Post by Prespari on Aug 18, 2008 0:44:18 GMT -5
Notes from the Balkans : locating marginality and ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian border, 2005, Sarah F. Green. - pages 74-76
Finally, there is the immediate south, Thesprotia, which I have thus far mentioned only in terms of its being a major transhumant destination for the winter months. I have left that area until last deliberately, because it is the area that all people I met on both sides of the mountain mentioned the least. When people did discuss it, it was to describe three things. First and most commonly, the routes transhumant peoples used to take (and sometimes still take) through the Pogoni area to go south for the winter months; second, how these same routes were used to trade goods between the north and south (predominantly olive oil and salt going north, wool and cheese going south); and third, how those routes had been extremely dangerous in the past because of high levels of animal rustling and other kinds of theft that used to occur along some of the narrower and more hilly sections of those routes (Green 1998b). “The people down there were goat thieves, “one woman from Argyrohori said, “terrible people, no morals at all.” This sentiment about the past dangers of Thesprotia and the people who lived there was expressed often by people all around the Kasidiaris—though once again, as with Albanians and Northern Epiriots, opinions about this varied. What did not vary was the people’s sense that there were few past or even present close relations between Pogoni and Thesprotia, even though there had been many trade and transhumant routes between the areas. It was evidently not a place to stay for any length of time, marry into, or to visit for festivals.
Over time, and with some difficulty, I began to understand that the particular part of Thesprotia being referred to was the borderland area, and that the ‘terrible people’ were not all the peoples associated with Thesprotia but more specifically peoples known as the Tsamides –though they were rarely explicitly named as such in the Pogoni area . One of the few people who did explicitly refer to them was Spiros, the man from Despotiko on the southern Kasidiaris (next to the Thesprotia border) who had willingly fought with the communists during the civil war. He blamed widespread negative attitudes toward the Tsamides on two things: first, that in the past they were perceived to be ‘Turks’ in the same way as Albanian speaking Muslims had been perceived to be ‘Turks’; and second, there had been particularly intense propaganda against them during the two wars –propaganda that had led to large numbers of Tsamides’ being summarily killed by EDES forces under General Zervas. Zervas believed they had helped the Italian and later German forces when they invaded Greece, and thus ordered a campaign against them in retribution. Spiros went on to recall that two young men from Despotiko had rescued one endangered Tsamis boy after they came across him when they were in Thesprotia to buy oil. They brought him back to the village with them, and Spiros had baptized him in a barrel (many Tsamides were Muslim) in the local monastery. In the end, the boy had grown up, married in the village, and stayed there.
That was the only instance I came across of an assertion by anyone on the Kasidiaris area that he or she had helped a Tsamis; most people expressed either deeply ambivalent or explicitly negative attitudes were expressed toward the area in Thesprotia with which Tsamides were associated. For most Greki Pogoni peoples, Tsamides and the borderland region to the south signalled both danger and otherness; it was not a place they would have gone willingly in the past unless they absolutely had to, and few people in the Kasidiaris area said they had gone there, or that they knew any Tsamides. Yet this area seemed to me more like Lower Pogoni than almost any other: the same kind of landscape, the same border-straddling status, and a lot of the same mixed cultivation and pastoralism. But while the people in Lower Pogoni were constituted as having been nothing in particular, the Tsamides seemed to be at the opposite extreme.
At first, I was struck by a strong similarity between the way some people talked about Tsamides and the way Albanians were sometimes negatively described since the border had reopened. Indeed, many people said that the Tsamides were Albanians, after a fashion. But it was the ‘after a fashion’ that was the difficulty: everyone I met, and everything I read, asserted something different, and often contradictory, about the Tsamides. Nobody could even agree on the language of these people (Greek, Arvanitika , Albanian their own language, or a combination of these), their religion (Muslim or Orthodox Christians), or a whether they were ‘originally’ from Thesprotia or somewhere else. Most, though not all, suggested that in the past, they were Muslim and spoke Albanian (or some dialect of Albanian, or a language akin to Albanian); but opinions differed about whether they had been orthodox at some point before becoming Muslim, and they also differed about whether they were ‘ethnic Albanians’ or something else. Some texts even denied that they even existed in Epirus anymore, following the end of the Second World War .
In short, there was a continual production of ambiguity in Epirus about these people, and an assertion that a final conclusion about the Tsamides was impossible. The few people I meet in Thesprotia who agreed that they were Tsamides were singularly reluctant to discuss anything to do with differences between themselves and anyone else. One older man said, ‘Who told you I’m a Tsamis? I’m no different from anyone else.’ That was as far as the conversation went. Another man, Having heard me speaking to some people in a Kafeneio in Thesprotia on the subject, followed me out of the shop as I left, to explain to me why people would not talk about Tsamides; he did not was to speak to me about it in the hearing of others.
