MARIUPOL, Ukraine — “Urum or Roumei, we’re all the same. In the past, there were even fights about who was more Greek.”
Last year I was sitting in the office of Aleksandra Protsenko, the imposing head of The Federation of Greek Communities of Ukraine, poorly hiding my naiveté about Urum and Roumei history. I was in Mariupol— one of Ukraine’s most important port cities on the Sea of Azov, and only a few miles from the country’s front line with Russia-backed separatists—but stepping into the federation’s headquarters felt like entering another world.
At the entrance, Mariupol’s drab, Soviet façade gives way to white-washed ionic columns, images of triremes (ancient longboats of Odyssean fame), and ubiquitous, iconic, sky-blue flags.
Protsenko’s office is the gravitational center of this small—there are an estimated 150,000 Greeks in Ukraine, although the actual number may be far larger—Hellenic world. Throughout our interview, women orbited us, with questions on new passports from Athens, transfer of funds, construction projects in outer villages, etc. Protsenko seamlessly oscillated between the banalities of everyday Roumei life and the singularity of their heritage.
“About 40 percent of our language is related to Modern Greek,” she told me. Indeed, what constitutes a language or dialect is a tricky question. A scholar in Athens may tell you that Pontic (from the ancients’ name for the “hospitable” Black Sea, or Pontus “Euxeinos”) is merely a variation of standard Greek. A non-Greek linguist may cite a lack of mutual intelligibility, and classify Roumeiki glossa as a separate language. Perhaps most fitting for the two maritime communities, however, is the adage that a dialect is powerless, while a language has an army and a navy.
Both Urum and Roumei denote Roman, a relic from the Ottomans, who conflated Christianity with Byzantium, the sole continuous heir to the Roman Empire until Sultan Mehmed II sacked Constantinople in 1453. Yet, despite considering themselves, and the Roumei, to be equally Greek, Urum is, in fact, a Turkic language, immediately recognizable to any Istanbulite 567 years later.
Protsenko continued: “15 of our villages are now located on the front line. So many die of cancer, heart attacks, and psychological stress from the shelling. Of course, we provide aid for all people. We Greeks are the original cosmopolitans. You know cosmo and polis come from Greek, it means ‘citizen of the world.’”
I had come to Mariupol to understand how this multilingual phenomenon survived in our modern age of the nation-state. And could Azovian Greek cosmopolitanism—now trapped in a war that, to a large extent, began over a quintessentially nationalistic issue, the right to speak Ukrainian or Russian—last?
Protsenko insisted I visit the local Greek museum in the Roumei village, Sartana, further east of Mariupol and only a couple of miles from the contact line. A few days earlier, soldiers of the unrecognized Donetsk Peoples’ Republic (DNR) were lobbing shells close by.
My taxi driver and I found the small museum in front of a local school, which to my surprise, was packed with children. Despite her mid-sixties, Tatiana Bogaditsa has jet-black hair and youthful radiance. “You must forgive us, but we are in the middle of a renovation.”
Climbing up the steps to the second floor, a large map of Crimea and the Sea of Azov came into view. To the left an artist had painted Metropolitan Ignatius of Mariupol, the city’s founder, pointing towards some inscrutable goal.
Bogaditsa explained that after the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 – 1774, the Russians annexed their first territory on the Crimean Peninsula. Following the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji, Yeni-kale, a fortress on the Kerch Strait (where in 2018 Russia’s FSB rammed a Ukrainian naval tugboat) traded hands. Yet, most Crimean territory, and Orthodox Greek villages in particular, remained within the Crimean Khanate, a vassal of the Muslim Ottomans.
Metropolitan Ignatius, fearing retribution or forced conversion to Islam for his flock, plead with Empress Catherine the Great to allow the Christian population to resettle in “New Russia.” The empress agreed, and in 1778 Crimea’s Christians began the arduous journey to their new home. Over two thousand lost their lives, and many now consider the “resettlement” more of a “deportation.”
Against all odds, Roumei culture and language then survived 250 years of Russification. But now, amidst war and economic depression, Tatiana feels she is fighting a losing battle. Indeed, only 30 thousand Greeks are still fluent in Roumeiki glossa. Few children, whose parents are separated by the unremitting search for work abroad, pick up the language at home.
While Athens has provided funding to study Greek for Sartana’s 900 schoolchildren, the classes are in modern standard, not Roumeiki. “It’s great for learning to communicate with Greeks from Greece,” Bogaditsa told me, “but what is the real motivation? To make the villages here speak Modern Greek? Not one does nor will!” She then began to sing in her dialect, a haunting ballad about leaving home 250 years ago.
That home, thanks to its strategic location, had always been a center of trade, and thus linguistic diversity. In Crimea: A History, Neil Kent describes a 15th century Crimean port: “there were not only Genoese, but most importantly Armenians, as well as a variety of Turkic speaking peoples, including Muslim Tatars, Jewish Krymchaks and Karaites […] There were also a great number of Byzantine Greeks, Wallachians originally from what is now Romania, and Slavs.”
Of course, Crimea became famous again in 2014 following Russia’s illegal annexation of the peninsula. Moscow continues to push for homogeneity and Russification on the territory, painting Crimean Tatar activists as extremists.
