Pontus (region)

• 1. Introduction

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  Pontus is a strip of coast and mountain on the southern shore of the Black Sea, in the eastern Black Sea region of modern Turkey. Its name began as the name of a sea. The Greeks called the Black Sea Euxeinos Pontos, the Hospitable Sea, and the single word Pontos already stands for the sea in the Persians of Aeschylus, from 472 BC, and in the Histories of Herodotus.

  The land behind that welcoming name proved harder to define. It had no firm borders, and ancient writers even placed the legendary Amazons here. Herodotus and Strabo both treated Pontus as their possible homeland.

  A series of rulers claimed this country. They included Greek colonists, a royal house with Persian roots, Roman governors, Byzantine emperors, a breakaway empire and Ottoman officials. Who actually lived here before the Greeks arrived? How did a king descended from Persians come to fight Rome? How did a small empire on a remote coast outlast the great city that once ruled it? And what happened to the Greek-speaking people who still called the region home in the twentieth century?

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• 2. Land Without Rulers

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  The Hittites, whose empire of Great Hatti was the nearest power of the Bronze Age, gave the name Kaška to the unorganized groups on their northeastern frontier. Neither Hatti nor its eastern neighbours, such as Hayasa-Azzi, ever truly controlled the region. The best any outsider could hope for was a temporary alliance with some local strongman. As of 2004, archaeologists had found very little of the Kaška.

  After the Hittite empire collapsed, an Assyrian court recorded that the "Kašku" had overrun its territory. They acted alongside a group the Assyrians had never met, whom they called the Muški. Greek visitors in the Iron Age found the interior still divided and wrote down the names of its tribes. Among them were the Moskhians, often linked to the Muški, and the Leucosyri, Mares, Makrones, Mossynoikoi, Tibarenoi, Tzans and Chalybes, who were also called Chaldoi.

  In the late 8th century BC the Cimmerians, who also spoke an Indo-European language, used Pontus as a base. The Lydians defeated them, and after the campaigns of King Alyattes they faded into memory.

  Because writing was so rare in northeastern Anatolia before the Persian and Hellenistic eras, the local languages can only be guessed at. Kartvelian languages are still spoken east of Pontus, so some scholars suspect they were once spoken in the eastern part of it. The Tzans are usually linked with today's Laz.

  The Greeks who settled the coast are the earliest long-term residents who left written records. Their arrival is the next part of the story.

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• 3. The Greek Shore

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  Around 1000 BC, Greek merchants and adventurers probably began sailing to the southern Black Sea. Archaeology shows that their camps hardened into lasting cities only in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. That timing suits the date of 731 BC that Eusebius of Caesarea gave for Sinope, perhaps the oldest Greek colony in the area later called Pontus.

  Greek myth may preserve memories of these early meetings. Jason and the Argonauts sailed to Colchis, Heracles crossed the Black Sea, and Odysseus wandered into the land of the Cimmerians. Zeus chained Prometheus to the Caucasus mountains as punishment for outwitting the gods. All of these tales can be read as echoes of contact between Greek colonists and the local, probably Caucasian, peoples.

  The earliest known written description of Pontus comes from Scylax of Korianda. In the 7th century BC he described the Greek settlements there.

  The country itself had no special name at first. People spoke of the land east of the river Halys as being En Pontoi, meaning "on the sea," and from that phrase it became Pontus. The earliest appearance of this name is in Xenophon's Anabasis.

  Its extent shifted over time. It generally ran from the edge of Colchis, in modern western Georgia, to well inside Paphlagonia, with more or less mountain country behind the shore.

  Sinope also produced a famous thinker. Diogenes of Sinope, who lived from about 408 BC to 323 BC, became one of the founders of Cynic philosophy.

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• 4. Persian Kings

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  By the 6th century BC, Pontus formally belonged to the Achaemenid Empire. In practice this probably meant that the Greek colonies paid tribute to Persia. The region's peoples were folded into the third and nineteenth satrapies. Persian influence ran deep. Victorious Persian generals founded a temple at Zela for the Persian deities Anaitis, Omanes and Anadatos.

