Marriage, Loss, and the Catastrophe

Around 1907 Sophia Saoulidou married Jordan Hotokouridou; a son was born to them and died in infancy, and her husband disappeared c. 1914 into the Ottoman forced-labour battalions, never to return. These private losses unfolded against the destruction of the Ottoman Greeks between roughly 1914 and 1923 — the persecution of the Pontic Greeks and the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe — the world-shattering background to Sophia’s uprooting.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Pontic Greek; 20th-c. woman ascetic)

Marriage, c. 1907

The devotional accounts of Sophia’s life report that, in the ordinary way of a Pontic Greek woman of her generation, she married in her twenties: around 1907 she was wed to Jordan (Iordanis) Hotokouridou — the surname also transliterated Hortokoridou or Chotokouridis — and by that marriage she is known in some notices by her married name, Hotokouridou (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura,” Mystagogy Resource Center; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). As with everything in her early life, this rests on late hagiographic attestation rather than on documents, and it is reported here per the repository’s discipline (§3.5) as what the accounts transmit: the marriage of a Pontic Orthodox couple in the Trebizond region, on the eve of the decade that would destroy their world.

A child followed. The fuller Life records that a son was born — some accounts date his birth to 1910 — and that he died young, in early childhood or infancy; others say only that a newborn died soon after his birth, or that the infant did not long survive the loss of the father (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy Resource Center; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). [Disputed: the son's dates — "born 1910, died 1912" in some accounts; "a newborn who died shortly after his birth" (and, in some tellings, soon after the husband's disappearance) in others. The sources agree that a son was born and died in early childhood; they do not agree on the years.] However the dates are resolved, the substance is a young mother’s bereavement of her only child — the first of the two losses that emptied her family life before she was forty.

The Husband’s Disappearance, c. 1914

The second loss came with the war. The accounts report that Sophia’s husband Jordan disappeared around 1914, taken — as were great numbers of Greek and Armenian men of military age across the Ottoman Empire — into the amele taburu, the Ottoman forced-labour battalions, and that he was never heard from again (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura,” Mystagogy Resource Center; OrthodoxWiki, “Sophia of Kleisoura”). [Disputed: the year and manner of the husband's loss — most accounts say he vanished into the labour battalions c. 1914 during the First World War and never returned; the exact circumstances, and whether he died in the battalions, in captivity, or otherwise, are unknown and unrecoverable from the sources.]

The fate the accounts describe was that of tens of thousands. From the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War in late 1914, non-Muslim men — Greeks and Armenians above all — were conscripted not as combatants but into unarmed labour battalions, set to road-building, portering, quarrying, and other heavy work under conditions of deliberate neglect, starvation rations, exposure, and disease; a large proportion never came home, and the amele taburu became, in effect, one of the instruments by which the empire’s Christian male population was destroyed (general histories of the Ottoman labour battalions and of the persecution of the Ottoman Greeks and Armenians during the First World War; Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, Harvard University Press, 2006, on the wartime destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities). That Sophia’s husband simply “disappeared” into this system, leaving no grave and no word, is exactly the shape of countless Pontic and Armenian family stories of these years. By about 1914, then — a widow in fact if not in confirmed report, and already bereft of her child — Sophia had lost the whole of the family life she had entered around 1907.

The Destruction of the Pontic Greeks

Her private catastrophe was one thread in a general one. The years from roughly 1914 to 1923 saw the systematic uprooting and destruction of the Greek Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire — the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea coast among them — through massacre, deportation, forced marches into the interior, the labour battalions, starvation, and disease. The Pontic Greeks, concentrated in and around Trebizond and the mining districts inland, were subjected during and after the First World War to deportations and killings that contemporaries and later historians have described as amounting, for the Ottoman Greeks as a whole, to a campaign of destruction paralleling the Armenian genocide of 1915 (Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, on the destruction and expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks; general histories of the fate of the Ottoman Greeks and of the Pontic Greek communities, c. 1914–1923). Whole villages of the Pontic hinterland were emptied; the survivors were scattered, many toward the Caucasus and the Russian Black Sea coast, others eventually toward Greece.

