The Pontic Rebels’ Identification with Greek National Identity and the Othering of the Turks

Invented around the end of the 18th century, nationalism transformed the relations between non-Muslims and other Ottoman communities by initiating a process of constructing new collective identities. This process led to the forging of identities that might be defined as the sentiment of belonging to a group based on religion, nationality or ethnicity, among other aspects of identity. National identity emerged in this context from the 19th century onwards, as a newly acquired type of collective identity. As in all forms of identity, identification and othering are among the primary phases of shaping national identities. From the end of the 1700s, the Ottomans/Turks became the ‘other’ of the Greek national identity. Pontic nationalism played an important role in the identification of the Anatolian Greeks with the Greek national identity. This ideology, which was based on the Greek idea of Megali Idea and gained currency from the second half of the 19th century onwards, aimed to create a Greek-Pontic state that would extend on the Eastern Black Sea shore from Sinop to Artvin. Predictably, we can witness all the primary phases of identity formation in the activities of the Pontic nationalists. In this context, this study first defines the historical event in question (the Pontic Rebellion) in light of a theoretical perspective on the processes of the formation of national identity. It then investigates representations pertaining to primary phases of the identity formation process such as ‘identification’, ‘differentiation’ and ‘othering’. The study employs texts by the Pontic Greeks seized by the Turkish Central Army’s raid in 1921 in Merzifon American College, an important locus for Pontic nationalism. Among the various representations in these documents aiming at identifying Anatolian Greeks with the Greek national identity, the most frequently witnessed representation was ‘Greece as the motherland, as the sacred homeland’. This phenomenon of homeland included Anatolian Greeks with Greeks elsewhere into ‘us’ and othered the Turks as ‘them’. Another frequently witnessed representation has been based on race, ethnicity and nationality. The Pontic nationalists were represented as ‘the children of Greece’, with reference to Hellenic origins and emphasis on Hellenic supremacy. It emerges that the representations of othering regarding the Turks in the Pontic nationalists’ texts reached the level of hatred and animosity.

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