  About a century later, in 401-400 BC, the Athenian commander Xenophon crossed Pontus and found no Persians there at all.

  A Persian family nonetheless gave the region its most famous state. In the 4th century BC this family ruled the Greek city of Cius, in Mysia. Its first known member was Ariobarzanes I of Cius, and its last ruler based there was Mithridates II. His son, also named Mithridates, later declared himself Mithridates I Ktistes of Pontus.

  The years after Alexander the Great's death were chaotic. Mithridates Ktistes served for a time under Antigonus, one of Alexander's successors. He steered carefully through the turmoil, and shortly after 302 BC he created the Kingdom of Pontus. His descendants, most of them also named Mithridates, ruled it until 64 BC. A Persian dynasty thus prospered in the Hellenistic world after the main Persian Empire had fallen.

  The kingdom peaked under Mithridates VI Eupator, called the Great, who lived from about 135 BC to 63 BC. He fought the Romans for many years, and Rome counted him among its most formidable and determined opponents. His realm took in Pontic Cappadocia, the seaboard from the Bithynian frontier to Colchis, part of inland Paphlagonia, and Lesser Armenia. He also allied himself with the Armenian king Tigranes the Great, who married his daughter Cleopatra.

  The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes how Mithridates VI faced two audiences. To the Greek world he posed as a cultured lover of Greece and a new Alexander. At home he displayed his Iranian heritage. He kept a harem and eunuchs, gave all his sons Persian names, and sacrificed in the manner of the Persian kings at Pasargadae. He named "satraps" to govern his provinces, and one inscription suggests he took the title "king of kings." Hellenistic Greek inscriptions are very scarce across Pontus. That suggests Greek culture hardly reached beyond the coastal cities and the royal court.

  In the end the Romans defeated both Mithridates VI and Tigranes in the Mithridatic Wars. Strabo, the historian and geographer from Amaseia who lived from about 64 BC to AD 24, grew up under the Rome that replaced them.

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• 5. Provincial Lines

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  In 64 BC, Pompey subdued the kingdom, yet daily life for ordinary people and for the oligarchies running the cities changed little. What changed was the meaning of the word Pontus. Rome joined part of the old kingdom to Bithynia in a double province called Pontus and Bithynia. This part covered only the coast between Sesamos, today Amasra, and Amisus, today Samsun. The larger inland share went to the province of Galatia.

  Romans, and people speaking from their viewpoint, then used the plain name Pontus for this half of the double province. The eastern half of the old kingdom became a client kingdom along with Colchis. Its last king was Polemon II.

  In AD 62, Nero made the whole country a Roman province in three districts. Pontus Galaticus lay in the west beside Galatia. Pontus Polemoniacus lay in the centre, named for its capital Polemonium. Pontus Cappadocicus lay in the east, beside Cappadocia. In the early 2nd century, the emperor Trajan placed Pontus inside the province of Cappadocia.

  A Gothic raid on Trebizond in AD 287 prompted the emperor Diocletian to split the area into smaller provinces with more local administration. Around AD 295 three provinces emerged within the Dioecesis Pontica. Galatian Pontus, also called Diospontus, was later renamed Helenopontus by Constantine the Great in honour of his mother. Its capital was Amisus, and it included Sinope, Amasia, Andres, Ibora and Zela. Pontus Polemoniacus had Polemonium, also called Side, as its capital. Cappadocian Pontus had its capital at Trebizond and stretched all the way to Colchis.

  The emperor Justinian redrew the map again in 536. He dissolved Pontus Polemoniacus. Trebizond and Cerasus joined the new province of Armenia I Magna, whose capital was Justinianopolis. Comana went to Armenia II. Helenopontus gained Polemonium and Neocaesarea but lost Zela, and its governor was reduced to the rank of moderator.

  Later the Byzantines placed Pontus in the Armeniac Theme, with Paphlagonia in the west under the Bucellarian Theme. By the late 10th century the area was divided into the themes of Chaldia and Koloneia. The Gabrades family governed Chaldia, and a second family of local power, the Gabras of Trebizond, would soon appear.

