Following in Bryer’s Footsteps From Kromni to Imera

In 1962, the English historian Anthony Bryer set out to explore the district of Kromni, deep in the Pontus Mountains that rise spectacularly up from the Black Sea in the northeastern corner of Turkey. Bryer had gone looking for medieval churches from the Empire of Trebizond, but instead found “spectacular evidence of the prosperity of nineteenth-century Kromniots” (Bryer, The Post-Byzantine Monuments of Pontos, p. 268). Just who were these Kromniots, and what made them prosperous? Some called them “crypto-Christians”; indeed, this was how they had defined themselves in 1857, in a petition addressed to the Great Powers in the wake of the great reforms of the Tanzimat (as discussed thoroughly by Yorgos Tzedopoulos in his 2009 article “Public Secrets: Crypto-Christianity in the Pontos”). The Kromniots, or Kromlides, had an ambiguous identity and ambivalent social and legal status both in their own eyes and from the point of view of the Ottoman State. Something of this ambivalence is captured in “a gibe made by Turks at crypto-Christians who came to the Uzun Sokağı in Trebizond to make an open profession of their faith in 1856” (Bryer, p. 268):

Uzun sokak çamur oldu —
Kromlilar Giaour oldu

Long Street has turned to mud —
The Kromniots have turned Giaour.

Bryer tells us that this quote, which prefaces his section on the Kromni District, comes from the archives of the Centre for Micrasiatic Studies (sic), which is none other than the the Κέντρο Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών at which our group had also spent two weeks studying the oral history archives of Greek refugees who fled Asia Minor in the population exchange of 1923 before making our own journey to Trebizond.

In this, as in many other respects, we found ourselves almost literally following in the footsteps of Bryer. His two monumental volumes — the first published in 1985 with David Winfield, bearing the title The Byzantine Monuments of Pontos, and the second, aforementioned 2002 book with the title The Post-Byzantine Monuments of Pontos — were our constant companions as we traipsed through the backcountry Bryer had traversed more than 40 years earlier. We marveled at how he had accessed ruined churches and abandoned villages that even today are still linked at best by winding dirt roads. We turned to his meticulous descriptions of seemingly every village church to try and puzzle out the dedications in cases where the frescoes of the dedicatory saints had long since eroded beyond any hope of legibility. We were lucky to have with us Professor Paschalis Kitromilides, who had himself accompanied Bryer on his travels many years before and now shared generously of his stories and knowledge. Once, we found ourselves so besotted with the sight of wildflowers in the meadow below the hillside monastery of Imera that we left Bryer’s little blue hardback on the ground as we ran together into the long grass. Back in our minibus, we searched frantically for the book until we concluded that Bryer had been left behind in our mad rush — until the end of the day when the blue hardback reappeared as if by a miracle in the trunk. Lying in the meadow until a curious cow starts perusing its contents would have been a fate to make Bryer proud.

Above all, we found ourselves puzzling over the same phenomena and questions that Bryer himself wrote extensively about. Consider the foundation inscription of the church of Imera (image below). It says:

ΟΙΚΟΔΟΜΗΘΗ Ο ΠΑΝΣΕΠΤΟΣ ΟΥΤΟΣ ΝΑΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΑΓΙΟΥ ΕΝΔΟ
ΞΟΥ ΠΡ[Ο]ΦΗ[ΤΟΥ] ΠΡ[Ο]Δ[ΡΟΜΟΥ] ΚΑΙ Β[Α]ΠΤ[Ι]Σ[ΤΟΥ] ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ ΤΗΣ Μ[Ο]Ν[Η]Σ ΓΗΜΕΡΑΣ
ΕΠΙ ΒΑΣ[Ι]Λ[ΙΟΥ] ΑΠΤΟΥΛ ΜΕΤΖΙΤ ΚΑΙ ΕΠΙ ΤΟΥ ΧΑΛΔ[ΙΑΣ] ΘΕΟΦΙ[ΛΟΥ]
ΔΙΑ ΣΥΝΔΡ[Ο]Μ[Η]Σ ΤΗΣ Κ[ΥΡΙΑΣ] ΚΑΘΗΓΟΥΜΕΝΗΣ ΡΩΞΑΝΗΣ ΡΑΤΠ
ΚΑΙ ΣΥΝ ΒΟΗΘΗΑ ΤΩΝ ΕΥΣΕΒΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΟΡΘΟΔΟΞΩΝ
ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑΝΩΝ ΑΜΗΝ Ο ΠΡΩΤΟ ΜΑΪΣΤΩΡΑΣ ΓΡΗΓΟΡΙΣ ΧΡΥΣΟΥΛΙΔΗΣ ΜΑΪΟΥ 1 ΕΤΟΣ 1859

This holy church of the Saint and Prophet the Forerunner and Baptist John of the Monastery of Imera was built under the reign of Sultan [Vasiliou] Abdul Mecit and under [Bishop] Theophilus of Chaldia by the contribution of the Abbess Roxana Ratp [sic] and with the assistance of the pious Orthodox Christians amen the first builder Gregoris Chrisoulidis May 1 in the year 1859 [my own loose translation]

Here, too, we turned to Bryer to help us puzzle out the text of this inscription which he says is “confident in style, if not epigraphy” (Bryer, p. 298). But what Bryer could only begin to tell us about is the social and political identity and context of the people who built this place. Who is the “Roxana” who served as an abbess in refounding this monastery? What did the Kromniots of Imera think of Abdul Mecit, the sultan of the Tanzimat? Were they merely paying their dues or did they actually feel a sense of open possibility in the post-Tanzimat Ottoman Empire? How did their relationship to the Ottoman Sultan interweave with their identity as “devout Orthodox Christians”? How, if at all, did they identify as “Greeks” — whether Hellenes, Romioi, or Pontians?

These are substantial and serious questions that go beyond the confines of a short blog post such as this. In the end, I think they also push us beyond Bryer, because they take us into the realms of Ottoman and twentieth-century history (and social and political theory) that exceed the competences of this Oxford-trained Byzantinist. Yet we can begin to provide an answer to these questions by returning to the same evidence that Bryer so thoroughly documented for us: the primary literary sources, the people who made their lives in these places (whether we can talk to them today or whether we hear their voices through archives like that at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies), and above all from the material remains of the sites themselves. Suffice it to say, then, that from Plaka to Kromni, from Athens to Trebizond, and from religion to economy, we continue to follow in Bryer’s footsteps.