common lexicon that includes many Romeika words. Even when they are not fluent in Romeika, almost everyone in the valley would casually use and understand these words while Turkish and Romeika words and suffixes are interchangeably used or mixed together to form local expressions. This shared vocabulary of the Valley generally consists of swear words, such as pisoli (dick), ramabul (anasını siktiğim, similar to “son of a bitch”), or kundema (fuck, to fuck);
the names of animals, such as gogli/kohli/kohlidi (snail), kunkuna (weasel?
raccoon?); the names of plants, such as ifteri (fern), likarba (a local species of [huckle]berries), tsifin (a type of flower), zaguda (a local herb), or hamucera (wild strawberry); local dishes, such as havits, pishi, tsumur, or males; tools, such as kudal/fderodi(ka) (a wooden mixer); general/abstract expressions, such as aboskal (something to do, a duty to perform) or emrodika (the eldest child of the house); toponyms and estates, such as village names, geographical spots as in kaban (steep slope of a mountain) or bizavira (an uphill road that is not so steep), family holdings as in Gargar, Kalençsi, Kunkuna, Similo, Rizi, or Vartanlı, pastures as in Garester, Mağlakambo, Manoşer, Ma’akambos, Staronar, Mavreyas, or Vartan.247
II. Toponyms and the Persistence of Geographical References
Toponyms constitute another aspect of the anthropological analysis of Romeika in the Valley. All settlements have a Turkish name that is assigned through the name-changing programmes of the state in 1960s with the cooperation of local notables. And yet, almost all villages have an old Romeika name, too, which has survived up to this day with universal prevalence among locals, who sometimes fail to remember the new Turkish names. This state policy to Turkify the geography was specifically focused and detailed in the area as most of the geography had Romeika names in the case of the Valley. The ministerial directive below, from March 1964, as addressed to the Governorate of Trabzon,
247 İsmail Çolak, “Coğrafi Yapı [Geography],” in Geçmişten Geleceğe Çaykara Dernekpazarı, p. 190 – 191.
exemplifies the significance of the Romeika toponyms and their perception by the state:
1- All names of villages, which are included in the administrative division of your province, in reference to village names notes that were sent in this regard, were examined by the expertise commissions that had been formed within the Ministry, [and] names of those villages that bear a foreign name were changed.
[…]
2- This list, consisting of 36 pages and includes Turkified [Türkçeleştirilen] new names of foreign and ambiguity-producing [iltibasa yer veren] village [and] neighbourhood names; [while those]
old neighbourhood names that were preserved as they are Turkish, in the province of Trabzon, was approved by the Ministerial Office in 3/3/1964.248
One should not be surprised to see “foreign” (yabancı) as an adjective in the bureaucratic descriptions of local toponyms that inhabitants of these valley systems have been using for centuries. As the state has gradually renamed all non-Turkish geographical features through decades-long efforts, intensifying in the east and southeast, where Armenian and Kurdish names dominate the landscape, and the northeast where Lazi, Hemshin, and Romeika names are pervasively used to designate physical surroundings including rivers, mountains, pastures, villages, crossings, and others. “The Southeast, and to a lesser extent the East, with a prevalent Kurdish population and a strong Armenian heritage were the [Expert] Commission [for Name Change]’s priority target,” claims Kerem Öktem in his analysis of changes of toponyms in the Turkish context,
“followed by the Black Sea region with its significant communities of Armenian-
248 Ministry of Interior Directive, dating 1964, numbered 22105/7304. Emphases are mine. In Turkish:
Trabzon Valiliğine
31/10/1941, 29/12/1956 gün ve Daimi Encümen Kalemi 100/4709; Yazı İşleri Kalemi 4554/278 sayılı yazılarınızın karşılığıdır:
1 – Vilayetiniz idari taksimatına dahil bütün köylerin adları, bu hususta gönderilen köy esami fişleri de nazara alınarak, Vekaletimizde teşkil edilmiş bulunan ihtisas komisyonunca tetkik edilmiş olup, bunlardan yabancı ad taşıyan köylerin adları değiştirilmiştir.
