklore, Pontic (or Laz) dress, circular dances and the kemendja, Pontic violin. To some extent, the construction of Pontic Greek identity is an issue of reconstructing Pontic geography. One can say that the Pontic Greeks as an imagined community come from and refer to the geographically imagined Pontos. As Shami suggests, “the geography of identity, the linkage between territory and belonging, becomes important to conceptualize in addition to its modes of articulation, textualization, and persuasion”.^[3]
The emergence of a Pontic identity among the Caucasian Greeks is closely related to the liberalization of the border regime in the last years of the USSR and the post-Soviet period, which has made it possible for Greeks from the Caucasus to visit Greece. As migrants, the natives identify them as Russian Pontians (Russo-Ponti). On the other hand, the Greek revivalist movement that has been developing in the post-Soviet Caucasus since 1989 maintains contacts with Pontic nationalist organizations in Greece. Pontic cultural identity is broadcast by them to the Greek population in the Caucasus. Thus, geographically rooted ethno-nationalist discourses intersect with transnational practices of cross-border migration.
The Greek population of the northwestern Caucasus, particularly two regions in southern Russia, Krasnodar krai and the Republic of Adyghea, is the focus of this paper. Pontic identity is examined as the modern identity of the Caucasian Greeks – an identity that has appeared as a response to new, changing conditions of life. I argue that the construction of Pontic Greek identity in the northern Caucasus is strongly affected by transnational migration to Greece as well as by local economic and political discourses in post-Soviet Russia. The Greeks in the northwestern Caucasus live in two worlds, but they are at risk of losing their “home” while looking for a “Homeland”. All such factors point to Pontic ethnicity as a highly contested and constantly (re)negotiated identity.
This view of Pontic identity poses the following questions: How do the practices of cross-border migration affect the geographical imagination of the Pontic Greeks? How does moving to the “Homeland” impact on location of the “home”? Does the construction of Pontic identity change the meanings of other, previous identities? How has the post-Soviet transformation of life in the Caucasus influenced the identification processes among the local Greeks?