They had a bad reputation, you see. They were accused of being thieves and armatoloi . But you can see for yourself, there not much to live on around here. If some of them did act that way, it was because they had to, to survive. But there were good people too, you know; in any population, you get good people and bad people. My grandfather and my father after him were barrel makers, they were honest men. They made barrels for oil and tsipouro . I’m sorry that people have not been able to help you do your work. It’s just very difficult; it’s a difficult subject.
This man went on to explain that his father was also involved in distilling tsipouro, and he proceeded to draw a still for me in my notebook, to explain the process of making this spirit. But he would not talk about any more about Tsamides and certainly never referred to himself as being Tsamis. After a time, the only thing that became relatively clear was that this insistence on ambiguity was different from the sense of ambiguity in Lower Pogoni areas. Tsamides were also closely associated with the ambiguities surrounding the Greek-Albanian border, but the difference was that whereas Lower Pogoni people were represented as Greeks living on the Greek side of the border who had close relations with the Greek people living on the Albanian side of the border (Northern Epirots), Tsamides were perceived as Albanian-like peoples living on the Greek side of the border, and having close relations with the Albanian-like peoples on the Albanian side of the border, even though they were Greeks –or at least all those I met on the Greek side of the border considered themselves to be Greek. Moreover, and as I have already mentioned in discussing Spiros, what Tsamides did, and what was done to them, during various parts of ‘big history’ (practically the debate about them during the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey in 1923, and the events of World War Two) was even more hedged around with tension and ambiguity, and usually discussed outside public places and in hushed tones.
The drawing on the cover of Dimitris Mikalopoulou’s book on Tsamides seemed to sum this up: it is a drawing of one man whispering into the ear of another man (Mikalopoulou 1993). Mikalopoulou’s prologue to the book gives a sense of the anxiety surrounding these peoples; it recounts how the author was awakened early one morning (in Greece) by a hostile police officer who wanted to question him about his research (Mikalopoulou 1993: 11). He goes on to state that the topic of the Tsamides is not a ‘mirror image’ of the Northern Epirots, because Tsamides were never accorded a clear ‘minority’ status in the same way that Northern Epirots had been (Ibid,:12-14); they remained an ambiguity, despite various interventions on their behalf, both by the league of nations in the 1920’s and by the Albanian government. In fact, the involvement of these bodies exacerbated the ambiguity. The League of Nations never mentioned Tsamides by name; they were included in the category ‘Muslims of Albanian origin’ (Ladas 1932: 384), which covered a great number of Muslims in Epirus as a whole. This criterion was important at the time, because the general definition of who should be included in the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey was based solely on religion: Muslims living in Greece; Greek Orthodox Christians living in Turkey (Hirschon 2003: 8). That created something of a complication, since the whole point of the exchange was to establish ‘ethnically homogenous populations’ in each (national) territory out of previously ‘ethnically mixed’ populations of the Ottoman territories (ibid.: 15,19). Yet Muslims of ‘Albanian origin’ were evidently not Turkish by those criteria so should not be included in the exchange; but they were also not Greek by those criteria either (Ladas 1932: 384-390). That left them in an officially ambiguous position.
The sense of anxiety over the more recent Second World War issue was exacerbated in the early 1990’s by another intervention from the Albanian government (which claimed moral responsibility for Tsamides, asserting they are ‘ethnic Albanians’). Albanian officials began making demands of the Greek government for compensation to Tsamides for the loss of their property and their treatment during the Second World War at the hands of EDES. The Albanian government stated that Tsamides were killed in their thousands in the summer of 1944 by EDES forces under the orders of Gerneral Napoleon Zervas (as was reported to me by Spiros). Many of those who survived the onslaught (other than those few rescued by people like Spiros) fled to Albania, leaving their property and possessions behind. Fifty years later in 1994, the Albanian parliament went so far as to declare June 27 as a day of remembrance of the actions taken against Tsamides by EDES. The Greek government steadfastly refused to entertain the idea of negotiations about compensation, declaring the whole thing a ‘nonissue’ .
