Impacts of Circassian Resettlements in the Ottoman Empire
Panel 168, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 23 at 5:00 pm
Panel Description
After the Russian Invasion of the Northwestern Caucasus (1817-1864), the Ottoman authorities resettled Muslim Circassian refugees in different parts of the Empire. Initially, the Ottoman administration sent many of the refugees to the Balkans, especially to Bulgaria. However, as the Ottomans lost control of the Balkans in the last quarter of the century, the Circassians had to be moved again. By the start of the twentieth century, the number of Circassian refugees reached an estimated total of 1.5 million. The proposed panel will focus on socioeconomic and cultural effects of these devastating demographic transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in multiple contexts.
Many refugees perished during their travels. For example, in February 17, 1864, a British consul reported that in the last few days 3,000 immigrants had landed at an Ottoman town at the Black Sea shore and 40,000 more were preparing to leave Russia the next week. Most of these unfortunate people—similar to others who came in earlier that month—were sick with typhus. The disease claimed the lives of 4,000 in the past weeks, mostly Circassians, and many more shared the same fate.
The departure of these refugees transformed the region that they left and the region in which they arrived. Even though the Ottoman administration granted exemptions from tax and military obligations, provided weekly salaries and at times housing and land, their plight becomes apparent from available documents. They changed the ethno-religious composition of the regions they were settled in at a time when nationalist movements and international politics made politics of self-identification processes highly charged. As increased economic activity and demographic pressures made resources such as land more scarce, local authorities often mentioned that the the Circassians were a burden and at times used them as scapegoats. Repeated forced resettlement radically transformed refugee culture and community, leading to the emergence of complex dynamic diaspora narratives influential in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Despite the large impact of these forced resettlements, surprisingly little scholarly work exist on the distressing experiences, diaspora culture and local/imperial impact of these refugees. The proposed panel will explore these themes from different anthropological and historical perspectives.
This paper reassesses the role of powerful members of the North Caucasian diaspora and the roles they would play in the years immediately preceding the emergence of the Soviet Union and the Turkish Republic. I would argue that this period represents an Ur moment when the politics of Turkey’s North Caucasian diaspora first came to the fore. The emergence of a “Circassian politik” during the years between 1918 and 1922 strikes at the very heart of identity politics in Asia Minor and the evolution of Anatolia as a geographic, cultural and political bridge between multiple worlds. In this essay, I wish to turn to those North Caucasians who were among the staunchest advocates of the so-called National Movement, the armed opposition effort that led to the ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as president and founder of the Turkish Republic. Here I wish to explore how and why a select cohort of Circassians concurrently staked a claim to both their adopted home in Anatolia and their more distant homeland in the Caucasus.
This paper examines 19th Century Circassian emigration from the Caucasus and resettlement in the Ottoman provinces from two opposing perspectives: Russian and Ottoman, as represented in their respective archives. These opposing archives present significantly different portrayals of the same event complicating the interpretation of the causes, process and contexts of the Circassian displacement from the Caucasus. Methodological and interpretive questions are raised by comparing how these two imperial powers and their functionaries recount the sending and receiving ends of the migration and by comparing both to oral history accounts by the descendents of these very migrants.
This paper focuses on the discussions around immigrants in the two councils that administered this larger administrative unit, the county of Vidin in the northwest corner of modern-day Bulgaria, where borders of Romania and Serbia meet along the Danube. Fertile soil and moderate climate made these lands suitable for agriculture and led to high levels of rural settlements, where diverse ethnic groups lived together and interacted with each other. The County was predominantly non-Muslim in the 1860s and 70s—with the exception of the town of Vidin where Muslim population tended to be slightly over the half.
Following the Ottoman provincial regulation in 1864, the administrative council, and the council of appeals and crime, became central to the local political economy and the judicial affairs. I contend that these councils and their associated subordinate offices were not simply provincial extensions of the Tanzimat state; instead, they served as domains for a variety of politics—of ethnicity, confession, class, and the like. Within this framework, an analysis of how a politically charged topic, such as immigration, is discussed within this sphere can be informative about the general perceptions of influential agents at the local level.
In the nineteenth century, waves of refugees flooded the region. Most of them were Tatars and Circassians coming from Russia; while another wave came to Vidin from Serbia. Their settlement in the northwestern borders of the Ottoman Empire bolstered the Muslim population. Yet another group that migrated to Vidin in 1870s was Christian Vlachs who used to live in the Vidin area but crossed the Danube migrating to Wallachia earlier in 1860 and returning “home” a decade later. Regardless of their faith, refugees had to face difficult conditions in the course of their migration, and their settlement meant severe financial burden at the imperial and local level at a time when issues such as property ownership, citizenship, universal conscription, and tax reforms were debated throughout the empire.
The local government gave refugees farmland, oxen, regular allowances, tax exemptions; furthermore, built houses, schools, and mosques for them. The conjunction of Ottoman modernization with such costly resettlements meant increased provincial discussions around “nativeness,” “Ottoman-ness” and “coexistence” in Vidin during this period. Therefore, immigrants and their conceptualization in provincial correspondence provides a good insight on local dimensions of nineteenth century Ottoman transformation. This paper will do that by analyzing case studies from the registers of the councils mentioned above.
Most studies on diaspora regard the experience and a memory of displacement and resettlement as significant formations of diasporic identity. Based on in-depth interviews, this paper is an attempt to explore the narratives of Circassian diaspora activists and intellectuals in Turkey on displacement and (re)settlement. In the narratives of Circassian activists and intellectuals, displacement and resettlement is associated with the (re)production of fear, silence, rootlessness, and political impotence in Turkey. I argue that through the unveiling of silence, fear, rootlessness and political inefficacy that are associated with the processes of displacement and resettlement, Circassian activists redefine and transform Circassian identity and diasporic experience as agents.