Upon this decade of war and persecution came its culmination in the west: the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922. The Greek army’s advance into Anatolia after the First World War ended in rout in the summer of 1922; the Turkish nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal drove the Greek forces and the Greek civilian population toward the coast, and in September 1922 the great Greek and Armenian city of Smyrna (Izmir) was taken and largely burned, its Christian quarters destroyed and a vast refugee population crushed onto the quayside in scenes that became the defining image of the disaster (general histories of the Asia Minor Catastrophe; Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, on the fall of Smyrna and the collapse of Greek Asia Minor). The Catastrophe ended nearly three thousand years of Greek life in Anatolia. Though its epicentre was Ionia and the Aegean coast rather than distant Pontus, it sealed the fate of all the Ottoman Greeks: there could be no return, and the surviving Christian population of Anatolia — Pontic Greeks included — was now a refugee people.

The formal end came the following winter. The Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923, made the uprooting permanent and compulsory: the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia (with narrow exceptions) and the Muslims of Greece (likewise) were exchanged across the new frontier by treaty, a compulsory transfer of well over a million people that ratified, in the language of international law, an expulsion that violence had already largely accomplished (the Lausanne Convention, 30 January 1923; Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006, the central study of the exchange). For the Pontic Greeks, Lausanne was the legal seal on a catastrophe already complete. The world of Sophia’s childhood — the Trebizond region, its villages and monasteries, its Pontic speech and its Marian devotion — was, by 1923, gone.

The Ground of a New Life

It is essential to read Sophia’s later asceticism against this background rather than apart from it. The eldress who slept two hours a night by a cold hearth, who owned nothing, who was taken for a madwoman and answered every hardship “I look up,” was a woman who had already lost, before she was forty, her child, her husband, her home, and her entire native world (Sanidopoulos, “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura,” Mystagogy Resource Center; on the catastrophe as the setting of the Anatolian-refugee saints, cf. Clark, Twice a Stranger, 2006). Her poverty was not first a chosen austerity but the literal condition of a Pontic refugee; her radical detachment grew in soil that history had already stripped bare. The accounts do not present her losses as the cause of her sanctity — grace is not manufactured by grief — but they do present them as its occasion, the emptying that left her, in her own idiom, with nothing to look to but heaven (Sanidopoulos, Mystagogy Resource Center; §3.5, reporting the hagiographic interpretation as such).

This same catastrophe produced a whole generation of Anatolian-refugee figures in modern Greek Orthodoxy, and it is the reason Sophia is so often set beside them: the refugee children of Cappadocia and Pontus who became, in Greece, clairvoyant elders and ascetics steeped in the devotion to the Panagia they had carried out of a burning homeland (on the shared Anatolian-refugee milieu, general histories of the 1922–1923 uprooting and its religious afterlife; cf. St. Paisios, himself a refugee child of Farasa in Cappadocia). What Sophia shared with them was not a documented personal connection but a common formation in loss. From that loss she was carried, in the great refugee exodus, across the Aegean to Greece and, in time, to a monastery hearth at Kleisoura — the journey traced in the next section (cf. Uprooted to Greece).

References

Sanidopoulos, John. “Eldress Sophia the Ascetic of Kleisoura.” Mystagogy Resource Center (Orthodox Christianity Then and Now), resource page and translations, c. 2010–2011. (The marriage c. 1907 to Jordan Hotokouridou; the son who died young; the husband’s disappearance into the labour battalions c. 1914; the losses as the setting of her later asceticism.)
OrthodoxWiki. “Sophia of Kleisoura.” (Summary Life: marriage, the death of the son, and the husband’s disappearance.)
Clark, Bruce. Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. (The destruction and expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks; the fall of Smyrna and the Asia Minor Catastrophe; the 1923 compulsory population exchange.)
Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations. Lausanne, 30 January 1923. (The compulsory exchange of the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia and the Muslims of Greece.)
General histories of the Ottoman labour battalions (amele taburu) and of the persecution of the Ottoman Greeks and Armenians, c. 1914–1923. (The forced-labour battalions into which non-Muslim men, including Sophia’s husband, were taken; the wartime destruction of the Pontic Greek communities.)