In contrast with the ambiguities of the Lower Pogoni peoples, this was an example of the polar opposite of indifference: indeed, the (contested) difference between Tsamides and others was important in a highly charged way for almost everyone I met. That was clearly related to the long-term, ongoing disputes concerning past and present relations between neighbouring states, the kind of thing that Michalis and Tasos had described as causing chaos. And once again, it was an issue about which I was exhorted to remain confused, to let go; ‘poking around’ in it was troublesome and sensitive, liable to cause upset. Those disputes had led to repeated debates between and among peoples in Epirus about what did and did not happen, who did what to whom and why, and how division and alliances, enmities and loyalties were forged, broken, remembered, and forgotten, deliberately. Most peoples did not want the memories anymore.
The ambiguity surrounding the subject of Tsamides was yet another object lesson to me the active and deliberate practises involved in the production of incoherence, which spread to an equally incoherent image of the physical place in Thesprotia with which Tsamides were associated. A symptom of this is what I came to view as the ‘name game’: as I have already said, most peoples and most places in Epirus had more than one name, and also, different places and different peoples occasionally had the same name, just to add to the confusion. Thesprotia was known as ‘Tsamouria’ by those studying the history and character of Tsamides as a distinct ethnic group; Tsamouria’s boundaries were not exactly the same as the administrative boundaries of today’s Thesprotia, but Tsamouria did usually include most if not all of Thesprotia, and some other areas as well. This continual ambiguity about peoples and places –a condition of shifting, occasionally blending, occasionally separating, occasionally forgetting, occasionally recalling, and occasionally ignoring how things seem and how they are –meant, in practice, that resolving the issues’ once and for all’ was precisely not the point.
As a result, a few people’s attempts to help me to become less confused about Tsamides invariably ended in frustration. For example, Socrates, a man living in Thesprotia who ran a small restaurant, spent around an hour one summer afternoon trying to explain to me all the different opinions about Tsamides. I asked him to do this, for at the time I was still guilty in pursuit of clarity. Even though he had his own preferred version, he was well versed in others. He attempted to compare and contrast them so that only one would emerge as acceptably true, thus clarifying things to me. This endeavour led to ever more complicated delving into historical accounts, theories of language and ethnicity, religion and ‘Great Power’ politics. Not to long after Socrates had finished covering several scraps of paper with scribbling and flowcharts, he succinctly expressed his decision to abandon the enterprise: ‘Oh the devil with it. How do I know? They’re just people in the end, aren’t they? We’re all just people, in the end,’ For the time being, then, Socrates had given up on separating things out and decided to opt for leaving things unclear: it did not matter in the end, because everyone was ‘just people.’
Finally, there is the immediate south, Thesprotia, which I have thus far mentioned only in terms of its being a major transhumant destination for the winter months. I have left that area until last deliberately, because it is the area that all people I met on both sides of the mountain mentioned the least. When people did discuss it, it was to describe three things. First and most commonly, the routes transhumant peoples used to take (and sometimes still take) through the Pogoni area to go south for the winter months; second, how these same routes were used to trade goods between the north and south (predominantly olive oil and salt going north, wool and cheese going south); and third, how those routes had been extremely dangerous in the past because of high levels of animal rustling and other kinds of theft that used to occur along some of the narrower and more hilly sections of those routes (Green 1998b). “The people down there were goat thieves, “one woman from Argyrohori said, “terrible people, no morals at all.” This sentiment about the past dangers of Thesprotia and the people who lived there was expressed often by people all around the Kasidiaris—though once again, as with Albanians and Northern Epiriots, opinions about this varied. What did not vary was the people’s sense that there were few past or even present close relations between Pogoni and Thesprotia, even though there had been many trade and transhumant routes between the areas. It was evidently not a place to stay for any length of time, marry into, or to visit for festivals.
Over time, and with some difficulty, I began to understand that the particular part of Thesprotia being referred to was the borderland area, and that the ‘terrible people’ were not all the peoples associated with Thesprotia but more specifically peoples known as the Tsamides –though they were rarely explicitly named as such in the Pogoni area . One of the few people who did explicitly refer to them was Spiros, the man from Despotiko on the southern Kasidiaris (next to the Thesprotia border) who had willingly fought with the communists during the civil war. He blamed widespread negative attitudes toward the Tsamides on two things: first, that in the past they were perceived to be ‘Turks’ in the same way as Albanian speaking Muslims had been perceived to be ‘Turks’; and second, there had been particularly intense propaganda against them during the two wars –propaganda that had led to large numbers of Tsamides’ being summarily killed by EDES forces under General Zervas. Zervas believed they had helped the Italian and later German forces when they invaded Greece, and thus ordered a campaign against them in retribution. Spiros went on to recall that two young men from Despotiko had rescued one endangered Tsamis boy after they came across him when they were in Thesprotia to buy oil. They brought him back to the village with them, and Spiros had baptized him in a barrel (many Tsamides were Muslim) in the local monastery. In the end, the boy had grown up, married in the village, and stayed there.
