Summary:
Timo Sironen, An Islamic Sepulchral Stele of the tempestuous Ottoman contexts from North-Western Greece, dated to 1832/1824
The sepulchral stele, evidently of an upper-class Ottoman citizen of the town of Paramythia, only 20 miles south of the border with today’s Albania, is a good example of the type of monument that recently has been object of basic research of Ottomanian history, both in Greece and Turkey, but also elsewhere, as in Great Britain. The text is dated to the hijra (in Arabic, ’the migration’ [of the Prohet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina]) 1239, that is to the years 1823–1824 of Christian era. These years were the most intense in the Independence Fight begun by the Greeks in 1821, mostly south of Epirus, but e.g. Ali, the pasha of Yanya (Greek Iannina), close to Paramythia, was defeated and killed in 1822.
My editio princeps i.e., the first edition of the text reads as follows, with Arabic in bold, and Ottoman Turkish in italics:
Qad intalaqa l-marhűm
jannat-makân min dâr
al-fanâ ilâ dâr al-baqâ
Zaynal Agha Ibn Abű Bakr Aghâ
line 5 Pîrűnîű rűhîjűn
al-Fâtiha.
sana 1239
It is reasonable to give here below a reading also in the Ottoman Turkish transcription, because Ottoman Turkish is the real sociolinguistic context of our sepulchral stele: Arabic has never had a status, not even an unofficial status, in the societies of South-Western Balkan – the local population in and around Paramythia in the 19th century spoke and read OttomanTurkish, Greek and/or Albanian. Our stele is linguistically partly Arabic and partly Ottoman Turkish (mostly line 5), in theory bilingual, but not in practice, as Arabic was then and there only a liturgic language. Paramythia of those days was a predominantly Muslim and Albanian town: in the neighbouring Aydonat (in Greek Hagios Donatus) 50 years later 33 per cent of the population were Muslim, but Paramythia in 1890 had 2006 inhabitants, of whom 1134, i.e. 57 per cent, were Muslim.
The words, especially the prepositions and the verb form, are lexically, and even more grammatically, pure Arabic, with the exception of lines 4 and 5:
Kad intakale el-merhűm
cennetmekân min dâri’
l-fenâ <’>ilâ dâri’l-bekâ <’>
Zeynel Âgâ ibn-i Ebű Bekir Âgâ
line 5 Pirońo rűhyçün
el-fâtiha.
sene 1239
In an English translation, with Arabic in bold and Ottoman Turkish in italics, this makes:
”The deceased, who is destinated to dwell in Paradise, has moved from the house of transience to the house of eternity. The Fatiha (for the soul of) Zeynel Agha son of Ebu Bekir Pirońo. Year 1239” (=AD 1823–1824)
The name Pirońo, in Greek Pronios, strangely enough, as I found out, is purely Albanian, although dressed in a Greek ”costume”: pron(j)ar means ’landowner’, and ’landlord’, pronë is ’(landed) property’. If we wished to translate the family name Pronios, it would be ”Mr. Farm-Possession-Gainer”, or ”Mr. Provisioner”, perfectly feudal in its context. We know that the Pronios family had been rich feudal lords in Paramythia already in the Byzantine period, and continued to be also later in the 19th century.
Not a trace of the Muslim or Albanian past of Paramythia is to be seen, with the exception of the stele of Zeynel Agha Pronios, son of Ebu Bekr Agha Pronios, finished up in the local museum, rather an happy exception than purely a casual fact. Some more or less rhetoric questions arise: the collection dates back to 1944 and it was donated to the local museum in September 1963. Could the longlasting suspicion/enmities, since the Independence fights of the 1820’s and the Balkan Wars (1912–13) have been by then forgotten? Or could some new kind of local atmosphere/identity have been born during or/and right after the World War II in North-Western Greece, near the border with Albania, ”thanks” to new invaders/enemies, namely the Italians and the Germans? Or could the surname of the original possessor of the collection, Mouselimis, contribute to explaining an eventual interest to include the Ottoman stele into the collection? Unambiguous explanations do not exist in this case, I fear. But we must not forget, not even in the context of this modest microhistoric document, that the increased tensions between the Greeks and the Turks in Istanbul lead to large violences, among others, in September 1955 due to the first crisis in Cyprus, then again, for the very same reason in December 1963, continuing in 1964 and still, after the invasion and division of the island in 1974. So I think it was a good thing that the stele in Paramythia was donated already in September 1963 and another fact perhaps securing its survival was that in May 2005 it was found by the Finnish team in the farthest room of the museum.
