axali da uaxlesi istoria

DANKO TABOROŠI
American University of Beirut
TRANSPLANT FROM THE CAUCASUS: HISTORICAL OVERVIEW AND
THE CURRENT STATUS OF CIRCASSIANS IN THE BALKANS
Circassians are indigenous people of the northwestern Caucasus. Expelled from their ancestral lands by invading
Russians in the 19 th century, hundreds of thousands of them settled in the Balkans under Ottoman control.
With decline of the Ottoman Empire, most Circassians retreated from southeastern Europe to Anatolia. By the beginning
of the 20 th century, very few Circassians were left in the Balkans, and on the eve of the 21 st century only a
tiny community in Kosovo remained. The recent interethnic conflict in Kosovo reduced them to an even smaller
group, that nevertheless endure as the last Circassians in their adopted Balkan homeland.
This text aims to review the brief but tumultuous historical experience of Circassian people in the Balkans. It
provides an English-language introduction to this little known and unwitting encounter of Caucasus and Balkan
peoples that started nearly 150 years ago and still continues.
Circassians are indigenous people of the northwestern Caucasus area, where they have lived for thousands of
years 1 as a supra-ethnic group comprised of many distinct tribal, regional, and dialectical divisions 2 . Today,
however, the majority of them lives in a worldwide diaspora as a result of Russian takeover of their homeland 3 .
In 1864, Tsarist Russia completed its conquest of the Northern Caucasus, annexing the historical regions of
Circassia and Abkhazia and forcing most of the native people – who bitterly resisted the Russians for an entire
century – to seek refuge among their Muslim 4 co-religionists in the neighboring Ottoman Empire. Mass emigration
started immediately 5 and continued in waves so that over the next half century at least two million 6 persons from
the Northern Caucasus embarked on this journey of no return. Members of all tribal divisions of the Circassian
people went into the making of Circassian diaspora, which, occasionally subsumed several related northern
Caucasus ethnic groups 7 who shared the same fate in exile.
The exodus and subsequent dispersal of Circassians all over the Ottoman Empire has been described as “one
of the saddest [forced] emigrations ever recorded” 8 . Leaving Circassian shores by ships across the Black Sea, and
to a smaller extent by land routes, contingents of displaced people suffered heavy losses from the start. It is said
that they had problems adapting to new environments, which, combined with the difficult conditions faced by
1 For history of Circassians from time immemorial until the Middle Ages, see: Бетрозов Р., Этническая история адыгов с древнейших
времен до XVI в. (Нальчик, 1996).
2 Circassians' endonym (self-designation) is Adyge (Адыгэ in Cyrillic alphabet). They are comprised of peoples who speak two major
dialects and a number of mutually intelligible subdialects. Abadzekh, Bzhedugh, Egerukai, Khatukai, Makhosh, Mamkheg, Natukhai,
Shapsugh, Temirgoi, etc. speak Western (Adygean) dialects. Cherkess, Beslenei, Bakhsan, Kuban, Malka, Mozdok, etc. speak Eastern
(Beslenei and Kabardian) dialects. For a comprehensive catalogue of Circassian peoples and their respective subdivisions see Ronald
Wixman, The Peoples of the USSR, An Ethnographic Handbook (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1984). For geographic distribution of
well over a million speakers of Circassian languages, see: Gordon Raymond, Jr., ed., Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15 th edition
(Dallas, 2005). For an in-depth discussion of the entire language family to which Circassian belongs, see George Hewitt, North West
Caucasian, Lingua, 115 (2205), p. 91-145.
3 Jaimoukha Amjad, The Circassians: A Handbook (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001) discusses the numerous and widely dispersed
Circassian diaspora in detail in Chapter 5. The largest group is in Turkey, where about 1,100,000 Circassians are said to live in 890
villages. Significant communities are found in Syria (~30,000), Jordan (~40,000), Lebanon, Israel (~2,000 in the villages Kfar-Kama and
Rikhaniya), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Western Europe (Germany, Netherlands) and the United States (New Jersey), etc. Interestingly, Circassians
were expatriates even prior to Russian conquest of Northern Caucasus, probably at least since the Middle Ages. They had a tradition of
joining foreign armies as professional soldiers and were a major component of the famed Mamluks of Egypt.
4 Circassians were partly Christianized by the Georgians in the 13 th century and partly converted to Islam by the Tatars in the 17 th century.
Among Circassians who escaped to the Ottoman Empire, many were Christian who subsequently became Muslim in exile or persisted for
some time as Crypto-Christian converts to Islam. In the northern Caucasus, there are still Christian Circassians around Mozdok in the
Republic of North Ossetia – Alania.
5 Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), p. 66.
6 Suraiya Faroqhi, Bruce McGowan, Donald Quataert and Şevket Pamuk, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire: Volume
2, 1600-1914 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 795.
7 Abkhaz and Abaza (collectively known as Apswa) and Ubykh are all related northern Caucasus peoples who also left their homelands in
large numbers upon Russian conquest. The Ubykh are the only group that no longer exists in their homeland. In March 1864, the entire
Ubykh population, at least 30,000 people, chose to emigrate to Turkey rather than live under Russian rule; Ronald Wixman, The Peoples of
the USSR, An Ethnographic Handbook, p. 202. In exile, however, the Ubykh were assimilated by other Circassians and Turks and lost their
unique language. Ubykh language was not mutually intelligible with any other and is famous among linguists for having astonishing
eighty consonants (according to David Crystal, Language Death, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 56). The language
died with its last competent speaker, Tevfık Esenç, of Haci Osman village, near Manyas in Balıkesir province, October 1992.
8 Ezen Pitar, “Narodi koje su Turci doveli na Balkan” in Knjiga o Balkanu I (Beograd, Serbia: Balkanski Institut, 1936), p. 174-178.
404