That was the only instance I came across of an assertion by anyone on the Kasidiaris area that he or she had helped a Tsamis; most people expressed either deeply ambivalent or explicitly negative attitudes were expressed toward the area in Thesprotia with which Tsamides were associated. For most Greki Pogoni peoples, Tsamides and the borderland region to the south signalled both danger and otherness; it was not a place they would have gone willingly in the past unless they absolutely had to, and few people in the Kasidiaris area said they had gone there, or that they knew any Tsamides. Yet this area seemed to me more like Lower Pogoni than almost any other: the same kind of landscape, the same border-straddling status, and a lot of the same mixed cultivation and pastoralism. But while the people in Lower Pogoni were constituted as having been nothing in particular, the Tsamides seemed to be at the opposite extreme.
At first, I was struck by a strong similarity between the way some people talked about Tsamides and the way Albanians were sometimes negatively described since the border had reopened. Indeed, many people said that the Tsamides were Albanians, after a fashion. But it was the ‘after a fashion’ that was the difficulty: everyone I met, and everything I read, asserted something different, and often contradictory, about the Tsamides. Nobody could even agree on the language of these people (Greek, Arvanitika , Albanian their own language, or a combination of these), their religion (Muslim or Orthodox Christians), or a whether they were ‘originally’ from Thesprotia or somewhere else. Most, though not all, suggested that in the past, they were Muslim and spoke Albanian (or some dialect of Albanian, or a language akin to Albanian); but opinions differed about whether they had been orthodox at some point before becoming Muslim, and they also differed about whether they were ‘ethnic Albanians’ or something else. Some texts even denied that they even existed in Epirus anymore, following the end of the Second World War .
In short, there was a continual production of ambiguity in Epirus about these people, and an assertion that a final conclusion about the Tsamides was impossible. The few people I meet in Thesprotia who agreed that they were Tsamides were singularly reluctant to discuss anything to do with differences between themselves and anyone else. One older man said, ‘Who told you I’m a Tsamis? I’m no different from anyone else.’ That was as far as the conversation went. Another man, Having heard me speaking to some people in a Kafeneio in Thesprotia on the subject, followed me out of the shop as I left, to explain to me why people would not talk about Tsamides; he did not was to speak to me about it in the hearing of others.
They had a bad reputation, you see. They were accused of being thieves and armatoloi . But you can see for yourself, there not much to live on around here. If some of them did act that way, it was because they had to, to survive. But there were good people too, you know; in any population, you get good people and bad people. My grandfather and my father after him were barrel makers, they were honest men. They made barrels for oil and tsipouro . I’m sorry that people have not been able to help you do your work. It’s just very difficult; it’s a difficult subject.
This man went on to explain that his father was also involved in distilling tsipouro, and he proceeded to draw a still for me in my notebook, to explain the process of making this spirit. But he would not talk about any more about Tsamides and certainly never referred to himself as being Tsamis. After a time, the only thing that became relatively clear was that this insistence on ambiguity was different from the sense of ambiguity in Lower Pogoni areas. Tsamides were also closely associated with the ambiguities surrounding the Greek-Albanian border, but the difference was that whereas Lower Pogoni people were represented as Greeks living on the Greek side of the border who had close relations with the Greek people living on the Albanian side of the border (Northern Epirots), Tsamides were perceived as Albanian-like peoples living on the Greek side of the border, and having close relations with the Albanian-like peoples on the Albanian side of the border, even though they were Greeks –or at least all those I met on the Greek side of the border considered themselves to be Greek. Moreover, and as I have already mentioned in discussing Spiros, what Tsamides did, and what was done to them, during various parts of ‘big history’ (practically the debate about them during the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey in 1923, and the events of World War Two) was even more hedged around with tension and ambiguity, and usually discussed outside public places and in hushed tones.