THE LOCATION, THE LOCALS, AND THEIR IDENTITIES

This paper is based on my latest fieldwork (Summer-Autumn 2002), which can be characterized as multi-local. Several cities, towns and villages were visited during field research. Meanwhile, the communities of two Greek settlements in the northwestern Caucasus, namely, the town of Vitiazevo (which is situated on the Black Sea shore of Krasnodar krai) and the village of Gaverdovskii in the Republic of Adyghea became subjects of relatively long-term ethnography. The current paper is based on an ongoing analysis of life-story interviews and field notes conducted mainly in these sites.
According to the last Soviet census in 1989, the Greeks accounted for 28,337 or approximately 0,6% of all the population of Krasnodar krai, including Adyghea.^[4] Vitiazevo and Gaverdovskii are probably the biggest settlements with a compact Greek population in Krasnodar krai and Adyghea respectively. The Greeks compose between 25 and 30% of the 10,000 inhabitants of Vitiazevo. There are about 200 Greek households or approximately 1,500 people in Gaverdovskii.^[5] Nevertheless, the dominant population in both settlements is Russian. Armenians and Germans in Vitiazevo and Armenians and Adyghians in Gaverdovskii also form significant proportions of the population in each town respectively.
Greek residents of both settlements have different historical and cultural backgrounds, adding an element of diversity within the Greek population of the region. The core of the Greek population in Vitiazevo is composed of descendants of migrants from the Pontos, i.e. from the vilayet of Trabzon in the Ottoman Empire, who emigrated in the second half of the nineteenth century. The town has seen inGreek - and out-migration during the twentieth century, including emigration to Greece in the 1920s and 1930s; deportation to Kazakhstan and the Ural region in the 1940s; and the return from exile during the 1960s and 1970s. Many Greeks resettled in the town from Central Asia and the Transcaucasus in the early 1990s. Old and middle generations of the local Greeks still speak the Pontic dialect of Greek, while most young people are exclusively Russian-speaking. The East Anatolian dialect of Turkish is the native tongue of recent migrants from the Tsalka and Tetritskaro districts of Georgia; there are approximately 50 such families in Vitiazevo.
The Greeks appeared in Gaverdovskii in 1938 as migrants from the Tsalka region of eastern Georgia, chiefly from the villages of Edikilisa and Oliank. The first settlers maintained contacts with their villages of origin and resettlement continued after World War II. At the beginning of the 1990s, migration from Georgia took on a mass character. The Greek population of the village has more than doubled during the last decade. The absolute majority of Gaverdovskii Greeks are Turkish-speakers (the East Anatolian dialect).^[6] There are only four people in the village who can speak the Pontic dialect. One of them came from the village of Kumbat (Gumbati) in the Tsalka district, which is inhabited by Greek Hellenophones. Two were born in the Greek village of Achkva in Adjaria. One person originates from the city of Belorechensk in Krasnodar krai, but he arrived in Adyghea from Kazakhstan where his family was in exile. All of them married Turkish-speaking Greeks.
The complex settlement history of Vitiazevo and Gaverdovskii is revealed through the pluralism and multiplicity of identities among the local population. Bryceson and Vuorela suggest that “transnational families have multiple community identities related to all the places where their members are resident or have been resident in the past”.^[7] In Vitiazevo, several Greek families have nicknames (klichki) which are derived from the places of origin of their ancestors in the vilayet of Trabzon.^[8] Identification by the village of origin in the Tsalka district is still important for the Gaverdovskii Greeks, who continue to define their families as the olinkskie (from Oliank) and edikilisinskie (from Edikilisa) and so on.
The Pontic-speakers in both settlements define themselves as Romei. They use this word as a synonym for the Russian ethnic term of “Greki” (the Greeks). The Urums (Urumlar), the term preferred by Turkish-speaking Greeks to designate themselves has the same meaning and origin as Romei. Both terms can be traced from the Byzantine epoch through the Ottoman Empire where “Rum/Urum” were names for Orthodox Christian subjects.^[9] The Urums mark their linguistic difference with the Pontic Greek-speakers by calling them “Laz.” In Anatolian Turkey, this concept is applied as a regional identification to people from the Black Sea coast and more concretely from the Pontos.^[10] It was handed down through generations of Urums, being brought to the Caucasus where it lost its geographical meaning.
New spatial divisions connected to recent migration from the former Soviet republics appears among the Greeks in the Northern Caucasus. Greeks who have arrived from Kazakhstan can be called the kazakhstanskie greki. The general name for Greeks from Georgia is gruzinskie greki and can be regionally specified as either tsalkali (usually for all Turkish-speaking Greeks from Tsalka and Tetritskaro districts), abhazskie or sukhumskie greki (from the former Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia and it capital city, Sukhumi), and batumskie (taken from Batumi, the capital city of the Autonomous Republic of Adjaria). Additionally, the recent migrants trace their family identities back to the group or region of origin in Anatolia and the Caucasus. Old people among Tsalkali, for example, remember that all Urum villages in the Tsalka district were divided into Passeny and Kegeli. One who moved from Kazakhstan can mention that his or her ancestors were Samsonlidies. An abkhazskii Greek can define himself as a Sandet.
All these identities constitute inner boundaries within local communities. Identification with one or another regional group can be revealed through inclusive or exclusive practices. That forms a field for continuous re-negotiation of the present identity which is often conveyed by the sentence “we are local Greeks” (my mestnye greki). The meaning of this expression refers to a particular ethnic community and concrete place simultaneously. In modern Russian circumstances, belonging to a location, especially in the villages, has quite a material sense. This means, first of all, attachment to the land which contains the territory of the settlement. In accordance with the Russian land law, non-agricultural land in rural areas belongs to the state; local administrations provide rights to plots of land to individuals for the building of houses on behalf of the state. Only a person with a local registration has access to land.^[11]
Humphrey suggests that the emerging citizenship regimes in post-Soviet provincial Russia are generated by an emotional identification with place that is developing alongside the registration system.^[12] In Krasnodar krai and Adyghea, land issues and the institute of registration implicitly constitute regional policies towards migrants and ethnic minorities. A link between the land and “native” population (often defined exclusively as the “Slavs” or Adygheans) is constructed within xenophobic discourses which are strong in both regions. The permanent registration of migrants in the region is being rejected by local officials. This discriminative practice is justified as a measure to protect the land of the “natives.”
The local communities of Vitiasevo and Gaverdovskii are highly concerned about land and registration problems. In Vitiazevo, the former head of the local administration, who was a Russian and did not originate from the town, was accused by the local population, chiefly the Greek community, of selling community lands to enterprises and individuals from outside. The activists of the local Greek organization initiated his replacement via a special commission that was sent from the regional capital, Krasnodar. It is significant that the fired head of administration was also accused of being a patron of Armenian traders in the town market.
In Gaverdovskii, the widespread practice was to register Greek migrants from Georgia in the households of their local relatives. Once registered as permanent residents, the migrants could apply to the administration for lots in order to build their own houses. On numerous occasions, registration in the village took place long before an actual resettlement from Tsalka. This practice has become more difficult since Gaverdovskii has lost its status as an administrative unit and has been absorbed into the city of Mayikop.
Thus the political and administrative representation of local communities has come to acquire an importance for local Greek identity. It connects these communities with regional political regimes. In both cases (Vitiazevo and Gaverdovskii), there is a tendency to regard the locals on an official level as ethnic collectives. The Greek societies (grecheskie obschestva), which are national cultural organizations, play a crucial role in ethnic representation of the local Greeks before local and regional administrations. And it is critical that, as mediators, they are recognized by the authorities. In Vitiazevo, for instance, the Greek organization and town administration have close-knit relations. The local Greek society is located across the street from the administration building; and Greek leaders often change their jobs simply by crossing the road. Greek militants sophistically play with regional political discourses in order to maintain their political capital. In Adyghea, the Gaverdovskii Greeks managed to elect their deputy to the republican legislature playing off the complex relationships between Russian and Adyghean politicians in regional politicd. The dominant positions of Greeks in relation to official authorities confirm the image of the settlement as ethnic Greek in its entirety.
In any case, the Greeks of both settlements share the newly accepted Pontic Greek identity despite any previous regional and local identities. For the absolute majority of my informants, Greece is the source of their Pontic identity.

