Archive for August, 2010
If you want to gain an understanding of what life was really like for the majority of Russian subjects before the Revolution, you can do worse than read Maxim Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy – My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities. The books are difficult to find in English, although the 1960s and 1970s translations by Ronald Wilks, published by Penguin, are sometimes to be had second-hand.
Gorky’s reputation in the West is regarded as compromised by his association with the Soviet regime and his writings seldom figure in any major way along side those of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev in courses on Russian literature. This is a shame, as he serves as a salutary corrective to the more romantic, metaphysical and literary takes on Russia and the Russians found in the works of the more highly acclaimed writers. His trilogy depicts Russian society at the bottom rung and it is seldom attractive. His Russian labourers are not the idealised figures found in Tolstoy. They are impoverished, often ignorant and without hope, possessed of a casual brutality and a seeming enjoyment in witnessing others’ pain. Their lives are often cut short by poverty, toil, inadequate diet, alcohol abuse, violence, the extreme weather, and a failure or inability to look after themselves. But these same lives are illuminated occasionally by astonishing tenderness, or comradeship, or an ability to be engaged and greatly touched by the written and spoken word, which in itself is very moving to the reader precisely in the context of the coarseness and cheapness of their daily lives.
The trilogy covers Gorky’s early childhood to restless late adolescence, from approximately 1871 through to 1888, as he grows up in the fractious home of his maternal grandparents, then, at aged 11 years, becomes an “apprentice” on a Volga steamboat and in an icon workshop, and finally, aged 16, enrols in the “university” of life among the urban poor. The trilogy is set in specific places such as Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Krasnovidovo, strung out along and in the hinterland of the Volga, but there is no reason to suppose that life among the lower classes elsewhere in Russia was much different in the second half on the 19th century. All three works make compelling reading and are recommended for those with family roots in Russia, or an interest in the history of late Imperial Russia, or of course a passion for great literature.
The NW region of Bulgaria is recognised by the European Union as the poorest part of the EU, with a GDP of only about 25% of the EU average. The region corresponds approximately to the Montana oblast which was in existence from 1987 to 1999, but which both before and since then was divided into the three okrugs (pre-1987) and oblasts (post-1999) of Vidin, Montana and Vratsa. Life here has suffered what the Bulgarian journalist Diana Ivanova calls “a collective breakdown”: firstly, of the traditional village way of life under collectivisation, and, secondly, of the communist structures following their collapse in 1989.
NW Bulgaria presents a very attractive face to most Western visitors, although it receives but few: the landscape is beautiful, often mountainous and forested, the flora and fauna is diverse and rich, and of course the human settlements have that picturesque quality that is often inherent in places noticeably sidestepped by modernity. But for the inhabitants prospects often appear bleak: there is a subsistence-level life in the villages and few employment opportunities. The region is experiencing depopulation. The young head for the capital Sofia or for one of the other large towns in Bulgaria, or are drawn overseas to work in Germany or elsewhere within the EU. Another key phenomenon in the depopulation is the exodus of mature women to Greece, Spain and especially Italy, where they work as carers and auxiliaries in nursing homes and hospitals. In Italy, these women care workers are known as badante. They may spend several years abroad, away from their families, saving or remitting money home to dependents in the villages.
Sofia’s National Art Gallery is currently showing a tremendous temporary exhibition called “Traumas and Miracles: Portraits from North-Western Bulgaria”, combining monochrome photographs of people and places by Babak Salari, an Iranian photographer, and accompanying text by Diana Ivanova. The exhibition focuses on a cluster of nine villages: Chelyustitsa, Dolna and Gorna Bela Rechka, Dolno and Gorno Ozirovo, Druzhevo, Lyutadjik, Milanovo and Zanozhene.
For more information, visit the “Traumas and Miracles” Facebook page , the Town of Badante Women documentary film website and the Goat Milk festival website.
In Bulgaria, as in other Central and Eastern European countries, it is the custom to publicly announce and remember deaths by memorials affixed to certain recognised sites within a neighbourhood, for instance, pinned on boards or wall surfaces on particular street corners with frequent passing foot traffic, or near bus stops, or outside the parish church. It is common to see passers by pausing and cyclists dismounting to read the notices; they serve a similar purpose to obituaries published in newspapers and doubtless are read and discussed keenly by some local gossips.
