Circassians

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1992, a man named Tevfik Esenç died, and with him a language went silent. He was the last speaker of Ubykh, a tongue from the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. No one alive could answer him in it.

  Ubykh belonged to the Circassians, who also call themselves the Adyghe and are known in Russian as the Cherkess. Their homeland, Circassia, lay in the North Caucasus. It was once a country in its own right.

  Today most Circassians live far from it. Their story runs through mountain assemblies, slave soldiers who became sultans, and a war that emptied a coastline. How did a people with twelve tribes and no single king end up scattered across so many nations? What did they carry with them, and what has been lost along the way?

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• 2. Names and Origins

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  The word Circassian was never a name the people chose. It is an outsider's label, Latinized from the Russian Cherkess, and its roots are argued over. One view traces it to a Turkic phrase meaning head choppers or warrior killers, a nod to how Circassians fought. Another points to a Mongolian word, Jerkes, meaning one who blocks a path.

  A Persian explanation splits the name into kar, for mountain, and kas, for region. Some scholars suspect it began as Chahar-kas, four people, naming four tribes. The medieval writers Ali ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khaldun both used the form Jaharkas, though the Persian theory remains uncertain.

  The people call themselves Adyghe. One reading ties the word to Atyghe, meaning high in altitude, which would make the name a statement that they are mountaineers. Another reading starts from Adzakha, the form recorded for the medieval Zygii in inscriptions from the Bosporus.

  On the question of ancestry, archaeology points to dolmens scattered across the northwest Caucasus, the remains of a megalithic culture. The forebears of the Circassians are usually identified as the Sinti-Maeotian tribes, indigenous people of the region. Genetic testing finds the most common male lineage, G2-YY1215, in 43 percent of Circassians. The main lineages trace to a single ancestor about 3,000 years ago, and the closest relatives are the Ingush, Chechens, Georgians and Abkhazians.

  Not every claim about their origins deserves respect. Turkish nationalists and some Pan-Turkists have argued that Circassians are of Turkic descent. Linguists, historians and Circassians themselves reject this, since the Circassian language shares little with Turkish beyond borrowed words.

  A stranger myth grew from European race science, which praised Circassians for a supposed superior beauty. That idea fed an eighteenth-century stereotype of the Circassian beauty. Under Soviet rule, a different kind of labeling followed, as officials split one nation into separately named peoples.

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• 3. Twelve Stars

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  The Circassian flag is a green field with twelve gold stars and, at its centre, three crossed arrows. Each star stands for one of the twelve tribes, among them the Abzakh, Besleney, Bzhedugh, Kabardians, Shapsugh and Ubykh.

  Nine of the stars curve in an arc and stand for the aristocratic tribes. The other three sit in a horizontal line for the democratic tribes, the Natukhai, Shapsug and Abdzakh. Those three ran their affairs through assemblies called Khase, or larger ones called Zafes, while the other tribes answered to princes.

  Geography shaped each tribe. The narrow Black Sea coast belonged, from north to south, to the Natukhai, Shapsug and Ubykh. The Natukhai grew rich on trade because their coast opened onto the steppe rather than onto high mountains. The Hatuqwai had a warlike reputation and were later expelled from the Caucasus completely.

  The Kabardians held about a third of the northern foothills, stretching east toward the Chechen country. They dealt with Russia from the sixteenth century and were badly thinned by plague in the early nineteenth. Today they are the largest tribe, numbering three to four million people worldwide.

  The tribes spoke slightly different dialects. These drifted apart after the death of Inal, the ruler who united Circassia, because travel between tribal lands grew harder. Each dialect then took the name of its tribe.

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• 4. Custom and Hospitality

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  A guest room called the kunakskaya stood in many Circassian houses, and the rule behind it was strict. Hospitality, similar to the Greek idea of xenia, bound a host to protect a guest. That duty reached even to an abrek, an outlaw.

  This was part of khabze, the body of custom that governed Adyghe life. Society was stratified. Aristocrats were called warq, and some of their families held the rank of Pshi, or prince. The eldest of such a family, the Pshi-tkhamade, was the tribal chief. Below the warq came the tfokotl, roughly freemen, and then three classes close to serfs or slaves.

  Even in the feudal tribes, a chief's power could be checked by assemblies or by other influential families. In the democratic tribes, decisions were made by general agreement, with no formal way to enforce them. Those tribes lived mostly in the mountains, where Russian pressure was weaker. In the decades before Russian rule, two tribes overthrew their traditional rulers and set up democratic processes, an experiment cut short by the end of independence.

  Cross-cutting ties linked unrelated people. Two men might become sworn brothers, called kunaks. Groups of unrelated individuals formed brotherhoods called tleuzh to give each other support. Many children were raised by an atalyk, a foster father.

  When disputes turned violent, criminal law aimed mainly to reconcile the two sides. Where Islamic reformers such as Imam Shamil pushed a stricter religious law, khabze was often described as adat, custom, by contrast.

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• 5. Cloth, Carpets and Table

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  The shashka, a long single-edged sword without a guard, is a Circassian invention in name as well as form. The word comes from the Adyghe Sashkhwa, meaning long knife. Cossacks adopted the weapon, but the Circassian version is longer.

  A dagger and a sword were compulsory in a man's costume. Down the chest ran rows of ornamental tubes called gaziri, which once each held a single gunpowder charge for reloading muskets. Colour marked rank. Princes wore white, nobles red, and peasants gray, brown or black. In fighting times, young men wore coats with short sleeves for freedom in combat.

  Women's dress varied by region, tribe, family class and occasion. Holiday dresses used silk and velvet, and embroiderers worked in gold and silver thread, by hand and slowly. Whites, reds, blacks and browns dominated, while blue and green were rarely used.