TRANSNATIONAL GEOGRAPHY: GREEK DEPARTURE AND PONTIC RETURN

The Caucasian Greeks have greeted post-Soviet transformation by significantly increasing their transnational mobility, mostly to Greece and Cyprus. In autumn 2002, approximately 50% of all young Greeks from Gaverdovskii worked in Greece. In Vitiazevo, people relayed that many families had moved to Greece without mentioning any figures, but also noted that only a few families did so permanently. The local Greeks have developed the practice of cross-borders migration, where they spend several months, a year, or even several years in Greece making money as low-skilled labor and send remittances to their families at home or bring money from abroad in order to use it in Russia.
Moving across borders, the Caucasian Greeks realize their Pontic identity alongside their earnings. They encounter it as soon as they arrive in Greece.
During my fieldwork, 25-year-old Kostia (the names of all informants have been changed) was living with his parents and older brother in the town of Vitiazevo. He had spent a year in Greece and had both a Russian and Greek passport. For about two years, he worked in Cyprus. He first went to Greece with his mother in 1998. They obtained the Greek visa relatively easy because Kostia’s grandfather, his mother;s father, had had Greek citizenship in the 1920’s.^[13] He described the first visit to Greece as a start of his adult life.

“I finished the eight grade and didn’t go on to the ninth, but went instead to the vocational school and started to study there. At that time, diplomas were not being awarded. There were nothing to be done, the school was not registered in the proper way… Well I decided I didn’t need it. And then, I went to Greece… (pause and smile) as it’s said, to the Homeland (na rodinu). Went to Greece not to study; I wanted to work. I thought that if I went with my mother, then the whole family could go. My father did not want [to go]. Neither did my brother. So my mother returned home. I had already been preparing my documents and I simply had to submit the documents… Yes, the apothosy, as it is called, came to me. Greece accepted us as its citizens and I had to go to receive a passport… I worked for half-a-year, what a half-a-year! First, I worked for two months, then I made received my passport…picked up my documents. I wanted to return home immediately, but thought that if I went in winter, what could I do at home during winter? I went to army in Greece, served six months, and came back home. This is the situation now. Now and then, where aren’t jobs to be found here, I go to Cyprus…”

In Greece, Kostia lived with the family of his uncle, his mother’s brother, who emigrated to Salonica in 1991. There he learned the neo-Greek language by school textbooks of his niece. Later, Kostia wanted to move to Germany where his cousin, his uncle’s child, had worked.
Although the Pontic Greek dialect was spoken in Kostia’s family, he heard the term “Pontians” (pontiitsy) for the first time in Greece:

“I considered myself Greek. [In Greece], I came to understand that I am a Pontian (pontiets), Pontius, Russo-Pontius, as they say. There I came to feel that I am a Pontian.., well, a Greek-Pontian (grek-pontiets), you understand. Well, many of the Hellenes (ellintsy) agree that we are more Greek than they are. It means a great deal to have spent three hundred years under the yoke of the Turks. (Question: But you weren’t be under the yoke of the Turks?) No, and we had run away. Our grandfathers had fled from there, from Turkey, and came here from the Turkish side.”

