Black Hole Poem by Huseyin Abudharr Ali Diakides

There's a black hole upon the Black Sea,

Missing 3,000 years of our history,

And cos of where I'm from they would attack me,

But where I'm from now is a mystery.



They called it the inhospitable sea,

Until we settled upon its shores,

So they renamed it the hospitable sea,

As its waters were alone no more.



And the sea fell in love with us,

Together we created a history so old,

From when Jason crossed her waters,

In order to find a fleece of gold.



From when Xenophon crossed our path,

After fighting in a war of the Persian throne,

And his defeated mercenaries passed through,

Our land on their long journey home.



From when our great King Mithridates,

Created an Empire that stretched across Anatolia,

And surrounded the entire Black Sea coast,

From the Balkans to Thrace and to Crimea.



And no one fought against Rome as long,

A greater foe than Hannibal was the poison king,

Became the hero of all Greeks and Persians,

Until eventually Pompey defeated him.



From when Strabo travelled as far as Ethiopia,

And recounted tales of Kush and Khemet,

From when Evagrius had eight evil thoughts,

From when Diogenes became a cynic.



What a glorious history now almost forgotten,

Who remembers us now except the survivors?

Kourtidis is forgot whilst Kemal's name lives on,

Who celebrates our polikare freedom fighters?



Now there's a black hole upon the Black Sea,

Missing a whole nation's identity,

The land is now full of ghosts and the people there

Are not who they were meant to be.



The Empire of Trebizon once stood proud,

But where is it now? It has gone,

How evil is genocide? It even steals the history,

So now Amisos is Samsun and Trebizond Trabzon.



Who now remember Alexios Komnenos?

Whom after Byzantium had fallen all around it,

Established and ruled the Trebizond Empire,

And one of the greatest dynasties was founded.



Where are those people now you ask?

For they no longer exist in the land of their name,

For a genocide not only erased life but history,

And we are one of history's greatest shames.



They destroyed every record of our existence,

Our entire identity was stolen away from us,

Even the latin names of nature had our name erased,

So now I'm from Sudan or Greece, but not from Pontus.



For being Greek we were attacked by the Turks,

And more than half our population was murdered,

Until most of our survivors fled to Russia,

Or to Greece where we were oppressed for being Turkish.



As a once mighty empire died it tried take us with it,

Then we suffered its partition in the population exchange,

Our wounds would stay open without any justice,

As we endured pain for longer than the Pontic Mountain Range.



So as the Kementche plays our sorrowful song,

We are still not ready yet to accept defeat,

Because the genocide wanted to erase our entire existence,

So as long as our culture lives it isn't complete.