Islamilainen hautakivi ottomaaniajan myrskyisistä konteksteista vuonna 1823/1824 Luoteis-Kreikasta. (Finnish)

The deceased, who is destinated to dwell in Paradise, has moved from the house oftransience to the house of eternity. (English)

The name Piroño, 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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