The drawing on the cover of Dimitris Mikalopoulou’s book on Tsamides seemed to sum this up: it is a drawing of one man whispering into the ear of another man (Mikalopoulou 1993). Mikalopoulou’s prologue to the book gives a sense of the anxiety surrounding these peoples; it recounts how the author was awakened early one morning (in Greece) by a hostile police officer who wanted to question him about his research (Mikalopoulou 1993: 11). He goes on to state that the topic of the Tsamides is not a ‘mirror image’ of the Northern Epirots, because Tsamides were never accorded a clear ‘minority’ status in the same way that Northern Epirots had been (Ibid,:12-14); they remained an ambiguity, despite various interventions on their behalf, both by the league of nations in the 1920’s and by the Albanian government. In fact, the involvement of these bodies exacerbated the ambiguity. The League of Nations never mentioned Tsamides by name; they were included in the category ‘Muslims of Albanian origin’ (Ladas 1932: 384), which covered a great number of Muslims in Epirus as a whole. This criterion was important at the time, because the general definition of who should be included in the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey was based solely on religion: Muslims living in Greece; Greek Orthodox Christians living in Turkey (Hirschon 2003: 8). That created something of a complication, since the whole point of the exchange was to establish ‘ethnically homogenous populations’ in each (national) territory out of previously ‘ethnically mixed’ populations of the Ottoman territories (ibid.: 15,19). Yet Muslims of ‘Albanian origin’ were evidently not Turkish by those criteria so should not be included in the exchange; but they were also not Greek by those criteria either (Ladas 1932: 384-390). That left them in an officially ambiguous position.
The sense of anxiety over the more recent Second World War issue was exacerbated in the early 1990’s by another intervention from the Albanian government (which claimed moral responsibility for Tsamides, asserting they are ‘ethnic Albanians’). Albanian officials began making demands of the Greek government for compensation to Tsamides for the loss of their property and their treatment during the Second World War at the hands of EDES. The Albanian government stated that Tsamides were killed in their thousands in the summer of 1944 by EDES forces under the orders of Gerneral Napoleon Zervas (as was reported to me by Spiros). Many of those who survived the onslaught (other than those few rescued by people like Spiros) fled to Albania, leaving their property and possessions behind. Fifty years later in 1994, the Albanian parliament went so far as to declare June 27 as a day of remembrance of the actions taken against Tsamides by EDES. The Greek government steadfastly refused to entertain the idea of negotiations about compensation, declaring the whole thing a ‘nonissue’ .
In contrast with the ambiguities of the Lower Pogoni peoples, this was an example of the polar opposite of indifference: indeed, the (contested) difference between Tsamides and others was important in a highly charged way for almost everyone I met. That was clearly related to the long-term, ongoing disputes concerning past and present relations between neighbouring states, the kind of thing that Michalis and Tasos had described as causing chaos. And once again, it was an issue about which I was exhorted to remain confused, to let go; ‘poking around’ in it was troublesome and sensitive, liable to cause upset. Those disputes had led to repeated debates between and among peoples in Epirus about what did and did not happen, who did what to whom and why, and how division and alliances, enmities and loyalties were forged, broken, remembered, and forgotten, deliberately. Most peoples did not want the memories anymore.
The ambiguity surrounding the subject of Tsamides was yet another object lesson to me the active and deliberate practises involved in the production of incoherence, which spread to an equally incoherent image of the physical place in Thesprotia with which Tsamides were associated. A symptom of this is what I came to view as the ‘name game’: as I have already said, most peoples and most places in Epirus had more than one name, and also, different places and different peoples occasionally had the same name, just to add to the confusion. Thesprotia was known as ‘Tsamouria’ by those studying the history and character of Tsamides as a distinct ethnic group; Tsamouria’s boundaries were not exactly the same as the administrative boundaries of today’s Thesprotia, but Tsamouria did usually include most if not all of Thesprotia, and some other areas as well. This continual ambiguity about peoples and places –a condition of shifting, occasionally blending, occasionally separating, occasionally forgetting, occasionally recalling, and occasionally ignoring how things seem and how they are –meant, in practice, that resolving the issues’ once and for all’ was precisely not the point.
As a result, a few people’s attempts to help me to become less confused about Tsamides invariably ended in frustration. For example, Socrates, a man living in Thesprotia who ran a small restaurant, spent around an hour one summer afternoon trying to explain to me all the different opinions about Tsamides. I asked him to do this, for at the time I was still guilty in pursuit of clarity. Even though he had his own preferred version, he was well versed in others. He attempted to compare and contrast them so that only one would emerge as acceptably true, thus clarifying things to me. This endeavour led to ever more complicated delving into historical accounts, theories of language and ethnicity, religion and ‘Great Power’ politics. Not to long after Socrates had finished covering several scraps of paper with scribbling and flowcharts, he succinctly expressed his decision to abandon the enterprise: ‘Oh the devil with it. How do I know? They’re just people in the end, aren’t they? We’re all just people, in the end,’ For the time being, then, Socrates had given up on separating things out and decided to opt for leaving things unclear: it did not matter in the end, because everyone was ‘just people.’