Kostia used the term of “Pontians” exclusively for the Greeks originating from the Soviet Union, although he knew about the refugees from the Pontos who migrated to Greece after World War I. He called their descendants “the old Pontians.”
Kostia worked in Greece and Cyprus as an unskilled laborer mainly in building construction. Almost everywhere, he lived and worked with the Greeks from the former Soviet Union. The last time in Cyprus, he had a bed in a flat that he rented together with other five young men from Vitiazevo. He described the work as difficult, but he was glad that it was like that because he “went abroad for work, not for rest.” Though the work was hard, he had an opportunity to earn “good money.”
When he came back to Vitiazevo, he bought a mini-van with the money earned in Cyprus and began a small cargo carrying business. In the summer 2002, he also helped his elder brother to sell wine on the town’s beach. That autumn, he started to build his own house in the town. He is planning to get married in two years to a local Vitiazevo girl. They planned to spend some time working in Cyprus after their marriage. But he does not want to live either in Cyprus or in Greece. In the interview, he expressed his disappointment with the “Homeland”:

“When I went, I thought “Ah, the Homeland. I’ve arrived. Let’s shout about the Homeland, we like it even though it is not beautiful” (in fact, this phrase is a slightly changed line from the song of the Russian rock-group DDT). So we went away from here, we got to know what the world is like, got to know that there is nothing better than home. (Question: In general, you don’t want to live there, do you?) I absolutely don’t want to. Is anything good there? Well yes, it is nice (krasivo) there in some way. And if you want, it can be nice [here in Russia], too. Simply, we have to work at it here, in Russia.”

