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circassians (2009)
Ruslan posing for picture with hunting guns, village of Ashe
Black Sea at twilight
Books at a village home
Bakir, a dancer with a local Circassian folk troupe
Ruslan from the village of Nadzhigo works as forest inspector for the Sochi National Park
The valley of Ashe river. During the mid 19th-century Circassian tragedy, all native villages including those in this valley have been completely erased.
Svetlana, member of a Circassian folk troupe, with an accordion
Wasteland in Ashe, a village on the Black Sea located in an area near Sochi where a few thousand Circassians live in compact communities. A late-19-century Russian scholar Ivan Klingen noted about the reasons of this area’s economic desolation: “By driving Circassians out of the country due to some general political considerations we imposed upon ourselves a heavy moral duty to compensate the civilisation for a perished culture that had accumulated for 3,000 years but vanished <...> without the natives’ experienced and strong hands <…> Any rootless project is powerless here because the old traditions and the old culture have disappeared forever».
Zaurhan with his dogs
After the Circassian exodus from the Caucasus, they have been dispersed all over the Ottoman Empire and today live in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Israel, US, Germany. In Russia, they are still known under four different ethnic names - Kabardians, Adyghe, Shapsug and Circassians proper.
Ibrahim
Mass graves in the Makopse river valley a few kilometers from the Black Sea are the only material evidence of the mid-19th-century Circassian tragedy in this area. People buried in these graves were the deportees who, waiting to be picked up by the Turkish ships, died of hunger, cold and disease. A Russian witness, shocked by the scene, later noted: «…The mountaineers <…> gathered in masses <…> along the Black Sea coast wherefrom they were transported to Turkey by the Turkish ships and, in part, by ships hired by the Russian government. But because these vessels were not at all enough to transport half a million people, they had to wait their turn for 6 months, for a year, or even more. All this time, they stayed on the shore in the weather without any means of living. <…> They were dying of hunger literally by thousands. In winter, cold added up to it. The Black Sea’s entire northeastern shore was covered with corpses and moribund men, women and children with those alive but weakened lying amongst them and waiting to be deported».
The valley of Ashe river
A Circassian graveyard in the village of Khadzhiko located in an area near Sochi where a few thousand Circassians live in compact communities. These communities are home to those few who, about 50 years after the mid-19th-century Circassian tragedy, have managed to return to their homeland.
Lonely horse
Waterfalls up in the mountains
Dzhegu, a traditional Circassian youth party with dance and entertainment always accompanied with the green star-and-arrowed Circassian flag – an important element of the reemerging Circassian identity.
The valley of Ashe river. During the mid 19th-century Circassian tragedy, all native villages including those in this valley have been completely erased.
A bust of admiral M.Lazarev in Lazarevskoe – capital of the district where a few thousand Circassians live in compact communities. The town's Circassian name - Psezuape - was changed in honour of admiral Lazarev who, although famous for his discovery of Antarctica, also took part in the extermination of Circassians.
View of the central Sochi. On early 19th-century maps, this area was known as Ubykhia after a Circassian tribe that used to live here but was completely exterminated or deported to Turkey as a result of the Russian-Caucasian war.
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