Bu maksatla ve Vilayetin idari taksimatına göre hazırlanan köy esame listeleri, her sahife mühürlenmek suretile, (31) sahifeden ibaret olarak, mahsus bir dosya içerisinde gönderilmiştir.
2 – Trabzon ilinin, yabancı olan ve iltibasa yer veren köyü mahalleleri adlarının Türkçeleştirilen yeni adlarını ve Türkçe olduğu için alakonan eski mahalle adlarını ihtiva eden ve (36) sayfadan ibaret olan işbu liste 3/3/1964 tarihinde Bakanlık Makamınca onanmıştır.
Asan, Pontos Kültürü, p. 33. Reproduced from Altay Yiğit, Çaykara Folkloru, Kent: Ankara, 1981.
As a note, iltibas is defined as the confusion between two things that resemble each other significantly by a number of dictionaries. Nişanyan Dictionary gives the meaning of the word as bulaşma, bulanıklık (turbidity, blurriness, contagion, ambiguity) while TDK Dictionary indicates andırışma [reflexive resemblance between two things].
(Hemşin), Lazuri- and Greek-speaking communities.”249 Almost three quarters of all toponyms, around 72%, in Trabzon were changed in the decades-long Turkification of the geography by the state, which emerges as one of the greatest concentrations in the country and the highest in the Black Sea region, followed loosely by other provinces of the littoral: Artvin with 39%, Giresun with 34%, and Rize with 33%.250
As they produce ambiguity and confusion with regards to Turkishness of not only geography but also its locals, “iltisaba yer veren” as the directive asserted, these old names were changed over the course of years, producing and implanting a Turkified geography above a local one, sometimes producing a two-dimensional socio-cultural geography within which local and official references would not easily match, as I discuss further in Chapter VII. Based on my field work in the Valley, it must be highlighted that locals mostly keep using these old names and generally struggle with the new ones, especially those of villages, as these Turkish names are rarely a part of non-official interactions. Settlements overall preserve their old toponyms albeit in variant forms as in the differentiation between local variants of Romeika, as in Şerah and Saraxo.
Especially the elderly locals generally have difficulty in correctly identifying new Turkish names of villages and pastures, as they are accustomed to the old Romeika names of these settlements, with the exception of the district centre, Çaykara, and the Lake, Uzungöl, to which they are heavily exposed through their interactions with state institutions and tourism, as I discuss in Chapter VIII. This confusion around new names, while old names are stable and well established for locals, needs to be highlighted specifically as an indication of the organic prevalence of Romeika toponyms for inhabitants of the Valley while new names need to be mediated, and are harder to recall.
249 Kerem Öktem, “The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, Vol. 7, 2008, Paragraph 44.
250 Öktem, “The Nation’s Imprint,” Table 3.
Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey, p. 243.
III. Future of the Language
Those who live outside the Valley generally retain their cultural and linguistic heritage and connection to their hemşehris and neighbours from the Valley; yet they generally fail at transmitting the language to younger generations, and their children. A number of respondents who live outside the Valley, in Turkey and abroad, indicated that they taught only Turkish to their children highlighting the threat of extinction for the language,251 a tendency that is especially strong in the case of communities living outside the Valley.
Children in the Valley grow more accustomed to Romeika, though their vocabulary and proficiency lag behind their parents and grandparents because of a number of factors, which might include growing exposure to Turkish through television and radio broadcasts, the significant extension of compulsory education in Turkish in village and district settings, the potential socio-political implications of using Romeika in public which limit its use and transmission, and the diminishing impact of the seclusion of villages where Romeika is casually and natively spoken owing to immigration and modernisation. Thus, Romeika is used extensively by older generations, in its most fluent form, by men and women alike, although children raised in the Valley have a more limited vocabulary and fluency. Yet, when considered together with the incessant outflow of population from the Valley because of economic and socio-cultural reasons, especially for the younger generation, the future of Romeika seems uncertain as those who could fluently speak the language decrease day by day.
251 UNESCO denotes Romeika as “definitely endangered.”