Focusing on the routes of migration imposes questions as to why and how the Greeks from the post-Soviet Caucasus get to Greece? The purposes and means of transnational migration have to be examined together because they are often interrelated. In informants’ personal narratives, the path to any destination can change the sense of the whole trip.
It is clear that for Kostia the economic uncertainty in Russia was the main motivation to go to Greece where he had the opportunity to earn money and receive a European passport that opened more accesses to get a job. But he also went to Greece as the “Homeland,” though the irony in his voice showed that he had a lack of patriotic attitudes toward Greece during the interview. Perhaps, he believed in the homeland in 1998 when he first went. In his narrative, the return to the “Homeland” seemed to be the means to reach the real purpose which was an economic one. In any case, his route to economical prosperity lead through the maintenance of his Greek identity and his ties with Greece as a state. Kostia’s Greek identity can be seen as social capital, using Bourdieu’s metaphor,^[14] which is invested to realize economic profits from migration to Greece.
If the Greek nation is perceived as an imagined community, the efficiency of being a Greek is obvious in Kostia’s circumstances. Kostia received the Greek visa easily because his grandfather had had Greek citizenship and was sent into exile in Kazakhstan for almost thirty years because of it. In the bureaucratic logic of the nation-state, his grandfather’s Greek citizenship and nationality is a respectful cause for the grandson to belong to the same nation.
At the same time, Kostia did not utilize his Greek identity only as a means to an end. He reconstructed the identity. His grandfather had given up his Greek passport when he accepted Soviet citizenship. This evidence of their Greek-ness was lost for the family and they had to prove it anew. The only document that they had was the certificate of his grandfather’s birth that then had to be linked with documents in the archive of the Greek Consulate recording the registration of his grandfather as a subject of the Kingdom of the Hellenes in the early 1930s. So Kostia’s route to Greece extended through three generations. Kostia arrived in the “Homeland” having proved his attachment to it and his genealogical Greek-ness.
Kostia’s family can be called a transnational one. He and his mother spent a relatively long time abroad; whereas, his father and brother stayed at home. Migration to Greece became a family business, which included living relatives as well as dead ones. Kostia’s grandfather, the core person in the family’s migration issue, died in 1996, two years before Kostia’s trip to the “Homeland”.
Thus, Kostia’s Greek identity was constituted by reconstructing family networks in time and space. That brought new meanings to his Greek-ness, underlining his membership in a family as much as in an imagined Greek nation. It also assumes that the family itself was rethought. For Kostia, family is not only his parents and brother; it takes in relatives who are remote historically (as was his grandfather) and geographically (the family of his uncle, for instance). Relations within this transnational family are imagined rather than kept by means of everyday interactions.^[15]
The goal of migration to Greece is an economic and materialistic one, but the way to it lays through the rethinking of one’s Greek identity and the creation of a new meaning for family and “Homeland.” This route extends through generations, but it has its own geography as well. Greece as a final destination is geographically certain. It is a European country (that could be more a political than a regional definition) in the Balkan Peninsula, while the places of departure could be as far away as the Caucasus or the Pontos. The Pontic path to Greece could run via Central Asia.
Another family-story shows a remarkable trajectory to the “Homeland” across generations, families, and geography. Klavdia Mikhailovna came from the village of Achkva in Adjaria. She married a man from the village of Oliank in the Tsalka district and, in 1962, settled with him among his relatives in Gaverdovskii.
The mother of Klavdia Mikhailovna was born in the northern Caucasus, in the village of Nizhne-Bakanskaia (now a town in Krasnodar krai). In the early 1920s, she had been lost in the port of Novorossisk where her family awaited the ship to Greece. She was only nine years old. Her parents emigrated, but she walked along the sea coast. In the city of Tuapse, an old Greek man, took her with him on his way to Batumi. In Kabuleti, she was adopted by an Adjarian family, but she ran away from her foster parents to the Greek village of Achkva. There, she married a man who had arrived a few years before from the city of Samsun in the western Pontos. (He was traveling around Georgia with his older brother while the rest of his family resettled to Greece.)
In 1932, Klavdia Mikhailovna was born. She went to Greece for the first time in 2000 to visit her son’s family. In 1993, Klavdia Mikhailovna’s son moved to Greece from Gaverdovskii with his wife and children, because he had lost his job in Russia. He managed to find the family of his grandfather’s cousin in Greece seventy years after the family was separated by the migration from Samsun. In October 2002, I interviewed both Klavdia Mikhailovna and her son who was visiting from Salonica for a few weeks to help his elderly mother. The story of this journey would not be complete without mentioning the fact that the Tsalka Greeks appeared in Gaverdovskii in the later 1930s on their way to Greece.^[16]
The Greek identity of Kostia and Klavdia Mikhailovna has a strong attachment to modern day Greece in the Balkan Peninsula. They went there under the pressure of economic difficulties, but money was not the only reason for migration. They went to meet their imagined and actual familiess. They believed that their ancestors belonged to this country at least according to the official records of the nationality in passports. They returned to the land where, probably, their grandparents had been buried. So they assumed that Greece should be their Homeland.
The Caucasian Greeks go to Greece as the “Homeland,” but what they discover there it is their otherness. The majority of them speaks Russian or Turkish, but do not know any Greek. If they have maintained the Pontic Greek dialect in their families, as Kostia and Klavdia Mikhailovna did, then they soon realize that it is not comprehensible for native Greeks. In fact, their Greek-ness, which constituted the desire of three generations to live in Greece, is put into question. They encounter a new ethnic border between the native-born Greeks, who are called the “Hellenes,” and newcomers, migrants from the former Soviet Union, who are defined by the natives as “Russo-Ponti” (literally, the Russian Pontians).^[17] They departed from the Caucasus as Greeks, but arrived in Greece as the Russians and Pontians.
And in Greece, the term “Russo-Ponti” has ethnic, national, geographical and class meanings. The Caucasian Greeks move to the “Homeland” seeking jobs and material profits, but they run into a difficult economic competition on the labor market. As Kostia, they are employed as unskilled workers with low earnings and a working day longer than that of most native workers.^[18] They share this social niche with other economic migrants from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East as well as other discriminated ethnic minorities such as Albanians and Gypsies.
Cultural and social differences with the native-born Greeks are viewed by the migrants in moral terms. For instance, Klavdia Mikhailovna and her son could not accept the gender relations that they witnessed in Greece. They blamed Hellenes women of immoral behaviour. The lack of hospitality among the Hellenes is mentioned as well. One of my informants, a young man who was born in Edikilisa but now lives in Gaverdovskii and who used to work in northern Greece clamed that the Hellenes were not a manly (muzhestvennye) (sic!) people because they were not hospitable. He compared: “If even one of them came here, the whole village gathered together and organized a feast. But for them, we are similar to Albanians.” Disappointed expectations resound in this quote. The Gaverdovskii Urums waited to meet relatives in Greece, the members of an imagined national family, but they were received as strangers and unwanted guests.
Becoming Pontic, the post-Soviet Greeks find a convenient explanation of their alienation from the “Homeland,” that still maintains their Greek-ness. They appeal to the history of their Pontic identity. Paradoxically, Pontians’ complex historical background and cultural otherness lead to a consideration about their ethnic purity as Greeks. Their modern Pontic identity occurs past referred. Kostia perceived that his ancestors had migrated from Turkey as refugees who avoided ethnic assimilation. Refugee-ness has become the core idea of the Pontic Greek identity.^[19] The Pontians view the violence against civilians in the Pontos during WWI, which appeared in informants’ narratives as a “Turkish massacre” (reznia), as a starting point of their tragedy as refugees and as alienated Greeks. “The Genocide of the Pontians” has enormous significance for the construction of the Pontic myth among Greek extremists. But for ordinary Greeks from the Caucasus it is a reference point used to explain their otherness. In Vitiazevo, a 40-year-old man told me that he had heard that the Pontic Greeks and Hellenes did not like each other because the Greeks from Greece did not help the Pontians during the massacre in the Pontos.
Narratives about the massacre the Pontic Greeks are reconstructed as “an accidental community of memory” (in Malkki’s terminology).^[20] These narratives penetrate informant’s recollections of their family histories even if their real ancestors never knew such a horrible experience. The Gaverdovskii Greeks, for instance, claim that their grandparents fled the Turkish atrocity although they resettled voluntary from eastern Anatolia long before the Pontians’ persecution.^[21]
The consciousness of being uprooted refugees and their economically-disadvantaged status changes the geographical imagination of the post-Soviet Greeks who migrated to Greece. The Greek-ness that moved them to the “Homeland” and the Pontian-ness which is accepted after arriving there push in opposite directions geographically. Their Pontic identity assumes that their roots are far away from the Balkans. The concept of the Pontos receives a meaning of the place of origin or the home rather than the certain region on the northeastern corner of the Black Sea. Post-Soviet Greek routes to the Pontos extend through the Balkan “Homeland” and then return back to home again.

THE PONTIANS AS NATIVES: A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE “LOCAL” LAND

Anthony Bryer states that “at the beginning of the nineteenth century a Pontic Christian might describe himself in the old way as a Douberites, Phytanos or Tsitenos first, and then as a “Roman” (Rum) Orthodox subject of the sultan; by the end of the century he was calling himself a Greek, and after he had finally left the Pontos in 1923, a Pontic Greek”.^[22] The post-Soviet Greeks were late in establishing their Pontic identity. The world had impetuously been becoming post-national^[23] when they got a chance to reunite with their “nation”. Unlike previous generations of Pontic emigrants, globalization gives them an opportunity to avoid a traumatic experience of economic adaptation and cultural assimilation in the “Homeland.” They can return home or continue to live on the borders profiting from transnational migration. And they come back home with their new Pontic identity that adds a new meaning to their trips as a return to their place of origin.
The geographical meaning of the Pontos is being changed as well. Few people among my informants apply this term to the historical region in the northeast of modern day Turkey. The post-soviet Greeks match their origin with the ancient Greek name for the Black Sea, Euxinos Pontos, about which they read in Soviet textbooks in history lessons. (The Euxinos Pontos is a name of the biggest Greek newspaper in the region which is published with financial support of the Vitiazevo Greek society). In Gaverdovskii, an old man told me that “Pontic Greek” meant the “overseas” (zamorskie) Greeks. (The local Greek society is called “Argo” from the legendary ship which delivered the ancient Greeks across the Black Sea to the Caucasian coasts). This geographical understanding of Pontic identity supposes the indigenousness of the Pontic Greeks in the land next to the sea.
The Pontic myth comes afterwards. Greek societies decorate their lodgings with “Pontic eagles” (the symbol of the Trebizond Emperors), kemendja or Pontic lira, and the maps of the historical Pontos. They organize dance groups where local school children dressed in Laz costumes perform Pontic Greek folklore. In Vitiazevo, the local Greek organization sponsors the town’s public theatre which stages plays in the Pontic Greek dialect written by Pontic writers and sent from Greece. In the town, the geographically imagined Pontos has reappeared in concrete form – the town’s stadium which was reconstructed two years ago by the Greek society is called “the Pontos.” Moreover, the Pontos has been mapped on the bottles of wine produced by the local wine-making plant. The wine is called Pontiyskoe krasnoe (the Pontic Red). A man in Laz dress with a rifle is drawn on the bottle; the background of the label is a map of the Black Sea with the location of Vitiazevo highlighted on the coast. The same picture is reproduced on the wall of the wine-making plant in the town’s center. This enterprise provides a job for a significant portion of the local Greek population.
People import the Pontic Greek identity from Greece to their local communities. The meaning of nativity which is implicitly constituted in this Pontian-ness gradually corresponds to a feeling of being rooted in the local Greek communities. This feeling is developed by the rhetoric of Greek organizations as well as by regional citizenship regimes, which explore a xenophobic discourse and construct an identity of “natives” for the local population. The Pontians’ wish to be rooted in the region is demonstrated and maintained by their special relationships with the local land.
Money that is brought from Greece or Cyprus finds its real use as capital invested in the construction of housing in the northern Caucasus, which is the main purpose of the majority of trips to the “Homeland.” Sometimes a family can be divided between Greece and Russia while the house is being built. For instance, one of my informants built a house in Gaverdovskii, while his wife worked in Drama in northern Greece, earning the money necessary for the continuation of construction.
The erection of a house on communal land has to be permitted by the local administration. The expression “to take a plan” (vziat” plan) means to take a lot and receive administrative permission for the building of a private house . In accordance with the law, such permission can be given only to permanent residents. Kostia’s brother did not migrate to Greece with his relatives because he had not yet gotten “the land” (zemlia) in 1998. As soon as Kostia received Greek citizenship, he lost his permanent registration at home, but he had had his plot already.
Kostia and other people with double citizenship returning to the northern Caucasus should pay for their registration as foreign citizens, putting them in a vulnerable position vis-a-vis the discriminative anti-migrant regime. Their land “ownership” is the only mitigating factor that makes them a privileged group among other migrants. That plays a significant role in their recognition as “locals” by the local administration and community.^[24]
In Vitiazevo and Gaverdovskii, new Orthodox churches have been built during the past decade. Although the churches are situated on lands that are chosen by the local authority from the communal land reserve and the majority of the Russian population consider themselves as Orthodox Christians; in both cases, construction was initiated by Greek organizations and the main part of financial support comes from them. In Vitiazevo, the collection of money for the church is one of the central activities of Greek society. Donations to the church are being sent even by the Vitiazevo Greeks who temporarily or permanently live in Greece now.
