The Pontic Greek community of Madan was founded in 1763 by Greeks from the Black Sea region of Turkey who came to work in the copper mine. Most of the community emigrated to Greece in the 1990s.

The recording was made in Thessaloniki in 2007 by Katherine Hodgson, and transcribed by Katherine Hodgson and Anna Kotanidou. It is an extract from a corpus of approximately 12 hours of transcribed sound recordings of Pontic Greek speakers from Armenia (Madan and Hankavan) collected as part of Katherine Hodgson’s postgraduate dissertation in Historical and Balkan Linguistics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2008), supervised by Professor Christos Tzitzilis.

The main speaker is Levan (Levusha) Mushkidianov, male, born in 1925 (aged 82 at the time of recording). He was born in Georgia to a Greek father from Madan and a Georgian mother, moved to Madan aged 5, and lived there until he was 71, when he came to Thessaloniki. He attended school until the 6th class. From 1932 to 1938 it was a Greek-medium school, from 1938, Russian-medium. He worked in the copper smelting plant of Alaverdi. He spoke Pontic Greek, Russian, Armenian, and Georgian, as well as some Turkish and some Standard Modern Greek.

The interviewer is Anna Kotanidou, female, aged about 30 at the time of recording. She was born in Madan to a Greek father from Madan and an Armenian mother, attended Russian-medium school in Madan and Russian-medium university in Ukraine, and moved to Thessaloniki in her early twenties. She speaks Pontic Greek, Russian, Armenian, and Standard Modern Greek.
Levusha’s wife Rosa, aged about 78 at the time of recording, also makes a few comments.
