Perpetual Change

From "Black Sea" by Neal Ascherson

"Near the entrance [to the Naval Museum of Istanbul], overshadowed by the galleys and their carved prow-spikes, lies the Chain. Only a few links survive. They are made of black, rough-forged iron, each link a metre long and beaten into a figure-of-eight shape which was then crudely welded together at the waist. This is what is left of the great chain made in the 8th century to the order of the Byzantine emperor Leo III, "the Isaurian".
"Supported on a string of timber rafts or buoys, the Chain was stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn in times of danger. It kept out the Arabs in the time of Leo III, and a hundred years later blocked the attacking ships of Thomas the Slav, a pretender to the imperial throne. In the eleventh century, the Viking warrior Harald Hardrade, commander of the Empire's 'Varangian Guard', ran his galleys against the Chain during his escape from Byzantine service to claim a kingdom in Norway...
"...Are these dark links really the same Chain which Leo the Isaurian commanded to be forged thirteen hundred years ago, the very metal rammed by Harald's ships on his way back to Norway? It seems unlikely. Chains break, iron rusts, and links require replacement every so often. And yet the thought leads to a familiar philosophical riddle: even thoguh every link may have been renewed over the centuries, yet this is in essence still the Chain itself.
"All around the Black Sea, reading its history or climbing through its ruins or talking to its people, I have remembered the old saying : 'This is my grandfather's axe. My father gave it a new helve, and I gave it a new head." That is the truth about the Chain of Constantinople. But it is also the truth about ethnic identities; the only wise comment on all the clames to 'be' a Pontic Greek, a true Scythian, a Cossack, a Romanian, an Abkhazian, a Ukrainian.
"Those who cherish and revive their 'native' language usually have ancestors who spoke a different one. Those who claim 'pure' lineage, in the genteic sense, are all to some degree mongrels. Even a secluded hill people like the Abkhazians might find in their pedigreees - if they could rescue and study the ramifications of each family tree over the centuries - a Greek waitress, a Jewish pedlar, a Mingrelian cattle-dealer, a Russian officer's widow, an Armenian tinker, a Circassian slave-girl, an Eastern Alan bandit, a Persian refugee, an Arab magistrate. Those who claim always to have dwelled in 'our' land can often be shown to have lived somewhere else in the not too distant past, like the Lazi or the Tatars or almost the entire population on the Lower Don.
"Even the protrait of a common cultural tradition, as eveidence of ethnic identity, all too often dissolves away at the first application of rigorous fact. The sense among the Pontic Greeks that 'home is Hellas' could logically be challenged by pointing out that many of them cannot speak Greek, that their education was Russian, that their biological mingling with Turkic, Iranian, Kartvelian and Slav peoples has been marginal but continuous for more than three thousand years, that most of them were born and brought up not among olive-trees and sea-winds but in Soviet Central Asia.
"You could, if you were unwise, walk up to Crimean Tatars as they built their houses on waste lots outside Simferopol [Ukraine] and suggest that their burning conviction to homeland and ethnic identity was false. And you could support that wiht some evidence. You might remind them that the Tatars of the Golden Horde had exchanged their own Mongolian language for the Turkic spoken by the local Kipchaks, that they abandoned shamanism for Islam, that they have interbred conintuously with Turks and Russians and that - like the Greeks, and for the same tragic reason of deportation- the 'land of their birth' is usually not Crimea but Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan. But, in both the Greek and the Tatar case, you would have missed the point.
"To demonstrate that tradition is wrong or invented does not put an end to this story. A claim to national indepenedence does not fall simply because its legitimising version of national history is partly or wholy untrue - as it often is. The sense of belonging to a distinct cultural tradition, of 'ethnic identity', can be subjectively real to the point at which it becomes an objective -political fact, no matter what fibs are used for its decoration. Grandfather's axe still lies on the table, gleaming, sharp and very solid."

That axe is the danger of nationalism, which after the writings of last year's Nobel laureate, I have also come to regard as just another type of fanaticism.

posted by jjs @ 3:18 AM