In Bulgaria, these black-bordered notices typically feature a reproduction of a black and white or colour photograph of the deceased, their full name (usually but not invariably complete with patronymic), vital dates and details of those mourning their loss. Sometimes a nickname is given too.
As well as those notices posted immediately after death, in memoriam notices are often placed at, for example, 40 days, and at three and seven years after death. A deceased person may be remembered at 10 or 25 years too if, for example, they died prematurely, or are survived for many years by their widow or widower.
There is something very touching about this public display of mourning and the levelling of an air force pilot, a TV anchorman, a teenaged motorcycle accident victim, a building caretaker and a nonagenarian widow appearing side-by-side on the same board, equally to be regarded or ignored by the living.
Gumoshtnik is little more than a hamlet today, being occupied by only around 165 people, but it was formerly a significantly larger settlement, reportedly boasting a population of approximately 1,000 at the time of Bulgaria’s liberation from the Turks in 1878. Two principal causes lay behind the population decline – the recent depopulation of the countryside common to much of mid- to late Communist and post-Communist era Bulgaria, and the earlier transatlantic emigration. It is the latter that places Gumoshtnik on the map today.
Eight men from the village were on the Titanic when it picked up passengers from Cherbourg on 10th April 1912, after leaving Southampton on its maiden and only voyage. All eight perished. However, just as in the blockbuster film, not everyone who had purchased tickets to America actually boarded. While Leonardo Di Caprio won a ticket in a card game and so took another’s place at the last minute, so Stefan Kliinovski and at least one and possibly two other villagers (Matyu Gankov and Petko Gloushkov) from Gumoshtnik apparently drank too many brandies in Paris the night before and failed to make the boat at Cherbourg.
There is a memorial to the victims in Gumoshtnik’s St Nikolai Letni churchyard. The eight who died, all of whom were potters, booked together into 3rd class for New York and bound for Chicago IL, were:
Peyo Kolev, 36 Marin Markov, 35 Lazar Minkov, 21 Stoycho Minkov, 28 Penko Naidenov, 22 Nedyalko Petrov, 19 Iliya Stoychev, 18 Lalyo Yonkov, 23
Their names often appear differently spelt in original documents and the subsequent articles and commentaries on the sinking of the Titanic, due both to errors and to the alternative systems used when transliterating from the Bulgarian language’s Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet.
It was surprising to find, while travelling in Bulgaria, a village in the NW of the country named after a British soldier. The custom in Bulgaria, as in Serbia and some other countries using the Cyrillic alphabet, is to spell a foreign proper name phonetically and then to transliterate it, letter by letter, back into Latin characters for translation purposes (for instance, on maps, streets signs and so on). In this case, Major William Frank Thompson’s surname became Tompsan or Tompsen when so treated. Similarly, William Gladstone – popular in Bulgaria due to his outspoken denunciation of the Bulgarian Horrors, committed by the Turks, in 1876 – can become Ujljam Gladston on a Sofia street map.
Major Thompson, brother of EP Thompson (the author of the classic The Making of the English Working Class), was a young special operations officer, with communist sympathies, liaising between the British army and the Bulgarian partisans in 1944 when Bulgaria was still a royalist dictatorship uneasily allied to Nazi Germany. He and other commandos came unstuck when, having crossed the river Iskar hoping to meet up with a larger band of partisans, he was betrayed, ambushed, wounded and captured at Batulia. He was interrogated and executed by firing squad in June 1944 at Litakovo, near Botevgrad, to the NE of the capital Sofia.
After the War, the Partisans among the new Communist leadership in Bulgaria honoured Thompson by creating out of the six small settlements of Babul, Lipata, Livage, Malak Babul, Tsarevi Stragi and Zavoya the new community of Tompsan. The village is easily reached by slow train from Sofia, being one of the halts on the regional line north up the scenic Iskar Gorge towards Mezdra. There is a memorial to Major Thompson at the railway station.
EP Thompson subsequently researched and wrote a book called Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission after studying his brother’s wartime fate and the official British, Bulgarian and Soviet responses to it.
Class was essentially a feature of rural society in pre-Partition and indeed Partitioned Poland.
