From Kostyantynivka to Constantinople
Iaroslav Volovod
“For the geopolitical imagination of the time, this also meant that a speculative northern frontier of Greece was moved up all the way to Russia.”
My grandmother with her siblings and cousins. Photograph taken in Ukraine in the 1960s.
The attempt to grapple with vanished knowledge is a crucial skill for those who came out of the Soviet Union. Unlike the preceding generations, the representatives of the first post-Soviet one faced the need to construct their identity. For me, one way to come to terms with uprooted identities is to frame your search as an artistic endeavor, to be ready to navigate omissions, absence, and the impossibility to produce complete and definitive knowledge.
Born and raised in the Russian Arctic Circle, I was inevitably led to believe that our Greek family lore was slightly eccentric. “Aren’t we Greeks after all”?—my maternal grandmother would occasionally exclaim, smiling. “If things go wrong, we’ll move to Greece!” Others in the family—grandaunts, granduncles, and their children—repeated this set phrase, a household tale; it was an idiom of false hope, as nobody ever took it seriously.
It was never their fault. For our parents and grandparents, Soviet identity was a given, a readymade of sorts, a preset configuration. As labor played a key role in the Communist ideology, heritage became redundant. The gargantuan project of Soviet modernity reshuffled people and communities, producing uniformity and cultural amnesia. The recruitment initiatives in the USSR enabled unprecedented mobility across the vast Eurasian expanse. So in the 1970s, my grandmother took up a job at the international seaport of Murmansk, the last city to be founded in the Russian Empire and the largest in the world located north of the Arctic Circle. This is how we all ended up under the Northern Lights.
But she was born elsewhere, some 3,000 kilometers southwards, in Kostiantynivka, an industrial city in south-eastern Ukraine. This region, also known as Donbas, has long been populated by different peoples, mostly East Slavs (Ukrainians and Russians) and a Hellenic minority hailing historically from the Crimean Peninsula. These Greeks descend from ancient colonists who came from Asia Minor some 2,500 years ago in search of unoccupied fertile land. They were mostly Ionians, Milesians in particular, who began establishing new poleis in the littoral zone of the Black Sea, such as, Theodosia, Panticapaeum, and Chersonesus. Subsequently they became subjects of the Byzantine Empire, the Crimean Khanate (the vassal state of the Ottoman Empire), and finally, in the eighteenth century they ended up under Russian rule.
In a cunning political move in 1778, Catherine the Great convinced them to relocate from Crimea to the Wild Fields, to what today is the Donbas region. It was part of her famous Greek Project. Formulated during the Russian-Turkish War, her ambitious geopolitical plan was to divide the European part of the Ottoman Empire between the Russian and Habsburg Empires followed by the restoration of independent Greece centered in Constantinople with her grandson Constantine on the throne. She had him learn Greek and even minted special silver coins with the image of Hagia Sophia with an Orthodox cross and without minarets. As this messianic idea never came to pass, Catherine the Great shifted her focus to Crimea, envisioning it as an ersatz Greece.
Gleb Sokolov’s 1972 Soviet book Circum-Pontic Antiquities
With the end of the Russian-Turkish War in 1774, the resettlement of Greeks from Crimea was elevated to the rank of state policy. Strengthening the southern borders of the Russian Empire and undermining the economic power of the Khanate were among the main incentives and contributed to the speedy annexation of the peninsula. The exodus from Crimea began with some 18,000 Hellenes leaving along with other Christian peoples. The newly arrived settlers became instrumental in the cultivating of the vast steppes of southeastern Ukraine. For the geopolitical imagination of the time, this also meant that a speculative northern frontier of Greece was moved up all the way to Russia.
