Door het oog van de naald: het Cappadocisch Grieks

Cappadocian is an extremely endangered Greek dialect that was spoken in Central Turkey until the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923-1924. This involuntary emigration to Greece caused the near-extinction of this dialect. Nowadays the number of Cappadocian speakers and semi-speakers has decreased to approximately 2,800. Fortunately this very remarkable dialect, which was thoroughly influenced by the Turkish language, has been captured in many orally transmitted folktales that were recorded by philologists and dialectologists from the nineteenth century onwards. This paper presents a critical edition of a hitherto unpublished folktale: ‘The Shepherd’, a very short story in the Cappadocian subdialect of the village of Axo, recorded by Richard M. Dawkins. The edition is followed by a Dutch translation of ‘The Shepherd’ and a folkloristic discussion on its origin. This folktale is most likely one of the numerous versions of the story about the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops, best known from its variant in Homer’s Odyssey.