At the top of the tree was the great nobility, the elite 30 to 50 families, in possession of wealth and titles. Immediately beneath them was the średnia szlachta or middle nobility, prosperous and estate- and village-owning, and with a strong sense of internal class solidarity fostered by frequent inter-marriage – it has been estimated that there may have been approximately 300,000 middle nobility towards the end of the 18th Century as the partitions began to dismantle the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
More numerous still was the drobna szlachta or peasant nobility, which itself was stratified and known by various other terms, such as szaraczkowa (or “grey” nobility, from their plain clothes), zaściankowa (“village” nobles), zagonowa (“bed”, as they owned but small beds of land) and gołota (“naked” nobility, who owned no land whatsoever). These nobles had tradition and pedigree, coats of arms and political rights, but whilst economically independent were rarely prosperous. Over time, subdivision of their land through inheritance and natural increase over the generations meant that a single petty-nobility family might grow to effectively occupy, or itself become, a village, or even two or more villages. The chief distinction between the peasant nobility and the great and middle nobility above them was that the peasant nobility owned no serfs and therefore usually subsisted only just above or at the same economic level as the landless peasants, who made up the lowest stratum of traditional Polish society.
The city dwellers were outside this class structure. Of course, many of the great and middle nobility owned substantial town houses or palaces. But the merchants, craftsmen, small traders and unskilled labourers who made up the mass of the urban population were just as frequently not ethnic Polish but, for example, German or Jewish. The larger Polish cities to the east – such as today’s L’viv or Vilnius – would likewise have a concentrated Polish and Jewish population but would be urban islands in a rural sea of Ukrainian or Lithuanian, rather than Polish, peasantry.
The ancestry of the Polish szlachta makes a particularly interesting subject for family history research, which Bluebird Research would be delighted to help you investigate. Kindly contact us for more information.
The special settlements – spetsposeleniye – are a Soviet euphemism. The experience of settlement there felt far from special, as the “settlers” were in fact the internally deported peoples of the Soviet Union.
During the Second World War, entire peoples were rounded up for deportation. The task was undertaken so comprehensively and systematically that serving soldiers fighting at the front were withdrawn, ostensibly into labour corps, before being deported. No one was meant to be excluded from the deportation orders – women, children and the elderly, subsistence farmers and communist activists, all were forcibly deported.
The peoples concerned were the minority nations of the USSR. It is supremely ironic that the notionally internationalist and fraternal Soviet Union should have been responsible for the type of chauvinistic nationalism that exiled entire ethnic groups into its harsh interior, to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekhistan, as well as to the Urals and further east to Siberia.
The Volga Germans were deported from August 1941. The Karachay were deported in November 1943. The Kalmyks were deported in December 1943. The Chechens and Ingush were deported in February 1944. The Balkars were deported in March 1944. The Crimean Tatars were exiled in May 1944. Greeks, Jews, Armenians and other smaller minorities around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov were also deported. Where these people had had their own autonomous republics within the Soviet Union, these were dissolved. In transit and in exile, many tens of thousands of the special settlers of the minority nations died of hunger or disease, or in labour camps.
It is true that, following the death of Stalin in March 1953, many of these peoples eventually gained an official right of return to their homelands – although this did not happen for the Crimean Tatars until Perestroika and is not true of the Volga Germans. In most case, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians had been immediately moved in during the War to colonise the homelands of these people, so much had changed by the time of the special settlers’ return. It was seldom possible for them to reclaim property, and usually the balance of population and power had shifted significantly in favour of Russians or Ukrainians, such that the returnees were more of a minority in their homelands.
The Greek island of Kythira (alternatively transliterated from the Greek alphabet as Kythera or Cythera) has an extraordinary story. Its modern population is somewhat lower than 3,500 yet it has a huge diaspora – it has been estimated that there may be as many as 60,000 Australians with roots on the island. Other Kythiriotes emigrated to USA, Germany and elsewhere.
Despite its position off the southern tip of the Peloponnese, Kythira is counted as one of the seven Ionian Islands, together with the more familiar Kerkyra (Corfu), Paxi (Paxos), Lefkada (Lefkas), Ithaki (Ithaca), Kefalonia (Cephalonia) and Zakynthos (Zante).
