Coming into central Trabzon from the west, the traveller is met by these two dancers—metal, but entirely recognisable in motion.
Georgia is close, and one’s thoughts turn naturally to the lezginka, that headlong Caucasian dance of pointed toes and flashing daggers. But no: this is not it. Despite a substantial Laz population, the cultural code of this coastline was set, over many centuries, chiefly by the Pontic Greeks.
What we are looking at is the horon.
A word you already know
Turkish horon comes straight from the Greek χορός (khorós)—which meant both the dance and the people dancing it. And you have that word already, several times over.
Every chorus in the language is it. So is a choir, a chorale, and every piece of choreography—which is, literally, dance-writing. A carol was a ring-dance with singing before it was a Christmas hymn.
That double sense is the point. In a Greek play the chorus did not merely stand and sing; it moved, in formation, as one body. The word never distinguished the singing from the stepping, because nobody did.
The dance in armour
The horon’s roots run back to the ancient pyrrhichios, the armed war dance, particularly esteemed by the Spartans, who taught it to boys as a form of drill: a dance of formation, of rhythm and of spirit.
English keeps that word too, in a corner where you would not look for it. A pyrrhic in prosody—a metrical foot of two short syllables—is named after that dance, after the quick double beat of men stepping in armour. (It has nothing to do with the Pyrrhic victory; that is King Pyrrhus of Epirus, and a separate misfortune.)
The paradox
Which brings us to the odd part. The Pontic Greeks have very nearly vanished from Türkiye—history, politics, and above all the population exchange of 1923, which moved something like a million and a half people according to their religion and asked nobody’s opinion about their dancing.
The people went. The dance stayed. More than stayed: the horon is now one of the region’s calling cards, performed at festivals and weddings, taught in schools, and—as you can see—cast in metal at the entrance to the city.
A community can be removed from a coastline in the course of a single year. Its chorus, apparently, cannot.
Watch the winners of the 2010 horon competition let rip. That is Trabzon energy in its natural state:
