Duplicate place name

[Rockdoc]

Place names in this part of the world are the bane of our lives, of course, and it doesn't help that some are duplicated. I've come across what must be a duplicate today but I can't find it.

In July 1916, 24th AAS had No 1 Gun at Ormanli and No 2 Gun at Orljak. Several times, No 1 Gun has recorded planes travelling between Demir-Hissar and Kukush. I had assumed they meant the Kukus(h) near Janes, which wouldn't be out of order, Except it can't be. I've now come across a record for 26th July where they say that No 1 Gun fired at a plane over Kukush town. With a maximum range around 7,500 yards, this Kukush must be within five miles of Ormanli but I can't find it on the Austrian map. The Section moved back to the XII Corps area a few days later but is definitely on the Struma when this was written.

Any thoughts?

Keith

Edit For Ormanli read Kopriva, throughout.

[apwright]

Hi Keith,

Like you I can't find any likely locations near Ormanli (Dasochori).

Two possible explanations occur to me:

1. They mixed up Serres and Kukuš/Kilkis - the 2 largest towns in the region outside Salonika. On the Struma Front, only Serres and perhaps Demirhissar could be regarded as "towns". But Ormanli to Serres is at least 15 miles as the crow flies...

2. No.1 gun wasn't at Ormanli but at, say, somewhere like Sermenli (now Xirovrysi, 3 miles north of Kilkis). How sure are you of the handwriting?

Adrian

[Rockdoc]

I'm absolutely certain that No 1 Gun was on the Struma, Adrian. It left Kukus (spelled this way in the Diary) on 21st June for Orljak and camped at Likovan the same day. They moved to Kopriva (sorry, not Ormanli. My mistake) on 24th. All entries recorded at this position use the spelling Kukush.

The Section left the Struma on 27th July. No 1 Gun says that it "camped at 12th Corps HQ Salonika" while No 2 Gun says it stayed overnight "at RE Base Park, Monastir Road, after reporting to 12 Corps". The two Subs met up at Dudular (presumably the military station) on 28th for travel to Janes but severe weather hindered them badly. They eventually got from Janes to Causica, where the Section dug in on the slopes of La Croix Blanche.

I've found a village marked as Cücülük, to the south-east of Kopriva. I presume that's a Turkish name? If so, I wonder what its Greek name was?

Keith

[apwright]

I wonder what its Greek name was?

Τσιουτσιλίκοβον - Tsioutsilikovon

but this is merely an approximate rendering in Greek (plus the Katharevousa neuter noun ending -n) of the Bulgarian name Чучулигово, pronounced Chuchuligovo. (There's no /ch/ sound in Greek, so they use <ts>)

The village probably didn't exist before the Turks arrived. It's inhabitants were mostly Bulgarian Christians until the Balkan Wars.

Whether Chuchuligovo comes from the Turkish Cücülük (?Çüçülik) or vice versa, I have not been able to discover.

But the pronunciation suggested by the Austrian map is "Tsutsuluk", according to their Croatian-based transliteration system, where <c> = /ts/ and <č> = /ch/ (= modern Turkish <ç>), so either they got it wrong, or maybe some elements of the local population did pronounce it with <ts>, Greeks for instance.

The point of all this nonsense is that none of the locals, nor indeed the Austrian army for that matter, would have pronounced the <c> as a hard /k/ sound, so it's very hard to see how the name could be corrupted to resemble Kukuš/Kukush - except perhaps by the monolingual Brits who see a <c> and think <k>... Maybe the soldiers called it Kukush informally because it was easier to pronounce and was a name they'd heard before? But that still doesn't explain why they would refer to what was little more than an abandoned cluster of shacks (70 houses in 1910) as a town.

The new Greek name for Cücülük is Anagennisi, meaning "rebirth" or "revival". It was resettled in the 1920s by Greek refugees from the Kars region of eastern Turkey.

It's Pandektis entry is here:

http://pandektis.ekt.gr/dspace/handle/10442/172448

And it even has a page to itself on Bulgarian Wikipedia:

http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A7%D1%83%D1%87%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE_(%D0%9D%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%A1%D1%8F%D1%80)

Sorry for all the useless information but, well, you did ask...

Adrian

[Rockdoc]

You're quite right, Adrian. I did ask!

It's an enigma, isn't it? The Sub-Section had been in the Janes/Kukus area immediately before moving to the Struma so it wasn't as if they weren't familiar with the name. Even allowing for the normal elasticity is naming the gun positions - for example, I've found one named for Karasouli that's several kilometres north of there up in the hills - there's no way I can see that a position anywhere close to Kopriva would have been able to see Kukus. The best explanation is probably phonetic writing of a mispronunciation, as you suggest. You tell me that Causica was pronounce more like Howshitza but the spellings in various Diaries make it clear that the British called it Cow-sika or Cor-sika.

Thanks (I think!)

Keith