Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  Amman, the capital of Jordan, was founded by Circassian refugees on the site of a ruined Roman city and Circassians still provide the bodyguards for the royal family. Their property in central Amman is home to Palestinians who fled what is now Israel in a series of waves starting in 1948. Although they were initially poor, the Circassians have made money from property deals and from their closeness to the royal family, and are now Westernized and secular.

  The Circassians I spoke to were fluent in English, and, despite being proud of their heritage, they came from the mould of wealthy Middle Easterners who looked to America and Europe for their culture. Before a concert and performance given by a dance troupe from the Caucasus, young and fashionable Circassians kissed each other on meeting, then stood and chatted in Arabic, their conversations larded with English phrases: ‘oh my God’; ‘reach common ground’; ‘no way’. My friend Zaina pointed out different members of the audience, with remarks that one was engaged to an American, another one had married someone from England, and so on.

  I was surprised to hear of Circassians marrying outside their community, and asked Zaina if it was common. ‘Oh, it is better to marry a European than an Arab,’ she said.

  During my few days in Amman, I visited sports clubs with swanky swimming pools and tennis courts, and was invited to smart, air-conditioned flats on the outskirts of the dusty, sprawling city. I had come here particularly to meet a group of students whom I had heard about in Israel. While I’d been sitting with Khon in Kfar-Kama, which is just the other side of the river Jordan, he had wanted to show me quite how much the Circassian diaspora had changed since those days when he and his neighbours had hunched round a crackly radio broadcast from Syria.

  Turning on his television, he showed me NART TV, a station made by Circassians for Circassians and decorated with the Circassian flag in the top corner. It showed a folk dance, and then a children’s tale, then some words by a Circassian academic, then some talking in the extinct Ubykh language. It was an interesting broadcast, but then, abruptly, it went back to the beginning again. This was on loop, and full programming had not started yet. Khon, however, was excited. This satellite television station could help provide the glue required to bring the scattered Circassians together.

  When I tracked down the NART (National Adiga Radio and Television) TV team, I was stunned by how young they were to carry such a heavy burden. The oldest of them, and the originator of the idea, was Nart Naghway, a 24-year-old with a quite breath-taking degree of ambition.

  ‘As you can see,’ he said, waving around the clean but messy office where his team was based, ‘we are a small group, but it’s going well. We do everything here, we edit, shoot, make reports. There are thirteen of us, mostly students at the university. We had this dream, but the money issue is critical. Most people make a business plan before they start a television station, but we decided to do it the other way around. We thought we’d create the TV station first.’

  He had already forged contacts with Circassians in the Caucasus and in Turkey, and planned to broadcast in all the languages of the diaspora. He would also broadcast, he said, in the different dialects used by Circassians – Kabardian in the east of Circassia and for people originating from there, Shapsug for people originating from the Black Sea coast, and other dialects in between. Circassians who did not speak Circassian would also be served with broadcasts in the languages of their home countries. The sheer complexity of broadcasting a multi-national television channel in at least four languages and an unspecified number of dialects did not seem to daunt Nart at all.

  ‘We will have Circassian lessons in English, in Turkish, in Arabic, that is the main role of NART TV, to teach the youth. We must use modern technology to keep this nation alive. If we cannot communicate with each other face to face then we need to use the satellite. The internet is nice but not everyone can use it.’

  As if that plan was not ambitious enough, he also told me they planned to gather archive footage from all over the Circassian community to create a resource for future generations to draw on, while also preserving the current generation from assimilation by the nations that threaten to swamp them. As we chatted, another man walked into the office. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, very fit and smartly dressed. He spoke perfect English, and handed me his business card. His name was Yinal Hatyk and he was, much to my surprise, chief of staff to Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan.

  With easy authority, he took over the conversation from the younger Circassians and required little prompting to tell me his story. He visited the Caucasus for the first time in 1986 aged twenty-two. He had gone to live in the city of Nalchik for a month along with five other Jordanian Circassians. A few years later, he started working with Prince Ali because King Hussein – the prince’s father – wanted his son to learn about the traditions of the people, and that included the Circassians. The prince took the project to heart. Together they hatched a plan to ride horses to the Caucasus, thus re-creating the links between the old Circassian communities, and perhaps reigniting old trade routes. In 1998, they rode up through Jordan, Syria and Turkey, caught a boat across to Russia and turned west towards Nalchik.

  The then 23-year-old prince struggled to get a Russian visa for his trip, however, and had to leave four of his horses behind in Turkey to avoid a customs infringement. It was a disappointment for the idealistic group to strike the stifling bureaucracy of Russian rule in the Caucasus. Hatyk was to come to know the suffocating legal culture even better. At that time, he had the prized vid na zhitelstvo, or Russian residency permit. But he would not have it for long.

  ‘For the Russians, they cannot distinguish if you are a Chechen or a Circassian, or if you are going to fight against them or not. They cancelled my vid na zhitelstvo, for example, on the charge that I am a nationalist. They’ve made it harder for us to get visas. It costs more money and it takes longer. There is a law that Circassians should be able to get passports, but they’ve made it harder. You have to give up your old passport, and you have to speak Russian. It’s easier perhaps if you’re fifty or sixty years old, then they know you’re not going to fight them.’

