Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  The Circassians in Israel now have a professional folk-dancing troupe, coached by a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Caucasus, and the children are well-educated about the history of their nation. But, in reaching out, they did find one problem. Despite being the smallest community, Israel’s Circassians are the only ones outside the old homeland to have preserved the language completely. It is so vigorously alive in Israel that even non-Circassian neighbours in Rehaniye speak it well.

  But it is hard to talk to compatriots in other countries. Young Circassians elsewhere speak Arabic, Turkish or even English.

  Take Sebahattin Diyner, a stern 75-year-old in the Turkish city of Kayseri, for example. He never thought he would visit the Caucasus, and he never thought his children would need the language that he grew up speaking. He was born after all in Turkey – a Turkey where saying you were not a Turk was a political act. He was a Circassian, and his parents taught him to be proud of it. But he did not advertise it.

  As the 1980s came to a close, however, change was bubbling over not only in his own country, where the economy’s growth was altering society profoundly, but in the Soviet Union too. Suddenly ethnic groups that had long been part of the happy communist family under the Russian ‘older brother’ could look around them and explore their past.

  The communities began to reach out to each other and, when they found each other, to dream of re-creating what was lost at a ground-breaking conference for the whole nation.

  So Diyner was nervous when he stood on stage at the International Circassian Congress held in the Caucasus town of Nalchik in May 1991. The Soviet Union still existed. Would the dream of forging bonds between the fragments of the shattered nation be pulled away as it had been in the past?

  ‘There must have been 15,000 people gathered there and I addressed them on behalf of the Turkish delegation. When I was speaking people started crying. When we went out on the street, people came up to us, they wanted to know about relatives in Turkey. An old woman, she must have been eighty, just hugged me, she said she had been told a big lie all her life. The governments had lied, they had been told that the diaspora had lost its culture, that Circassians abroad lived badly. She said she felt like a mother who had found a lost child,’ he remembered, seventeen years after that historic speech.

  Diyner was seventy-five years old when we met in the central Turkish city of Kayseri, and at first he possessed an austere dignity. He tapped his foot up and down as he answered, leaning back in an overstuffed armchair.

  Without being rude, he managed to give the impression of someone who wanted to be doing something else, rather than answering questions about his past. But as he remembered the congress of 1991, he thawed. He leaned forward in his chair, planting both feet on the ground, and began to lose himself in what had been. He talked more quickly about the people he had met and the amazing sights he had seen.

  ‘We could talk to everyone, we had no problems, our language was identical. I met sixty people from the same family as me, people with the same surname as me. Many of them lived in the little village of Lo’okit. We have a village just near here with the same name.’

  With the ice broken, he allowed me to ask more questions. I probed deeper and suddenly he just opened up. I sat in amazed silence, scribbling in my notebook as he told me his family story. He only stopped – his foot tapping again but this time in impatience – for his words to be translated into English so he could continue.

  Some sixteen members of his family left the Caucasus in 1864, with his grandfather’s father on the boat as a young boy. Twelve of them survived the voyage and the refugee camp. Three died of disease, while one young man had broken his leg and hurt his head climbing on board ship and died without reaching Turkey.

  They arrived in Samsun, and trekked into Anatolia in search of the empty lands that the government had promised them. They reached the Uzunyayla – the ‘Long Plateau’ – of central Turkey, where only nomads lived, and they settled down to make it their own.

  Uzunyayla is a bleak, terrible place, treeless and windswept. Villages are tucked into folds in the ground but are still dreadfully exposed. Poles along the verges mark the road when it is covered by dense snow in winter.

  The Circassian country along the Black Sea could scarcely have been more different. Densely wooded, and made up of rolling hills and tumbling rivers, it provided ample farming and grazing for the nation before its expulsion. It must have been cruel indeed for Circassians to trek from their lush home to this arid and blasted land.

