![Black Sea as literary and cultural space (II) [Fourth part] Cover Image](/api/image/getbookcoverimage?id=document_cover-page-image_1446066.jpg)
La mer Noire comme espace littéraire et culturel (II) [Quatrième partie]
Black Sea as literary and cultural space (II) [Fourth part]
Author(s): Patrick Donabédian, Eyüp Özveren, Yordan Ljuckanov
Contributor(s): Yordan Ljuckanov (Editor), Eyüp Özveren (Editor), Mzagho Dokhtourichvili (Editor), Alexis Nuselovici (Editor)
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Architecture, Geography, Regional studies, Visual Arts, Human Geography, Regional Geography, Studies of Literature, Turkish Literature
ISSN: 2815-5424
Published by: Сдружение „Транспонтика“
Keywords: medieval Armenian art; diasporic khachkar; Pontic basin; cosmopolitanism; Nazlı Eray;
place of memory; presqu’île; mythologisation of sea
Summary/Abstract: The issue offers two mutually complementary holistic views on Black Sea as a cultural, resp. literary space, focussed on the regional distribution and variance of Armenian cross-stones and on the space-creating power of a key Black Sea urban site, Sinop, resp. The detailed study and the micro-monograph are appended with an article that traces a number of 'loose ends' in the research works across the volume and identifies some self-entrapping ideas, past and present, that determine the domestication of the Black Sea space, both in sources and in present scholarship. Four indexes (of personal names, places, titles of works, and notions - the latter two in both English and French) covering issues 1-4 of the 1st volume of Transponticae are added. The indexes are supplemented by an integral Romanisation table for Armenian, Georgian and (Bulgarian, Russian and Ukrainian) Cyrillic that considers commonalities between the phonological systems of the resp. languages and minds the peculiarities of the Latin-based Romanian and Turkish alphabets.
Series: Transponticae
- E-ISBN-13: 978-954-354-009-9
- Print-ISBN-13: 978-619-92370-0-7
- Page Count: 236
- Publication Year: 2023
- Language: English, French
Le bassin de la mer Noire, aire de rayonnement du khatchkar diasporique : Le rôle de la Crimée et notamment de Caffa au Moyen Âge au Moyen Âge
Le bassin de la mer Noire, aire de rayonnement du khatchkar diasporique : Le rôle de la Crimée et notamment de Caffa au Moyen Âge
au Moyen Âge
(The Black Sea basin, area of spreading of the “Diaspora” khachkar (cross-stone): the role of Crimea, and especially of Caffa, in the Middle Ages)
- Author(s):Patrick Donabédian
- Language:French
- Subject(s):History, Archaeology, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Architecture, Visual Arts, Middle Ages, 6th to 12th Centuries, 13th to 14th Centuries, 15th Century
- Page Range:453-505
- No. of Pages:53
- Keywords:medieval Armenian art; Armenian diaspora; cross-stone called khachkar; diasporic khachkar; Pontic basin
- Summary/Abstract:The article attempts to highlight the central role played by the Pontic basin in the propagation of a religious and artistic form specific to the communities of Armenian Diaspora: the small wall khachkar (cross-stone). Created in Armenia in the 9th century, simultaneously with the monumental plates with cross called khachkar, the type of small plaque marked with the cross – tree of life, and inserted into walls, was first introduced in Jerusalem and Cilicia in the 12th century. Then it spread in various Diaspora communities where it became an almost exclusive form of “exposed” popular devotion. Crimea and especially its Genoese “capital” Caffa, where a large Armenian community resided from the end of the 13th century, played an important role, not only in the perpetuation of this tradition, but also in the “normalisation” of its new Diaspora type, and in its spreading, especially in the Black Sea basin, but also beyond. The article seeks to define the type in question, to clarify its characteristics, and to identify the places of the “Pontic basin” (in a broad sense) affected by its diffusion: on its northern shore, Crimea with various localities, in addition to Caffa; further to the north-west, Bessarabia with Akkerman/ Belgorod Dniestrovski); and beyond, Galicia with Lviv, and Podolia with Kamenets-Podolsk; on the southern shore of the Black Sea, Constantinople and Trebizond; on its east bank, Georgia and in particular Tiflis. It must be noted that this geography is limited to the current state of our knowledge, but it is certainly bound to expand.
Unearthing the native town of Diogenes in Nazlı Eray’s fiction: Sinop as gateway of a different kind to the Black Sea world?
Unearthing the native town of Diogenes in Nazlı Eray’s fiction: Sinop as gateway of a different kind to the Black Sea world?
(Unearthing the native town of Diogenes in Nazlı Eray’s fiction: Sinop as gateway of a different kind to the Black Sea world?)
