Abtracts
Greeks in the Russian Empire during the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries
The end of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries saw a wave of emigrations from the Balkans to the newly conquered Black Sea littoral regions of the Russian Empire. The year 1774 has been considered the starting point for such migration from the Greek world. In fact, migrations to the border regions of the Ukraine from Southeastern Europe and also from their Russian hinterland commenced earlier. As has been noted on many occasions, it is not always easy to differentiate the ethnicities of the migrating groups.
This presentation sought to examine the interconnections between migrations of the early and mid-eighteenth century, and the wave of migrations that followed the 1774 Treaty of Kucuk Kainardzha. Three brief stories illustrated the ways in which social institutions supported migration.
The first is a story of pioneers dwelling for the most part in monasteries in the city and movement within “a Balkan migration stream” that took merchants, monks and others from a variety of locations within the Ottoman world to the capital of Muscovy. The story concerns patronage and the giving, receiving and baptism of household slaves in Moscow from the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The exchange of slaves was a form of reciprocity that strengthened total packet that made up the patron-client relationship. In the absence of real kinship between the client and his patron, this had to be created. The baptism of slaves served to legitimise the giving of slaves by according it religious significance. It also tied the giver, the receiver, the member of the clergy and the slave into a model of spiritual (or ritual) kinship, with the respective owner cast as a father to his “child”. The giver, the receiver and the member of the clergy were thus cast as spiritual (or ritual) co-parents.
The second story constitutes an example of 'chain migration' and of movement within the Balkan migration stream at its apex. It concerns surety and the reworking of identities within a merchant Brotherhood in Nezhin in the 1780s and early 1790s.
During this period bureaucratic state structures were trying to determine who had the right to receive the benefits from belonging to this “Greek” Brotherhood. In doing so, they contributed towards the formulation of categories and engaged themselves in classifying the movers who arrived in the Russian Empire. The census of 1782 in combination with the change-over from Brotherhood to Greek Magistracy in 1785 signalled a transition to increased bureaucratic control, with the state itself henceforth determining who came under the Brotherhood/Greek Magistracy’s jurisdiction. Thus, as the state sought to regulate spaces within and beyond its control the categories used could not and did not stay put. They belong less to the ethnic situation at the points of origin, and more to relationships such as a system of surety developed between migrants, the relationship between migrants and bureaucrats and the refractions these gave rise to at the points of destination.
The third story examines the uses of God-parenthood in the port-city of Odessa in the early nineteenth century. This last considers migration to an urbanised environment should probably be considered separately from earlier migrations. Nonetheless, the newer port city migrants sought to build links to earlier arrivals, to the Greeks from Nezhin and Odessa. In creating such links newer migrants became integrated into the urban ethnic sub-economy. Migrants succeeded in integrating themselves into the ethnic economy in part through the institutions of God-parenthood and serving as witnesses at marriages. As would be expected given the link between God-parenthood and social status, far more ‘old’ Odessan and Nezhin Greeks were requested to be Godparents and witnesses at weddings than new arrivals.
Thus a flexible ritual-kinship connection based on religious ceremony was used, providing newer migrants access to jobs and resources through an ethnic network. These links served to connect earlier migrants with access to resources and newer migrants without them. But there is a shift from the situation in Moscow. There the gift and baptism of household slaves seems to have cut across the flexible conceptions of ethnic origin described to a degree that did not characterise Odessa.
All three narratives provide instances of kinship that go beyond consanguinity, and illustrate the importance of extending networks as a means of providing protection and eliciting trust. The aim in the presentation, however, was to go beyond an analysis of institutions that foster community in any given location, and so to observe changes in the systems that supported movement and migration during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Finally, such connections between migrants were to prove an important factor in the reworking of migrant identities. Somewhat schematically, the presentation suggested that the greater the role of an impersonal economy as a semi-autonomous sphere of human activity, the more an ideology of belonging to an ethnic group was required to foster trust and support a culture of movement: that was the role enacted by a diaspora Romaic identity in the eighteenth-century Russian Empire. Symbolic ties to original or imaginary homelands should not be taken as a given, however. As seen in Nezhin in the 1780s and 1790s, they were dynamic, narrated to meet the needs of given political circumstances.
- Iannis Carras, Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg
The paper will be published as an article in a volume edited by Olga Katsiardi-Hering and Maria Stassinopoulou entitled Across the Danube: Southeastern Europeans and their Travelling Identities, 17th-19th Centuries (Brill, forthcoming in 2017)
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