Today the Greek-speaking villages of Donbas centered around the city of Mariupol are the biggest, yet fading, hub of Hellenism in the post-Soviet space. When my grandmother and her siblings would come back from their mother’s village near Kostiantynivka, their Ukrainian birth town, people would jokingly ask them “How are things in Greece?” By a funny coincidence, the name Kostiantynivka itself sounds like a Slavic take on Constantinople. More than a lighthearted joke, this linguistic speculation summons the specters of Russian imperialism and its political imaginaries. Historically, there was a continuous obsession with Constantinople and the Byzantine legacy in the upper echelons of the Russian tsardom. Reigning monarchs projected the reclaiming of power over the cradle of Orthodox Christian civilization with carefully engineered intellectual constructs. Central to this endeavor was the concept of Moscow as the Third Rome. Articulated in the sixteenth century, it claimed that after the capture of Byzantine Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, Moscow became the successor of the Roman Empire.
But it was Catherine the Great who in the eighteenth century significantly updated Russian political theology embodied in the dream of reclaiming the Second Rome. This was a necessary step to validate Russia as a top-tier empire by means of establishing its linkage to the roots of European civilization. At the same time, this would have fulfilled Russia’s “civilizing mission” to recover Crimea, the site where the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity took place as a result of Vladimir the Great’s baptism in 988. These political imaginaries are brilliantly described by Russian literary scholar and historian Andrei Zorin in his book Feeding the Two-headed Eagle: Russian Literature and State Ideology in the Last Third of the 18th and First Third of the 19th Centuries: “Whereas it was traditionally considered that the torch of Enlightenment was passed from Greece to Rome, from where it was picked up by Western Europe and passed on to Russia, now it appeared that Russia was connected to Greece directly and did not need any intermediaries.”
1792 print showing Catherine II, Empress of Russia, bare-breasted, holding a scepter and sphere, taking a large step from a piece of land on the right labeled “Russie” to a crescent moon atop a steeple or minaret labeled “Constantinople” on the left; below her are the rulers of France, Prussia, Sweden, Austria, Poland, Great Britain, and Spain, and Pope Pius VI, who are all looking up her dress and making comments.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2013646678/
In another evocative example of Russian expansionism, Zorin cites an ominous 1848 poem Russian Geography by pan-Slavist Russian poet and diplomat Fyodor Tyutchev, who wrote:
Moscow, and the City of Peter, and the City of Constantine—
These are the sacred capitals of the Russian tsardom…
But where is its end? and where are its borders
To the North, to the East, to the South and toward sunset
It is a poignant paradox that a century and a half later, amid Stalinist purges against the Greeks, Crimea was still imagined as a Soviet paradise disguised as Classical Antiquity. Consider this description of the peninsula by Andrei Zorin:
“The world of white houses by the sea, gravel paths among laurel bushes, alleys of cypresses with plaster vases and statues, buglers in crimson kerchiefs at morning line-up, vacationers strolling in white pajamas—this was our ancient Greece, our paradise, even though it was cleansed of excessive ethnic diversity by the Father of the peoples after the war. But it was accessible, available through a trade union tour or via a directive from the pioneer organization for a citizen of the empire. Here they could holiday in peace, for the Red Banner Black Sea Fleet was on guard in Sevastopol’s bays, with sailors in white and blue uniforms and caps for whom girls in far-off villages were pining needlessly. It is here that the everyday and militaristic interpretations of Crimea’s allure for Russians become indistinguishable.”
In the twentieth century, the ethnic Greeks of Donbas and those who remained in Crimea were cut off from the bigger Hellenic world by the Iron Curtain and remained under the radar as the lesser-known fraction of the global Greek diaspora. Along with many other ethnic groups, the Soviet Greeks faced ruthless persecution by the Stalinist regime. The NKVD pogroms started in 1937 and culminated with mass deportations in the 1940s, with many members of the community sent to GULAG labor camps. The tragic account of Greek ethnic cleansing in the USSR is described in great detail in the book by Donbas Greek history enthusiast Ivan Dzhukha The Parthenon Stood Behind, Magadan Lay Ahead, whose title suggests a geopoetic axis connecting the Acropolis of Athens and the Russian Far East.