- Author(s):Eyüp Özveren
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Geography, Regional studies, Human Geography, Regional Geography, Studies of Literature, Turkish Literature
- Page Range:507-576
- No. of Pages:70
- Keywords:time/space; cosmopolitanism; Diogenes; microcosm; Nazlı Eray; place of memory; presqu’île
- Summary/Abstract:Sinop is the northernmost city of Turkey along the Black Sea coast. It is a small city, with difficult access, easier by sea than by land, until recently. This has limited its development, but also helped protect its aura over the very long term. Because the Black Sea is poor in islands, Sinop by its geographical layout serves as a second-best for an island, in fact a presqu’île that is almost an island but not, hence its persistent sense of being cut off from the world in either direction of land or sea. This is all the more important because thanks to its generous physical geography, Sinope was known as the most beautiful city on the Black Sea during the ancient period. It served as native town to Diogenes, a maverick philosopher famous for his cynical and cosmopolitan philosophy. Sinop had its most glamorous period then receded backwards as Constantinople/Istanbul, Trebizond/Trabzon, and much later Odessa played major roles in the reorganisation of the Black Sea ‘connectivities’ via the networks of port cities. Of that era, the fortress and the city walls, though run down, have survived to this day and still dominate the seaport’s silhouette. Other than that, ancient Sinope lies hidden and little excavated below the contemporary city. The fortress hosted the dungeon since time immemorial and then served as a prison until recently. As a matter of fact, the prison came to dominate the fortress during the 19th century, thus becoming the metaphor for a relatively self-enclosed seaport. There exists a whole literature on the feel or spirit of places that casts its spell on writers and artists. Sinop with its aura would be a good candidate in this respect. Yet a recently drawn literary map of Turkey left Sinop blank. The paper first confirms this impression by identifying the few marginal and passing references to Sinop in modern Turkish literature. Then it explores Sinop through its literary representation in Nazlı Eray’s novel, Sis kelebekleri (‘Butterflies in the fog’, in Turkish, 2003). Whereas she prefers to characterize her work magic realist, her literary critics also qualify it as fantastic or surrealist, and be that as it may, its connection with Sinop is very strong, all the more so for its metaphorical function as a claustrophobic and repressive prison that became the inevitable ‘guesthouse’ for many a writer and political prisoner, and therefore begs for a closer investigation. Because this paper looks for evidence in literature for the representation of a place and its feel, it engages in a constant dialogue with the pioneering work of Gaston Bachelard that investigated from a phenomenological viewpoint the poetics of space. While Bachelard serves us as a companion in this work, his work supplies us with successive commentaries. In this paper we substitute a ‘literary archaeology’ for the severely handicapped real archaeology of the ancient city via Eray’s fiction. This task is made even more difficult because her book covers only the modern period. We thus have to make her ‘silences’ speak out as evidence for the missing by starting from the function of the fortress-turned prison as a contemporary ‘memory place’ but also as a repository of innocence and youth as manifest in old photographs. The theoretical framework of this study entails two components deliberately brought into contact to address the underlying research question. The first is a transdisciplinary (across the social sciences and history) theorising of the Black Sea world as a ‘unit of analysis’. Second consists of a ‘literary space’ approach somewhat overlapping with the ‘literary geography’ conception. As far as the literary space goes, all space, real or imaginary, in the fiction concerned is covered. As far as literary geography is concerned, the focus is limited in this case to the content and the meaning of the book, without going as far as the post-textual process of general reception and continuous reinterpretation by the reading public. Hence Nazlı Eray’s authorial intention and my reading of her text are foregrounded to serve the underlying research objective. It is argued that she deploys two ‘dream devices’ in construing her representation of Sinop. First is to do with her playful engagement with writing espace/temps. Thanks to the limited connectivity of Sinop, it becomes a potential candidate for being a ‘microcosm’ or a ‘fractal’. Moreover, it is as if time does not exist in Sinop, except for its specific expressions in space, put differently, when time is thus eliminated, space becomes everything. Sinop thus becomes primarily a matter of physical – and not human – geography, that is, consists first and foremost of a series of combinations of land, sea, and sky as refracted through a crystal. This brings us to her second dream device, her highly imaginative re-peopling of this now all-the-more unpopulated space by a mix of interactive ‘historical’, ‘local’, ‘international’, and ‘fairy’ characters with the main character Nazlı strolling, hopping, and flying among them as a proxy for the writer Eray. This paper focuses on Sinop with the purpose of ultimately bringing it under scrutiny as a ‘microcosm’ of the Black Sea world. This presupposes a knowledge of the Black Sea world, to be deployed as a lens in approaching the specifics of Sinop. The local, seemingly isolated from the macrocosm, functions in all its complexity here also as a figurative expression for the whole. Literature and history thereby come together to fill a void and cast a new light on Sinop’s relationship to the Black Sea. Microcosmic as it is, Sinop also approximates to a complex multi-layered fractal in this respect. What we observe in Sinop has its counterparts in the rest of the Black Sea world. Hence the projection from the specific to the general waits to be realised in forthcoming works by contemporary and future scholars.
Conclusion
Conclusion
(Conclusion)
- Author(s):Yordan Ljuckanov
- Language:English
- Subject(s):Language and Literature Studies, Geography, Regional studies, Human Geography, Regional Geography, Theoretical Linguistics, Studies of Literature, Historical Linguistics, Other Language Literature, Georgian literature
- Page Range:37-53
- No. of Pages:17
- Keywords:names of the Black Sea; self-confinement to sea; (self-)ban from sea; sea and the notion of freedom; "bitter sea"; Khaldia and Chaldea
- Summary/Abstract:The text comments the research pieces gathered in Transponticae I (1-4), gravitating towards three topics: the possibility of an inflated belief in the link between, and of an insufficiently grounded association of, sea and freedom (or sea and resistance to oppression); the cultural-historical significance of (self)ban from sea and the ensuing importance of Bulgarian and Georgian, and Armenian, Kurdish and Kabyle matter for this volume; the power of antique (ancient and medieval) topoi over modern imagination and self-expression
Indexes
Indexes
(Indexes)
- Contributor(s):Yordan Ljuckanov (Editor)
- Language:English, French
- Subject(s):History, Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, General Reference Works, Geography, Regional studies
- Page Range:13-89
- No. of Pages:77
- Keywords:personal names; geographical names; titles of works of arts; notions
- Summary/Abstract:The indexes of titles and of notions have two versions each - a French- and an English-language one.