  I walked away from the meeting more depressed than I’d expected. The students might be trying to set up a television station, but if the Circassian population was still divided, then the chances of uniting its far-flung elements were slight. Struggling for a metaphor, I thought of the people as a pot that had been smashed, and then tumbled around in a river for a hundred years. The shards would still match in colour and pattern, but their edges would have been knocked about and chipped and scarred and encrusted. It would not be possible to slot them back together.

  But enough of the pattern survived to make the culture recognizable, and people who visited the Caucasus in the nineteenth century would still have seen flashes of their familiar Circassians in what was all around me two centuries later.

  In Kayseri, where I met Sebahattin Diyner, I was adopted by a young man called Aytek, who, as a friend of a friend of a friend, afforded me all the wonders of Circassian hospitality. He was a cynical and amusing man, with at times a very jaundiced view of his own people, but he loved the glory of its traditions. As we drove out to the village where he grew up, he told me about his aunt: a woman of a character strong even for a Circassian. Aged thirty, she was told that she could never climb a particular mountain while playing her accordion. Unable to resist the challenge, she set off and did so, marching up the mountain – which is a 45-degree scree slope – and down again. At the bottom, she promptly died. ‘Someone had told her she could not do it, you see,’ Aytek said.

  That evening, he took me to a wedding to see how Turkey’s Circassians – otherwise indistinguishable from other Turkish citizens on the streets – revelled in the traditions of their ancestors.

  The dancing circle was if anything even more frenetic here than in Israel. The men were sweating as they competed with each other for ever more macho poses. They remained careful, however, to
never shame themselves by turning their backs on their partners, who responded by looking ever more graceful and demure.

  All this dancing was thirsty work, and Aytek took me by the arm and steered me out to the car park where his friends had gathered around the open boot of a car to drink Johnnie Walker Red Label out of plastic cups and discuss the action inside. The dancing partners, although they appear to an onlooker to be entirely random, were it would seem part of an important ritual. One man and one woman are empowered with the right of selecting the partners for each dance, and if a party guest is interested in a particular woman, he asks the controllers to organize a dance for him. A few dances and they are considered to be an item, or kashen as the Circassian word has it.

  Aytek’s explanation of the intricacy of Circassian wedding lore was interrupted by a succession of loud gunshots from nearby. A Turkish wedding was taking place in a hall the other side of the car park wall and the groom was being saluted by his friends. My companions could not let such a challenge pass and one guest pulled a pistol from his pocket and loosed off a volley into the night. He masked the muzzle flashes with his jacket, but the noise was loud enough for the Turks to hear. There was no response.

  I was thrilled, for firing into the air is a standard celebration in accounts of Circassian life in the 1830s. And here it was, used again in 2008.

  This, however, is one tradition that the Circassian community is not united in defending.

  Circassian culture, like many others based on family ties, diaspora, respect and martial prowess, has been at times prone to develop into the kind of mafia clans that have marred Sicilian and Italian communities in the United States. The Circassian villages near Istanbul are well-known for their giant palaces built with the proceeds of criminal empires. In the 1990s, the area between the cities of Dubze, Adapazari and Izmit was known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ because so many pro-Kurdish businessmen would vanish and be found dead there. The mafia groups apparently take habze to the extreme. One chieftain, according to local legend, was shot in a bar in an argument that began when someone else paid the bill for him. Paying the bill was seen as a mark of disrespect, an argument began, guns were drawn, and the mafia boss paid for it with his life.

  As such, the communities east of Istanbul were awash with automatic weapons and, in the 1980s, people began arriving at weddings with boxes of ammunition all ready to be poured into the air in greeting, in exuberance or in celebration of particularly impressive dancing.

  Sadly, the bullets that went up also came down. Most Circassians I spoke to had at least one family member who had been killed or wounded by falling bullets at a wedding, and the situation had been getting worse.

  Eventually, the community had to act, as I heard from a group of old men who were attending a wedding in the village of Balballi east of Istanbul, where most of the residents were enjoying a few dances and a small celebration. Jihan Agumba, aged sixty-five, said that he and a number of other old men had decided to rein in their younger neighbours after a mother of two was killed at a wedding five years before.

  ‘Even before this woman was killed we had discussed what we could do to stop this,’ he said. ‘When we were young, not everyone had guns and shooting was very regulated. If someone danced beautifully then people would shoot to honour him. If someone who was dancing well was honoured with a shot he would stop and gesture at the shooter to show how happy he was to be honoured.’

  But when more guns arrived, things got out of hand, with shooting unregulated and uncontrolled. In short, this Circassian tradition had become excessive and, thus, non-Circassian.

  ‘The night this woman was killed, we were sat drinking coffee here and I used very strong words,’ remembered Agumba. ‘I said that anyone who shoots in the air should be shamed before his family, that he should be dishonoured. Anyone who serves them at the wedding should be dishonoured, we should not attend the weddings of these people, or their funerals. There were very strong words.’