  But on a map of Circassian communities in the Middle East, this plateau holds a special meaning as a crossroads. The Circassian villages fan south from the Black Sea city of Samsun in a line, stretching down through Uzunyayla to the border with Syria, then on into Jordan and Israel. To the east, only a handful of villages are scattered near the borders of Armenia and Iraq. To the west, however, a mass of them rings Istanbul in the regions of Sakariya, Eskisehir and Bursa. When Diyner’s great-grandfather arrived here, this Circassian world was just being created. Its members were cousins and neighbours and friends. They would serve together in the Ottoman army, and trade together and enjoy each other’s company. The Circassians had lost Circassia, but they were still linked in one giant community.

  Diyner’s grandfather left Turkey in 1911 to go to the Caucasus for a visit. He met those of his aunts and uncles who had remained behind. After staying for two and a half years, he reluctantly turned down offers to find him a bride. He had a wife and children in Turkey and they were waiting for him. But it was cruel homecoming, for he died in 1915 fighting the Russians in the First World War.

  He would not have known it but he was one of the last Circassians to have enjoyed the freedom to wander through the newly created diaspora. He just saddled a horse, rode for four and a half months, and came back to Uzunyayla.

  Diyner had a picture of him. It was a photograph of a painting, which was in turn taken from a photograph. It showed a young man, straight-backed and handsome with his moustache and astrakhan hat. He wore the tunic of the Circassian, with its cartridge cases in their holders across his chest and the long dagger in front of his crotch. Diyner was seventy-five years old and the very model of the secular Turk, in his checked shirt, glasses and cardigan. But he had the same moustache, the same hooded eyes and the same straight back. The resemblance was striking.

  The war that killed his grandfather also destroyed the Russian empire. The communist state that succeeded it built walls that separated the diaspora communities from their homeland for more than seventy years. No one from Diyner’s generation had ever been to the Caucasus, nor even dreamed that it would one day be possible.

  Uzunyayla is in a way the most Circassian of all Turkey’s districts. When the Circassians arrived in the Ottoman Empire, they were distributed wherever the government could afford to give them land. Circassians today like to say they were placed along the frontiers of settled agriculture as guardians of the Ottoman heartland from the wild nomad tribes. It is a pleasant myth, and has a comforting feel to it. In truth, however, it is more likely that the land used by nomads could be given away to the new arrivals without anyone significant complaining. The farmers would then encourage their nomad neighbours to settle. The line from Samsun down to the Holy Land was the line where the farming Turks and Arabs bumped against the Turkoman and Bedouin nomads, and thus the line where there was land available to give to the Circassians.

  To the west, where Circassians are clumped around Istanbul, they were moved onto swampy valley floors, which they drained and turned into fertile and profitable fields. Circassians were settled in the Balkans as well, but were driven out when the states of Romania and Bulgaria were created in 1878 – 9, leaving just a handful in Kosovo – a community that now is all but extinct.

  Hundreds of thousands of Circassians left the Caucasus. Estimated numbers vary wildly: from a probably overinflated two million, to a clearly too small 300,000. The number was probably somewhere between
a million and 1.2 million, according to the latest research by historians. The death toll of their terrible journey is impossible to estimate, but the mortality rate was probably about a third.

  The world’s current Circassian population is hard to estimate. The emigrants’ descendants today number maybe as many as four million in Turkey, although historians have not studied them and even Western histories of the modern Turkey fail to include them in their indexes. A hundred thousand or so are in Syria, and maybe 70,000 more live in Jordan, while 4,000 live in Israel and a handful cling on in Kosovo. Significant secondary communities also live in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. The diaspora community, therefore, massively outnumbers the 600,000 Circassians who still live in the Caucasus.

  There was, therefore, great excitement among these Circassians when, just a few months after Diyner’s speech at the International Circassian Congress in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and the prospect of reuniting the nation rose in its place.

  Young Circassians take great interest in the traditions of their parents. Today, in Turkey, very few Circassians below thirty or forty years old speak their own language, but they have nonetheless sought to assert their culture.