Kythira has never known Ottoman domination, being for centuries an outpost of Venice. The Venetians were followed by periods of Napoleonic and then of British rule (1815-1864), before enosis (union) was achieved in 1864 when the British ceded the island to Greece. Separate birth, marriage and death records exist for the British in Kythira and the other Ionian Islands, divided into three sections: the chaplains’ returns, the military returns and the civil registers. The indexes to these are available online (for example, on Find My Past) and certificates can be ordered online from the General Register Office using the index information. In these records, Kythira is shown under its Italian name, Cerigo.
These indexes refer only to the colonial population (and, of course, any intermarriage with locals and issue of such marriages). For the resident Greek inhabitants of the era of British rule, it is necessary to use the vital records created and still maintained on the island; this is true also, of course, of the years after the 1864 enosis. Generally speaking, records up to 1864 are kept at the state historical archives, while records after this date are held, depending upon their type, either at local community (koinotita) level or at the main register office (Lixiarheion) in the (rather small) capital (Hora, also known as Kythira town).
While there were some pioneers as early as the 1870s, chain migration from Kythira to Australia (as to America) began in the 1890s and grew steadily through to the First World War. Many emigrants were destined for New South Wales, but others settled in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia. To generalise, the Kytherians tended to concentrate in the urban centres, rather than to move on into the interior. Emigration from Kythira continued between the world wars, as family members gradually joined earlier immigrants in the usual fashion, but ceased to be so significant (at least as part of the overall Greek emigration to Australia) after World War Two.
Bluebird Research would be delighted to provide diaspora families with professional family history research assistance in Kythira. Please email us for further details.
What does it mean for, say, the average Scottish or English person to research their family tree, to take it back three or four or five generations? To find out that ancestors worked as agricultural labourers, or in domestic service, or down coal mines? Probably not such a great deal. Recreational family history is a hobby often undertaken casually, out of curiosity or interest. The emotional and psychological resonance of the research is limited and incidental. Even identifying an ancestor who was a black sheep, or who died in penury in a workhouse, is unlikely to have much of a bearing upon your early 21st century world view and sense of self.
For an American, Canadian or Australian, or for that matter a British person of immigrant stock, the whole undertaking is more likely to hold deeper meaning regarding their understanding of their identity and place in the world. This is especially true where their people as a whole has experienced some kind of profound trauma – think of black family history research, or Jewish, or the Irish in the context of the Famine. Then family history research is part of the process of engaging with and making sense of that past; it is much more likely to be raw and charged.
Michael J Arlen’s book Passage To Ararat (Hungry Mind, 1996) is not about genealogical research per se but is profoundly about family history in the sense of understanding one’s roots. Arlen’s father, Michael Arlen senior, a reasonably successful writer, was born as Dikran Kouyoumjian. His life seems to have been purposed to leave behind and rise above his Armenian roots and he encouraged his son to live first as an Englishman and then as an American. Following the death of his father, Arlen junior felt a pressing need to learn about his father’s background. The Kouyoumjian family came from Ruse in Bulgaria, and previously from Constantinople, and before that from near Ani, NE of Kars*, on the Armenian plateau, now known as Anikoy and situated on the wrong side, the Turkish side, of the Turkish-Armenian border. Arlen does not reconstruct his family tree but researches Armenia and its history from ancient to modern and what it means to be Armenian. And this means confronting the hard fact of the Armenian genocide of 1915/16 at the hands of the Turkish state and understanding too that this was not an isolated wartime aberration but formed part of a determined pattern of events, to eliminate Armenians from what is now Turkey, extending at least as far back as the Ottoman massacres of Armenians in 1894-96 and on to the Turkish ethnic cleansing of Anatolia in 1921/22, culminating in the destruction of Smyrna and deportation of the Armenians, with the Greeks, from Asia Minor.
In the introduction to the 1996 edition of Passage To Ararat, Clark Blaise wrote:
“If there is a difference between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, it might be only this: the Germans have made restitution, both Germany and Israel thrive. The Turks have never apologised, the Armenians have never returned, and both are unhealed.”
And, of course, the Turkish state and too many Turkish academics still persist in vehement denial.
Passage To Ararat is recommended reading for anyone researching Armenian roots.
* The good news for Armenians with ancestors from the Kars region – including the villages surrounding the towns of Artahan and Kaghzvan – is that significant records of interest to family historians for this area are available in Yerevan (Erevan), Armenia. Please contact us for details of professional genealogical research assistance in Armenia.