  We were sitting in a corner of the wedding set aside for the old men. The men – grey-haired, straight-backed and dressed in suits and trilbys – nodded at Agumba’s emphatic points. Some of them even turned away from the dancing, which in this mainly Abkhaz village was more intricate and involved less obvious courtship than at the Circassian weddings. Abkhaz, though ethnically very close to the Circassians, have customs of their own and this dance appeared to have more in common with those of Ireland than those of their ethnic kin.

  ‘These youths who were shooting were influenced by gun culture on television. They did not learn like we did how to use guns, and how to control themselves. The main thing in our culture is respect. This is like an unwritten constitution. If someone dies, all sixty or seventy Circassian and Abkhaz villages in this region send people to the funeral. It is the same for a wedding. We share happiness, we share sadness. And if someone is older than you, you respect him, even if he is two or three years older. It took time, but the young people agreed to stop shooting.’

  In the nearby village of Tashkorpru, I asked the young men if they were prepared to submit to the authority of the elders like their ancestors always had. The general response was that, yes, they would stop shooting if it was insisted on, but they were not happy about it.

  ‘I have never talked to anyone of our age who thinks it is right that we cannot shoot in the air. Probably 80 per cent of us do not agree with this,’ grumbled Omer Shakoomda, a 45-year-old sitting in the village coffee house with a crowd of younger men.

  ‘If the hosts of the wedding insist that we should not shoot then we will not shoot. We still think though that if there are thousands of gunshots it shows the amount of respect people have for that family,’ said Nejat, one of his friends at the bar.

  ‘At the last wedding I went to there was shooting. The man who asked us to stop was not really respected so people shot in the air anyway. If there is a sign saying “Please do not shoot” then people will obey it. But this is a logistical issue. If a new group arrives, they will not know you cannot shoot. It is mainly the ladies who want us to stop shooting. And groups with a lot of girls in them will leave if there is a lot of shooting.’

  There was a lot of nodding around the table at this comment, and some heads were shaken in disappointment at the shame of it, but it seemed the community leaders were determined to enforce the ban. Circassians would not bring in the police – it is an article of faith that they sort out their own problems – but they had mobilized to create a regional council to sort things out. The council’s development was particularly interesting, since Turkey is very sensitive to any sign of separatism, but it appeared to have been tolerated by the government so far.

  Afitap Altan, a woman in her fifties who heads the cultural centre in the city of Dubze and who acts as a delegate at the council, said Abkhaz weddings were now largely shooting-free, but the Circassians still shot a little.

  ‘You do not have the power to stop people shooting but when the elders say stop, there is a feeling that people should stop. I do not share the same ideas as the elders, but I will not argue with them. The elders will have found a compromise among themselves.’

  The next weekend, she was due to attend a meeting of a thousand or so elders from the region, where they would discuss, according to the invitation, ‘keeping the culture alive, making sure shooting in the air at weddings is stopped, and that no alcohol is consumed’.

  ‘They have tried to do this outside the official societies, so that no politics is involved. The problem is though that everyone likes to speak, and if you give them the time, then all thousand people will speak,’ she said.

  The Circassians’ tradition of natural democracy, of allowing anyone to speak who felt he had something to say, was remarked on wonderingly in the nineteenth century, and has survived over the centuries. Although the Circassians might bemoan the decline of habze and their traditions, they are clearly still alive in the modern world.

  ‘People from Dubze are very brave,
very brave. Some people think this is mafia but it is not, we are just brave. If I have a problem on the street, then it can be solved by the family but that does not mean we are mafia. If there are problems the elders will say, “You are Circassian, how can you do this?” We solve most problems without the police. It is the same if you are poor, you will not ask for money but people will help you, we help each other,’ said Altan.

  What she told me reminded me of something, but it was only later I remembered a story I had heard in Israel, when I had asked why there was no theft in the Circassian villages.

  It turned out that there had been a spate of thefts in Kfar-Kama some fifteen or twenty years before, which had initially confused a community where people leave their doors open and are not used to things going missing. After two weeks, the villagers realized what was happening and caught the thief, who was a Bedouin.

  ‘They did not involve the police. No, he got what he deserved. After he was released, his mouth was the only bit of him still working. We have not had a theft since,’ I was told.

  Circassians, I thought, are wonderful people to be friends with. But I would not like to fall out with them.

  3.

  I Give Thee That Little Bird

  Some 170 years before me, two other British men were wandering wide-eyed through the Circassian world, trying to make sense of the strange culture that surrounded them. These were John Longworth and James Bell, and they had come on a mission.

  A friend of theirs and a minor British diplomat, David Urquhart, had formulated his own foreign policy and, with great self-confidence, had set out to implement it by trying to provoke a war between London and St Petersburg. The plan involved entrapping the Russians into seizing a British ship (the Vixen) trading with the Circassians, and thus forcing London to intervene to secure Circassian independence. Circassian freedom would ensure the Ottoman Empire would be safe from Russian expansion, which would in turn guarantee the British hold on India.