  Listening to old stories, a group of young people in the early 1990s had heard an old folk tale of a woman called Elif Ketsep’ha. She, the story told them, grew up in the Balkans when it was still Ottoman land but was forced to flee in 1877 – 8 and ended up in a small village north of Adapazari in western Turkey. Her family died of disease and famine, leaving just her to honour their corpses. She sat every day by their graves singing the mourning songs of her people, becoming a symbol of the constancy and the tragedy of her nation.

  The young, idealistic Circassians of the early 1990s found the graveyard where she had lamented her loss, and began to commemorate their nation’s destruction there, choosing as their remembrance day 21 May: the date when Russia proclaimed victory in the Caucasus in 1864.

  Elif ’s village stands a few kilometres inland from the tiny fishing port of Kefken, which also has a special place in the hearts of the Circassians as one of the arrival sites of the massed refugees. It is a wild and bleak coast, with a few caves pushed into the low cliffs that mark the edge of the beaches. In these caves, Circassians sheltered and scratched the rocks with their names in the Arabic script they then used.

  The memorial ceremony, which I attended in 2008, has become a tribute to how far the Circassians have come in uniting their far-flung nation. They had come from all over Turkey, from America, from Russia, from Israel. Many of them bore the green flag of Circassia, with its crossed arrows and stars, and they all stood together on the jagged rocks to throw flowers into the sea which formed the final grave for so many of their compatriots.

  As the sun touched the horizon, an old man’s voice rose in a lament joined by the quiet hum of other Circassians singing together. Hundreds of carnations arced through the air to land in the water, which heaved beneath them. Song followed song, as the purple stain of evening spread over the sea. Darkness fell and I sat on the clifftop watching as a bonfire flared up on the beach and the assembled Circassians – young and old – took a blazing torch in each hand and made a procession along the shoreline. The haunting melody of the Circassian song ‘Road to Istanbul’ hung in the air like a floating scrap of silk: delicate but strong:Our beautiful caps lie on the edge of our foreheads,

  The steeds we ride, alas, we shall also have to leave behind.

  Woe, our forefathers and foremothers are weeping over us!

  Wailing and mourning we are exiled from our motherland,

  We utter our farewells to the fatherland with bleeding hearts!

  2.

  We Share Happiness, We Share Sadness

  I sat in the bus driving back to Istanbul from Kefken musing on the amazing strength of the Circassians, and on how, after so many years apart, they had reforged the links connecting their nation together so quickly. It was only our small bus-full that was leaving the event. A horde of young Circassians remained, and they would drink and talk and dance all night at a building on the jagged cliffs. New friendships would be born, new courtships would begin, and maybe new marriages be agreed.

  But, in some ways, the impression of a newly united nation was a misleading one. The nineteenth-century travellers who had been so amazed by the Circassians would have struggled to recognize some of their traits in their descendants. Circassians all over the world were often profoundly troubled by what they found in the communities of their compatriots in other countries.

  It is not surprising perhaps that a Circassian who has grown up in the democracy of Israel has a different mentality to one who grew up in the communism of Russia, or the authoritarian strictness of Jordan or Kosovo. But it still came as a disappointment to Circassians – overjoyed by the new freedoms they found after 1991, and by their chance to visit the Russian Caucasus – to find their ancestors’ homeland so, well, Russian.

  I found Selim Abazi, fifty-four years old, in Milosheve, one of two villages in Kosovo where Circassians once predominated. He moved to southern Russia in 1993, and was joined by the whole Kosovo Circassian community in 1998 when the war with the Serbians started in earnest. He remained a fiercely patriotic Circassian, with the green-and-yellow flag tacked to the wall of his shack, but he had left the Caucasus to go back to Kosovo in 2000.

  ‘I did not like these Russians, they are communists and we had no relations with them at all, they were scared of us. We could speak to the Circassians, but they too had become like Russians. They would ask us if we had only come to their country to find work and they would swear at us and say they did not have enough to eat for themselves, ’ he told me in the broken Russian he had learned in his time in the Caucasus.