Catherine’s invitation to Ignatius’ followers was written in both Russian and Greek (a separate letter was also translated into Armenian), but by the 18th century, not all the peninsula’s Christian citizens would have understood either idiom. According to linguist Maria Smolina, by then “some Crimean Greeks had switched to a Turkic language [Urum], which with the weakening of Byzantium and the formation of the Crimean Khanate, became the language of interethnic communication in the region.” Of course, even this is an oversimplification.
There are four varieties of Urum (Oghuz, Kipchak, Oghuz-Kipchak, and Kipchak-Oghuz), but it would be fair to say that each village speaks its own dialect. Oghus and Kipchak also represent separate branches of the Turkic language family. If English dialects were hypothetically as diverse as Urum, then perhaps New Yorkers would use more words with Germanic roots than French, Californians more French than German, and Midwesterners various mixtures thereof.
On the way back to Mariupol, my driver could no longer contain his curiosity about my visit and pointed to a Greek flag hanging from his dashboard, which somehow, I had missed.
“Here everyone dies at 60. In Greece, if someone dies at 85 it’s a tragedy.” We passed Mariupol’s heaving, post-apocalyptic metallurgical factory, and I somehow believed him. “This war is fake. I know who I’m going to vote for. He’s a clown (the former comedian, now Ukrainian PresidentVolodymyr Zelensky), but he could do some good. Eventually, though, I may have to move my family to Greece.”
The next day I went to Mariupol’s university to meet Professor Valeriy Kior. As our meeting began, the professor stated bluntly, “you must understand first, that we here in Ukraine are beggars (nischie).”
A professor of Russian and Ukrainian literature, Kior was in his late 60s and a poet in both Russian and his native Urum. He struck me as a solitary figure, perhaps unsurprising given his native language, and one he writes in, is ceasing to exist.
Like over half the estimated 7,000 languages spoken today, Urum is endangered and may disappear with the next generation. According to Professor Kior’s own estimate, there are under 2,000 speakers left. “It is a tragedy,” he said, as each language represents the “soul of the people.”
Professor Kior is the first, and therefore the founding father, of Urum literature.
“We started as Russian poets, but after perestroika they allowed us to publish in Urum. In the nineties, we had to decide which language to teach, Urum, Roumeiki, or Modern Greek. I said Modern Greek is fine to study, but what is the motivation? To make it your own?”
Last December, an academic conference declared Urum and Roumeiki to be separate languages, not dialects of the same. “Nothing new was discovered,” Professor Kior added sardonically; of course, Urum and Roumeiki belong to unrelated language families.
Two weeks before the conference, one participant had approached the professor stating his intention to declare Urum and Roumeiki separate ethnic groups. “I told him it’s not the time to do so. Not when everything in this country is falling apart.”
With a soft, melodic voice he read one of his poems in Urum. I began to drift off, wondering how many people have heard a founder of an entire language’s literature recite a verse.
The next morning, I woke early, barely having slept the night before. Aleksandra had invited me to attend the opening ceremony for a renovated community center in Chermalyk. The Roumei village, with a population of just 1,600, is located on the front line with separatists of the DNR. Since the start of the war two villagers had lost their lives to shelling.
Chermalyk’s Cultural Center (Dom Kultury) is the heart of village life. The center’s stage hosts school concerts, plays, and talent-shows (about 300 children still live on the contact line), and adults meet to discuss important local issues. The building’s position on high-ground, above the Kalmius River—which forms part of the front line running through Eastern Ukraine—made it a strategic object throughout the war. After it was destroyed, Chermalyk lost its outlet for diversion and entertainment, and for many, its soul.
After passing through our second checkpoint, manned by bored Ukrainian soldiers, the village came into view. With help from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Greek Federation, Chermalyk’s residents had rebuilt what they lost, despite daily shelling and shooting. Our driver, though, happily informed us that informal cease-fires are usually upheld when international observers are around.
As we entered the auditorium, I saw the whole village in attendance, eagerly awaiting the day’s full program.
The show kicked off with Chermalyk’s smallest residents, no more than five years old. Some sang, while others were a bit shy, preferring to quietly scrunch their costumes. Then grandmothers burst on stage, dressed in traditional garb, performing lively dances familiar to any Greek. One older gentleman started a stand-up comedy routine in Roumeiki, which was apparently quite funny for those who could understand (it seemed a member of the Greek Consulate sitting next to me could).
Each dedication, however, was deadly serious: “Let’s just hope for peace. We’ve been through so much, let’s just have peace.”
As we were filing out of the auditorium, an old woman approached an aid-worker: “Thank you, I haven’t heard music in five years.”
We went to a backroom to share a small feast and toasts. The concert was cheerful, but emotionally draining. “These children… their faces are already those of adults, they grew up far too quickly.”
I stepped outside with a local journalist to take photos of the breakaway republic just past the river – really a stream. The snap of automatic fire suddenly pierced the hollow silence; he turned to me with an indifferent shrug, “just bullets.” It was clear that the informal cease-fire was over.
Since my visit in early 2019, the war in eastern Ukraine has continued; but luckily, Chermalyk has not lost a resident to shelling in the interim. The unofficial border separating Ukrainians has been closed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, further dividing communities. And while the Federation of Greek Communities of Ukraine has postponed events and holidays due to the epidemic, they look forward to continuing their important work, maintaining this fascinating, forgotten corner of the Greek world.