The construction of churches provides a sacred meaning to the local land and attaches a religious aspect of the relations people have with their land. The places which are chosen for churches are connected by present inhabitants with the memory of previous generations who used to live there. The Vitiazevo church is reconstructed on the place of the old church which was destroyed in the 1930s. The location of the church in Gaverdovskii appeared to a local man by a strange female voice in a dream in 1993.^[25] Later, an aunt of this man remembered that the first settlers, Greeks, celebrated the day of the Virgin Mary near a spring which gushes out just under the hill where the church is being constructed.^[26]
Thus, the construction of churches refers to local history and tradition. This is a modern phenomenon which is closely tied to the current Orthodox revivalism in post-Soviet Russia.^[27] The belonging of the “native” Slav population to the Orthodox Church is a highly politicized topic in southern Russia. Hence, Greek national cultural organizations are very preoccupied with the religious representation of local communities. For instance, the required condition of enrolment in the Vitiazevo Greek organization is the Orthodox faith of candidates.
The local cemeteries are another example of sacred, but more personal attitudes toward the land. There are Orthodox cemeteries in Gaverdovskii and Vitiazevo, which are divided into family lots. Therefore, Greek graves are situated relatively compactly in the cemeteries of both settlements and they are separated from the parts where Russian graves dominate. A cemetery plays a significant role for maintaining relationships between living relatives within a family as a place that keeps the remains and the memory of dead ancestors. The local Greeks pay particular attention to family graves. When people who work for a long time or resettle in Greece visit their native settlements, taking care of the family lot in the cemetery is one of their essential obligations. Sometimes significant sums are spent on the reconstruction of old tombs. Once again, money and materials are brought from abroad. Consequently, the styles of Greek and Russian graves differ. One of the most visible differences is a special container for candles that are installed on Greek and never on Russian tombs. Perhaps, the tradition of such candleholders can be traced from the Pontos and eastern Anatolia.^[28] The modern design of these containers varies. It could be empty tins from marinated olives as well as miniature Byzantine churches or ancient Greek basilicas. (often such objects are imported from Greece).
The graves of ancestors demonstrate the literal attachment of Greek families to the land. They also can be used by militants as an argument to prove the indigenousness of the Pontians to the region. In spring 2002, the former head of Vitiazevo administration stated that the first dwellers of the town were the Cossacks.^[29] Leaders of the local Greek organization argued that such claims were nonsense because all the oldest graves in the town’s cemetery were exclusively Greek.
Vitiazevo leaders insist that Greek settlement existed on the place of the modern town before the Russian emergence in the region. They appeal to landmarks in order to demonstrate this. A big white stone with very faint traces of letters that look like Greek was discovered by a local historian (who is also the chief accountant at the winery). He identified his finding as a pole that marked the margins of an old Greek settlement. The inscription on the stone had a date, which was interpreted by the historian as 1837. According to archival documents, the Greeks appeared in Vitiazevo almost 30 years later.^[30] So Greek leaders assert that the history of Greek Vitiazevo needs to be reviewed. The stone is now positioned on the most sacred place in the town, near the church.
Eeven the land itself can be called as a witness in the Pontic Greek struggle over their nativity. In August 2002, a group of archaeologists from Saint Petersburg renewed excavation of the ancient settlement of “Labrit,” which was probably founded by the Miletian Greeks in the sixth century BC. This ancient city was situated only 35 kilometers from Vitiazevo. Archaeologists had known that Vitiazevo was a “Greek” town and asked the local Greek society for financial support for the excavation. The deficit in the fieldwork budget and archaeological imagination made the link between Vitiazevo and Labrit through over two and half millennia. Naturally, the requested support was given and Greek leaders visited the archaeological site, joking on their way back to Vitiazevo that they should declare this place their ancestral land and demand it for housing construction.
Three weeks later, a seventy-year-old inhabitant of Vitiazevo whose father was born in the Pontic village of Varenu told me that the Greeks had never left the site of modern Vitiazevo. According to him, they used to live everywhere on the Black Sea coasts, in Vitiazevo as well as in his father’s native Varenu, because it was part of the Byzantine Empire (sic!). He mentioned the ruins of ancient Greek “villages” around Vitiazevo in order to confirm his statement.^[31]
Pontic Greek declarations of their indigenousness to the northwestern Caucasus through special relationships with the land and territory is nothing more than a increase in the importance of locality emerging as a response to the increasing impact of globalization on life in the post-Soviet space. Consequently, this appeal to locality, with its stress on traditions and history, is a product of globalization and is developed by means of the global exchange of goods, money, information and imagination. The nature of this stress on locality is the renegotiation of the previous understanding of reality which leads to the new meanings of the “home”, “Homeland” and Pontic Greek identity.