  ‘The Caucasus is beautiful, it is subtropical. But the people are bad, when they got democracy everything fell apart. There is too much alcohol, too many drugs.’

  I got the impression Abazi was not being entirely open with me. He certainly never explained how he’d lost his arm, which was just a bandage-swathed stump. But his story was echoed by the few Circassians I managed to track down in the wretchedly poor Kosovan villages they had returned to in preference to the nice, red-brick houses the Russian government gave them to live in.

  The graveyards were still full of Circassian surnames, the mosque – built by Circassians – stood tall, but the few old men and women left here would be the end of Kosovo’s Circassian community.

  Murat Cej’s brother Musa lives in the Caucasus along with many other of his former neighbours, but he also came back to Kosovo when the war ended. We stood out of the rain and chatted – a translator having to help since Cej had not learned Russian during his stay – about the history of his people.

  ‘When we first got to Russia we were so excited,’ he said, with a broad smile raising crinkles all around his watery blue eyes. ‘All the Circassians were asking how had we saved our language. These Circassians were very nice, but not the Russians, they did not like us. My wife, even though she’s Albanian, wanted to stay there but I wanted to come back here. My father died here, and I will die here too.’

  In other countries, too, Circassians had problems realizing the dream of moving to the Caucasus. Technically, as people whose ancestors originated in Russia, they have the right under Russian law to move back there. But, in fact, they struggle to do so, especially since the Chechen war has made Russian officials so suspicious of any foreigners in the southern provinces of their country.

  Omer Kurmel, aged forty-five, is one of the leaders of the Caucasus Cultural Federation in Turkey. His organization, which has members throughout Turkey’s large Circassian community, aims to secure Circassian repatriation. He speaks perfect English, and has an American PhD, but even his diplomatic skills betrayed a slight frustration with the difficulties Circassians face in patching their people together.

  ‘It is not easy to get a visa now, it can take weeks. The security clearances go o
n. I understand that Russia is concerned about terrorism in Chechnya, but this has hit us particularly,’ he said as we sat in his office in Istanbul a few days after I took the bus down from Kosovo.

  ‘I would say not more than a hundred people from here have moved back to the Caucasus,’ he said.

  He said the Circassians needed to emulate the Jews and launch a movement to move back to the homeland, while accepting the fact that Russians now live there. ‘When I was a teenager, like all Circassians I used to think that the Russians were bad people who had persecuted my people. But when I went to the Caucasus I saw that the local people had developed a common way of life with the Russians. The problems are because of our weakness, rather than Russian strength.’

  But the Circassians face an uphill struggle. According to one report, 3,000 – 4,000 idealistic Circassians had immigrated to the Caucasus by 1993. It is hard to say now how many have joined them, but the number of foreign-born Circassians in the Caucasus would seem, if anything, to have shrunk since then.

  Chen Bram, an Israeli anthropologist who has studied the Circassian communities in the Middle East, summed up the disappointment felt by many Circassians. They had dreamt of an ancestral homeland running with milk and honey, but instead had found a land where people ‘reel under economic chaos, huge inflation and political insecurity. Moreover, the poor systems of transportation, communication and other features of modernity that affect the standard of living in the cities made an unfavourable comparison to their lives in Israel. If one adds the havoc at local airports and the horrible and useless bureaucracy in general, it is easy to understand why some of the Israeli visitors heaved a sigh of relief upon returning to Ben Gurion Airport in Israel.’

  Indeed, one Israeli friend in Kfar-Kama joked to me that Israel now ‘imports Circassians’.

  The difference between the Circassians in the Caucasus and those in the diaspora are perhaps most marked in Jordan, where the Circassians have a privileged position. Circassians, more than the Bedouins and Palestinians who make up the rest of the population, have created a civil Jordanian identity and allied themselves closely with the ruling family. They act as a unit in the tribal law that regulates relations between communities, and hold high posts in government, the army and business.