Pastures of Love, Mountains of Sacrifice: Ιmaginings of Pontic Homelands in Parakathi Singing and the Postmemory of Trauma

Abstract:The Pontic Greeks or Pontians play an important role in contemporary Greek history. Pontic identity and collective memory narratives wield significant influence over the national memory, and particularly the memories of Asia Minor and of the 1922 Catastrophe. Pontians commemorate and postmemorialize their ancestral pre-1922 homeland in the practice of music socialization known as parakathi or muhabeti. The performance of the parakathi repertoire involves an intertextual and dialogical negotiation of broader narratives of Pontic memory, especially nationalist Pontic folklore and representations of transgenerational trauma, thus exemplifying the complexity of collective postmemory practices as involving both highly personal processes of remembering and canonistic narratives of a usable past. Emotionality is central in the Pontic practices of the post/memory of Asia Minor.