Soviet park sculpture in Tarusa
After the fall of the Soviet Union, they became the citizens of the newly-independent Ukraine; as the borders opened some have started repatriating to Greece, given that they could legally prove their Hellenic origin—not an easy task as oftentimes one had to operate transnationally and deal with inaccessible archives.
The more I tried to unpack my family history, recreating migration trajectories and recuperating archival documents, the more I realized how alienated one can become from the past; when in lieu of concrete evidence you only have scant fragments: pieces of embroidered cloth, lace, handwoven fabric or a semi-forgotten song in the Rumeíka dialect. Submitting an odd-sounding recipe of Shumush pie to a Greek consulate as a jus sanguinis proof would never suffice. So the moving of my body along the convoluted routes of history has become a way to enact the past and secure the future. In my case it meant triangulating between Russia, Ukraine, and Greece, occasionally protruding to Turkey. Along the way, the bureaucratic protocol of collecting papers and preparing my Greek citizenship application became no less important than seeking out antiquity in Ephesus and Pergamon or Byzantium in Thessaloniki and Istanbul. Taking language classes at the Moscow Greek Society became as vital as seeing Istanbul through the eyes of the Rum community while reading Nektaria Anastasiadou’s A Recipe for Daphne. Or strolling with artist Hera Büyüktasciyan in Zeyrek and Vefa (who happened to be carrying around the same book as me, In Search of Constantinople by acclaimed Russian Byzantinist Sergey Ivanov). This is how I became increasingly engaged in traveling as a practice of empathy towards the place, its history, and people, rather than mere tourism as consumption and appropriation of a short-lived experience.
Ivan Dzhukha’s 1993 book The Odyssey of the Greek of Mariupol
I started this essay with some eccentricity, as a slightly bizarre feeling induced by the family anecdote of Greekness heard in the Arctic Circle. But I would also like to consider eccentricity as a product of empires. In the sense that eccentric means both slightly bizarre (simply consider the name of the book The Odyssey of the Greek of Mariupol written by Ivan Dzhukha and published in Vologda in 1993) as well as not being placed centrally, ex-centrical. Thus it is a fundamental job of empires to produce peripheries and Crimea is emblematic here. It was rendered as the northern periphery of the Hellenic world by Byzantium and as an obscure bit of the Ottoman Empire while part of Crimean Khanate, and in the Russian Empire, it was a far-flung provincial border in the south. What is hard to believe is that for imperial governance there is nothing more important than a provincial boundary. The sinister symbiotic merger of the military and tourism mentioned by Zorin in relation to Crimea is the best proof that this is so. Such borderlands are always porous territories with moments of renewal filtering through them, at times also erosions of the foundations or cataclysms. Modern Greece with its current political economy is another example—its liminal status calling into question the incredibly fragile and challenged European values. Despite its symbolic belonging to the center, Greece remained “the European bête noire” as curator Nadja Argyropoulou puts it and exemplifies in her exhibition Hell as Pavilion.
Russian irredentism has made a spectacular comeback since 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, the declaration of self-proclaimed republics and finally a devastating full scale war. As a consequence, the Hellenes of Donbas, like many other Ukrainians, have been caught up in the middle of a protracted violent conflict. Today with the destruction of Mariupol and the interrupted evacuations of the Greek minority to Greece, they find themselves once again in the epicenter of colonialist onslaught. In this catastrophic twist of events, Ukraine is becoming the narrative heart of a European political order, not too dissimilar to what the newly independent Greek state represented for the nineteenth century. But as always with eccentricities (and ex-centers), they arrive late to the focal point and at the cost of unthinkable sacrifice.
Iaroslav Volovod is a curator and researcher currently based in Istanbul. Until recently he was directing Space 1520, post-colonial artistic research laboratory at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. It explored the history of interactions of various communities of the former USSR with the cultural standards, political activity, and laws of the Russian colonial metropole.
He graduated from the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg State University majoring in Hindi and Sanskrit and received a master’s degree in curatorial studies from Bard College, New York. His writings appeared on international platforms such as the Gwangju Biennale’s online journal, Strelka Mag, and others.