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• 6. Trebizond Endures

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  In the 7th century, a man named Tychicus came back from Constantinople to found a school of learning at Trebizond. One of his students was the early Armenian scholar Anania of Shirak. Already in the early Byzantine period the city had become a centre of culture and scientific learning.

  After the 8th century the region prospered. That ended in the 1070s and 1080s, when the Seljuks conquered Asia Minor. Alexios I Komnenos later restored the area to the Byzantine Empire. It was then run by effectively semi-autonomous rulers, among them the Gabras family of Trebizond. From the 11th through the 15th centuries, a vast network of sophisticated coastal fortresses kept the region secure.

  In 1204 the Fourth Crusade cost Constantinople its sovereignty, but Pontus kept its independence as the Empire of Trebizond under the Komnenos dynasty. Remote geography and skilful diplomacy let this remnant survive. At various times it became a vassal of Georgia and of Turkic rulers inland. Under the Komnenos family it also became a renowned centre of culture.

  The Ottomans conquered the Empire of Trebizond in 1461, after the fall of Constantinople itself. Their rule opened a new chapter for the people who lived along this coast.

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• 7. Faith and Language

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  The New Testament mentions Pontus three times, and people from the region were among the first Christian converts. One passage places Pontians in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. In Acts 18:2, a Jewish tentmaker named Aquila, from Pontus, is living in Corinth with his wife Priscilla, and both have become Christians. In his letter, Peter the Apostle addresses the Pontians as the "elect" and "chosen ones."

  As early as the First Council of Nicea, Trebizond had its own bishop. This bishop was later placed under the Metropolitan Bishop of Poti. In the 9th century Trebizond itself became the seat of the Metropolitan Bishop of Lazica. Pontus also produced Marcion of Sinope, an early Christian theologian who lived from about 85 to about 160, and Evagrius Ponticus, a Greek theologian and monk who lived from 345 to 399.

  Under Ottoman rule, which began with the fall of Trebizond, some Pontic Greeks became Muslim through the Devşirme system, particularly from the 17th century. Some valleys of Greek villages converted voluntarily, most notably the Of valley.

  Still, large Christian Pontic Greek communities, around 25 percent of the population, remained until the 1920s. They kept their own customs and dialect of Greek, including in Trabezon and Kars. In parts of Georgia and Armenia they stayed until the 1990s.

  One group of Islamized Greeks, the Kromli, was suspected of having secretly remained Christian. They numbered between 12,000 and 15,000 and lived in villages such as Krom, Imera, Livadia, Prdi, Alitinos, Mokhora and Ligosti. Many Islamized Greeks kept speaking their language, known for preserving features of Ancient Greek. A few people in the Of valley still speak the local Ophitic dialect today.

  The last years of Ottoman rule produced two sets of figures for the Trebizond vilayet. Official Ottoman statistics for 1910 counted 1,047,889 Muslims, or 72.56 percent, and 351,104 Greeks, or 24.31 percent. They also counted 45,094 Armenians, or 3.12 percent, out of 1,444,087 people. The Ecumenical Patriarchate's 1912 figures counted 353,533 Greeks, or 25.96 percent of 1,362,026.

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• 8. The Republic That Never Was

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  In 1919, the Paris Peace Conference discussed a proposed Republic of Pontus, a Pontic Greek state on the southern Black Sea coast. Its territory would have covered much of historical Pontus. The Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos feared how precarious such a state would be. It was folded into a larger proposed state, Wilsonian Armenia.

  Neither state ever came into existence. After 1922 the Pontic Greek population was subjected to genocide and expelled from Turkey. Survivors were resettled in the Soviet Union or in Macedonia. The Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923 later formally recognized this outcome.

  Today the Black Sea Region, or Karadeniz Bölgesi, is one of Turkey's seven census-defined geographical regions. It covers all or part of 22 provinces and is larger than historic Pontus.

  The list of notable Pontians still reaches into modern life. Mike Lazaridis, born in 1961, became the CEO of Research in Motion and creator of the BlackBerry phone. Apolas Lermi, born in 1986, is a Greco-Turkish folk musician.

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