Pontus

“PONTUS” is a Hellenic word for “SEA”. It refers to the shores of the Euxinos Pontus (the Friendly Sea), or in English, the Black Sea. In particular, “Pontus” is a reference to its south-eastern shores, the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor.

Hellenic ties to this region go back to prehistoric times; to the days of Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. {Mountain tribes in the Caucasus have, for centuries, used sheep skins, stretched across river-beds, to catch tiny particles of alluvial gold.}

In historic times, Sinope was the first city founded by colonists from Miletus (one of the Ionian cities) in 785 BC. Later, colonists from Sinope founded Trapezous (Trapezounta/Trebizond/ Trabzon) in 756 BC and many other cities including Amissos (Sampsounta), Kotyora (Ordu), Kerasus (Giresun) and Diskourias (Sukhumi, Georgia). Hellenic cities mushroomed all around the Black and Azov Seas. After settling the coastline, the hinterland, too, became completely Hellenised, a process completed with the conquest of Asia Minor by Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC.

Diogenes (famous for wandering the streets of Athens with his lamp, looking for an honest man) was from Sinope. Strabo, the great historian and geographer, was from Amaseia. It was at Trapezous that Xenophon and his 10 000 soldiers found safe haven in 400 BC, following their nearly eighteen-month retreat from Mesopotamia.

Following the death of Alexander the Great in June 323 BC, his generals began fighting amongst themselves over the empire he had created. Mithridates the Builder exploited this infighting to establish Pontus as an independent kingdom in 301 BC. Under the dynasty Mithridates founded, Pontus flourished as a great commercial and educational centre. Mithridates was the last Hellenic ruler to succumb to Roman rule in 1 BC.

It was in Roman times that the Apostle Andreas (Andrew) brought Christianity to Pontus in 35 AD. With the division of the Roman Empire in 395 AD, Pontus became part of the Eastern Roman Empire, later to become known as the Byzantine Empire. When Constantinople fell to the knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Alexius the Great Comnenus established the Trapezounta Empire, a bastion of Hellenism that lasted for 257 years. The deposed Byzantine Imperial Court moved to Nicaea and waited for the opportunity to return to Constantinople, which they did in 1204. The dynasty Alexius founded (amongst them Manuel A’ and Anna Komneni), were great patrons of the arts and of commerce for centuries. The centre of Pontian Christianity, the Monastery of Panayia Soumela (Our Lady of Mount Melas), in the mountains of Trapezounta district. Founded in 386 AD, it reached its peak under the Komnenus Dynasty in the 1200s. The still magnificent ruins of the Monastery remain a place of pilgrimage to this day for Christian and Moslem Pontians alike.

Cardinal Bessarion (Vissarion 1403-1472), who created a scandal by defecting from the Orthodox Church to the Roman Catholic Church, also hailed from Pontus, as did the Hypsilandis family (centuries later to become rulers of the Danubian Provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia). Bessarion saw the union of the Eastern and Western churches as the only hope of preventing the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks. In 1439, he was made a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, abandoning the post he had held since 1437, that of Metropolitan of Nicaea. He died in Ravenna, Italy.

The Seljuk Turks attempted to invade Pontus, following their sweep through the Caucasus Mountains region, but were rebuffed in the early part of the 11th century. They proceeded into Kappadokia and, following their victory over the Byzantine Army in the Battle of Mantzikert in 1071, established the Sultanate of Iconium (modern-day Konya). This victory, plus their defeat of the Byzantine Army at Myriokephalo (outside Philadelpheia, Asia Minor) in 1176 gave the nomadic Turks control of most of the Anatolian plateau.

Pontus was the last fragment of the Byzantine Empire to fall to the Ottoman Turks. On August 15 1461, Sultan Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, besieged Trapezounta. Forty days later, the city fell. This conquest did not de-Hellenise Pontus, despite regular waves of forced Islamization (using a range of measures including wholesale massacres and mass kidnappings of male children). Testimony to this fact are the numerous churches, cathedrals, monasteries and schools established between 1461 and 1914. ‘De-Hellenization’ of Pontus and Asia Minor was not accomplished until 1922-23 ...or so the ‘Young Turk’ regime thought.

More than thirty centuries of cultural and political development lay behind Pontian Hellenism in 1914. Genocide and Diaspora lay ahead. Pontian Hellenes are a distinct and unique branch of Hellenism. They today retain their own Hellenic dialect, folk-dances, folk music, literature and theatre.