CRASSH

This paper sheds light on the Greek community of Gelendzhik. It examines the relation developed by members of a diaspora with their city and region of settlement, situated on the Russian Black Sea coast. Greeks from the Ottoman Pontus were among the first settlers in the region after the Russian conquest of this part of “Novorossiya” in the 1860s.Their presence in Gelendzhik as an integral part of the local ethnic structure has been continuous ever since. And that is, despite the fact that the composition of the local Greek population hasn’t stopped “renewing” as a result of successive voluntary and involuntary outgoing and incoming movements caused by critical events such as the October Revolution and the Russian civil war, the Second World War and Stalin’s deportations of 1942-1949, and finally the disintegration of the USSR. In the post-Soviet context, Gelendzhik is turning into an emblematic “landmark” of the Greek presence in both Russia and the Black Sea littoral. The paper discusses representations of territoriality and migration as well as discourses and claims of indigenousness, autochthony, and “insider” status among a population commonly qualified (and treated) as diasporic, cosmopolitan, deterritorialized and alien. Pontic Greeks attempt to comfort their “minority condition” by juxtaposing alternative narratives of nativeness which underline their long and deep roots in the cultural area of the Black Sea.