Why Should Kurds Know About Pontus?

Rastinews — Would you tell a Kurd to read their own history only in books written by the state? To learn about Koçgiri only from state archives, Dersim only from official reports, Ağrı only from General Staff publications… Would you want them to trust a historiography that files every rupture in Kurdish history under "rebellion," "banditry," "separatism," "foreign incitement"? I doubt it.

So here is a second question: why do you know Pontus only the way the Republic of Turkey told it to you?

Because those same textbooks compressed the story of Pontus into a handful of words:

• "Pontism."
• "The Pontus rebellion."
• "Greek gangs."
• "Greece's designs."
• "Foreign incitement."

Centuries of a people's life vanished — their villages, schools, churches, monasteries, merchants, fishermen, miners, teachers, women, children. What remained was a "question": the Pontus Question.

This is exactly why I think Kurds should know about Pontus. Because sometimes, looking at another people's history, you recognize the very words used to silence your own.

How does a people first become a "question"? States have long mastered this trick. First, people are made invisible. Then a "question" is created in their place. The human beings disappear.

• There is the "Kurdish question."
• There is the "Armenian question."
• There is the "Pontus question."

This phrasing is not innocent. The moment you say "question," what stands before you is no longer people who live, love, work, fear and raise children — it is a problem for the state to solve.

Pontus was told the same way. Instead of speaking of the Greek Orthodox community that had lived on the southern shores of the Black Sea for centuries, their political demands and their very existence were filed under a security heading called "Pontism." Then came the familiar words: Rebellion. Gangs. Treason. Foreign powers. Separatism.

Any Kurd reading these words today should pause. Because none of them are unfamiliar.

No, our histories are not the same

I want to underline one thing here. The history of the Kurds is not the history of the Pontic Greeks. Competing over suffering, equating the dead through body counts, or saying "we went through the same thing" has no historical or moral meaning. The circumstances differ. The eras differ. The political actors differ. The outcomes differ.

What I'm saying is something else: compare the language the state uses to describe different peoples. There, you find a chilling continuity. In one place, a Greek villager becomes a "gang member." Elsewhere, a Kurdish villager becomes a "bandit." In one place, people's demands are blamed on Greece. Elsewhere, on Russia, Britain, America, or some other foreign power.

The moment a people begins to speak for itself, it is immediately said that someone else is putting words in its mouth. Because the hardest possibility for official history to accept is this: what if these people are really speaking for themselves?

Why should a Kurd read about Amasya?

Look at Amasya in 1921. Leading clergy, politicians, educators, journalists and merchants of the Pontic community became targets of the Independence Tribunal proceedings; many were executed. The Amasya trials are studied today as one of the most significant ruptures in Pontic history.

But the point is not simply how many were hanged. The real question is: who carries a community's memory? Its teachers, its writers, its clergy, its politicians, its merchants, its local leaders — the people who can forge a link between past and future.

To dismantle a community, it is not enough to eliminate bodies. You also eliminate its memory-bearers.

Amasya deserves to be seen partly in this light. And I think the people of a community that has lived through Dersim, Koçgiri, Diyarbakır Prison, unsolved murders and village evacuations understand better than anyone what it means to "eliminate the bearers of memory."

I am not talking about the same things. I am asking the same question: why does a state fear the people who can tell a nation's own story?

Then the land falls silent

I was born in the village of Livera, in the Maçka district of Trabzon. In the landscape of my childhood, the mountains were still the same mountains. The streams were the same streams. But the memory of a landscape is far more stubborn than the memory of people.

A village's name can change. A church can be demolished. A monastery can be abandoned. A language can withdraw from public life. People can be sent away. But sometimes the past rises up again in the name of a dish, in a melody, in a lament, in a horon dance, in the stone of a house, in a single word an old woman still uses.

The story of Pontus is not only the story of the killed. It is also the story of those left behind. Of those who changed religion. Of those who hid their identity. Of those who changed their names. Of those who never told their children their family's past. Of those raised on the words "don't say this outside."

Here too, I think, is a silence the Kurdish reader recognizes. Because the state does not only displace people. Sometimes it displaces memory as well.

The population exchange: displacing not just people, but the land's memory

The population exchange convention signed between Turkey and Greece in 1923 mandated the compulsory exchange of Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey and Muslims in Greece; the Greeks of Istanbul and the Muslims of Western Thrace were among the main exceptions. In this way, a legal arrangement severed the ties of hundreds of thousands of people to the land of their birth.

One morning, people were simply told: "This is no longer your homeland."

Think about it. Your grandfather's grave is there. Your house is there. You planted the trees in your garden yourself. Your child was born there. You know the mountain's name. You know which stream floods in spring. You know which road leads up to the highland pasture.

Then somebody sits down at a table and decides that you now belong to another country.

That is the gap between a "population exchange" on paper and the loss of homeland in human memory.

Why should Kurds know about Pontus?

I don't want Kurds to learn about Pontus so that they feel sympathy for the Pontic Greeks. Nor so that they grieve over our suffering. And certainly not so that they take a political stance on our side.

I want it for a simpler but far more important reason: so they can read their own history better.

Because official history in Turkey did not just conceal certain events. It also taught us how to think. It taught us to see "rebellion" when we look at a Kurd. It taught us to see "treason" when we look at an Armenian. It taught us to see "Greek expansionism" when we look at a Pontic Greek — to think of them not as natives of the land but as a "minority" that could leave at any moment.

And perhaps a genuine reckoning with official history does not begin by disputing the answers the state gave us. It begins by noticing which questions the state never let us ask. For instance:

• We all know Mustafa Kemal landed in Samsun in 1919. But who was living in Samsun that day?
• We know the date Trabzon was conquered, or occupied. But what happened to the children of the people living in that occupied city?
• We know about the population exchange. But once those who left arrived at their destination, whose village did they dream of at night?
• We know about the "Pontus gangs." But what had happened in the villages of the people who took to the mountains?

History is, in part, chasing after these questions.

Perhaps we can find each other's missing sentences

It is a great tragedy that the peoples living in Turkey have come to know one another only through the state. The Turk learned about the Kurd from the state. The Kurd learned about the Armenian from the state. The Muslim learned about the Greek from the state. And more often than not, everyone read the other's past in files prepared by the very authorities that denied it.

This has to change.

A Kurd should hear the history of Pontus from a Pontic Greek. A Pontic Greek should hear Kurdish history from Kurds. The Armenian should tell their own story. The Assyrian should tell theirs.

Then we can sit down and open the documents together. We can argue. We may disagree. We may even challenge each other's readings of history. But at least we will no longer be hearing one another through the state's translation.

That, to me, is the point.

The voice reaching us today from the languages once spoken in the mountains of Pontus, from the songs once sung there, from the kemençe once played there, may be faint. But it has not fallen entirely silent. Anyone willing to listen can still hear it.

And perhaps when a Kurd turns to listen to that voice, they will notice something even before the story of a people they have never known: certain words once used to silence their own history.

This is why Kurds should know about Pontus. And Pontic Greeks should know about Kurds. Because in this land, learning one another's history is not only about learning the past. It is about beginning, together, to unlearn the history we were all forced to memorize.