CONCLUSION

…“Indigenous”, “postcolonial”, “diasporic”, or “minority” attachments are frequently at issue in the way anthropological “fields” are negotiated. Scholars such as Rosaldo, Kondo, Behar, and Limon, to cite only a few, define the spatial practices of their fieldwork in terms of a politics of locations, of tactically shifting insides and outsides, affiliations and distances…

James Clifford (1997)^[32]

This article has concerned itself not only with post-Soviet identities, transnational geography, and the construction of the Pontic nativity, but also with perspectives, different viewes of the “self” from different points in space and time. It is about imagination because space and time can be often imagined. Sometimes they exist more in our informants’, colleagues’, and own writings and readings rather than in any other realities.
The oxymoron expression “transnational natives,” is the best description of the Pontian identity in the northwestern Caucasus. Paradoxically, the Caucasian Greeks consider themselves a diaspora, but at the same time also adopt discourses on their indigenousness to the region. Pontic identity as any other is not absolutely stable; it changes in historical context.^[33] Perhaps, a new Caucasian Greek identity is being created at this very moment because Vitiazevo’s local historian is writing a book about his native town, their neighbors, and relatives. He told me that it was not correct to call the Greeks who are living or used to live in the Caucasus “Pontians.” He is concerned that this concept was too narrow to describe the whole complexity of Greek history in the region. He suggested instead the term “Ionian Greeks” (ioniyskie greki). According to him, the Pontians are the Greeks from the Black Sea shore, whereas the Ionians are descendants of the ancient Ionian Greeks who used to live in Asia Minor. He referred to the Russian translation of a book written by British historian. This new identity is going to be trans-historical and transnational simultaneously. It will stretch through various historical periods as well as through different national historical traditions.