  Carpets and mats carried the Adyghe name across the world for thousands of years. Gathering the raw material was permitted only in a short season. Drying it in shade gave a light gold, direct sun gave silver, and soaking it in water covered with poplar leaves gave a dark tone. Patterns showed birds, horses, plants and the Sun.

  In the guest room, two carpets traditionally hung on the wall, one over the rifles and pistols and the other over the musical instruments. Every Circassian girl was expected to make three carpets before marrying, and grooms read her future success in them.

  The table was seasonal. Summer meant dairy and vegetables, winter and spring meant flour and meat, including a dish called ficcin. Circassian cheese is among the best known in the North Caucasus. On holidays, families made haliva, fried triangular pastries filled with cheese or potato.

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• 6. Princes and Mamluks

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  In 1382, Circassian slave soldiers took the Mamluk throne in Egypt, and the Burji dynasty began. Its leaders were mostly of Circassian origin, with some Abkhaz, Abaza and Georgian men among them, and the dynasty lasted until 1517. Qaitbay, who ruled as sultan from 1468 to 1496, was one of them.

  At home, the Circassians were fighting off a long line of invaders. From around the year 400, waves of outsiders arrived, starting with the Bulgars. After the Khazar state dissolved, the Adyghe were drawn into the Kingdom of Alania. Georgia held influence from the 10th to the 13th century, and a Circassian kingdom called Zichia existed in the medieval era.

  The Mongols began invading the Caucasus in 1223 and destroyed most of the Alans. Later Golden Horde attacks pushed the Circassians back behind the Kuban River. In 1395 they fought Tamerlane and won, though he still plundered Circassia.

  The 1400s brought Prince Inal, who held land on the Taman peninsula. He raised an army and set out to unite the Circassians, who were then split into many states. He defeated 30 Circassian lords and then turned to the Abkhazians. After winning that war, he took Northern Abkhazia, and one star on the flag of Abkhazia still honours him.

  Inal divided his lands among his sons and grandchildren in 1453 and died in 1458. Principalities followed, including Chemguy under Temruk, Besleney under Beslan, Kabardia under Qabard and Shapsug under Zanoko.

  In 1708 the Ottomans sent at least 20,000 men with Crimean Khan Kaplan-Girey to collect tribute from the Kabardians. The Circassians had paid before, hoping to prevent Tatar raids, but the Tatars raided anyway. Kazaniko Jabagh's strategy won the Battle of Kanzhal. The Crimean army was destroyed on the 17th of September 1708, and the khan escaped humiliated, even losing his shoes. In 2013, the Institute of Russian History recognized the battle as of paramount importance to the history of the Circassians, Balkarians and Ossetians.

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• 7. Faith Before and After Islam

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  Tradition holds that the Apostle Andrew first preached Christianity in Circassia in the first century. The Christian faith spread across the Caucasus over the following centuries, helped by Armenian, Greek and Byzantine influence. Circassians, then called Kassogs, accepted it as a national religion without abandoning every indigenous belief.

  Islam came slowly. A small Muslim presence existed from the Middle Ages, but in 1717 Sultan Ahmed III ordered the Crimean Khans to spread the faith among the Circassians. The Ottomans and Crimeans found success first with aristocrats, who then spread the religion to their dependents. The growing threat from Russia sped up the change.

  Some communities resisted. Christian and pagan practice lingered among the Shapsugs and Natukhai, even as pressure came from those loyal to the Caucasus Imamate. Sufi orders, including the Qadiri and Nakshbandi, gained prominence and helped Islam spread.

  Today the vast majority of Circassians are Muslim, and fewer are followers of Habze, atheists or Christians. Catholicism, once brought to the coast by Venetian and Genoese traders, accounts for just under 1 percent of Kabardins.

  Observance varies widely. Some Circassians know only a few prayers and hold a Muslim identity that is more cultural than devout. Others follow every requirement. In diaspora communities such as Israel, Islam is central to daily life. In the homeland, Soviet rule left deep secularization, and norms such as social drinking are common.

  Habze has a complicated place. Some communities see conflict between it and Islam, while those in Israel see the two as complementary. There have even been reports of violence and threats against people trying to revive the pre-Islamic faith. In 2005 a survey of Circassians aged 20-35 found that about 26 percent identified as irreligious.

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• 8. The Last Stand

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  On the 25th of June 1861, Circassian delegates gathered in Shashe, the site of today's Sochi, for what they called the Great Freedom Assembly. Haji Qerandiqo Berzedj led the body. It appealed to Europe for help, warning that exile was coming. Before any answer arrived, Russian General Kolyobakin invaded Sochi and destroyed the parliament. No country objected.

  The conquest had been planned for generations. In 1714 Peter I drew up a scheme to occupy the Caucasus. He could not carry it out, but he laid its foundations, and Catherine II began putting it into action. Russian troops took positions along the Terek River.

  Forts were the first tool, but highlanders raided them and sometimes held them. Under General Yermolov, the army switched to disproportionate retribution. Troops destroyed villages believed to shelter fighters, and they used assassination, kidnapping and the execution of whole families. Because fighters relied on friendly villages for food, soldiers also wiped out crops and livestock and killed civilians. The Circassians answered by forming a federation of all their tribes.

  In May 1864-20,000 Circassian horsemen faced a fully equipped Russian army of 100,000. The horsemen tried to break the line and most were shot down. The survivors fought on as guerillas and were soon beaten. The war ended officially on the 21st of May 1864.

  The battlefield is known today as Krasnaya Polyana, which means red meadow. The name recalls Circassian blood running from the hill into the river.

  The Russian officer Ivan Drozdov saw the aftermath at Qbaada while his comrades celebrated. He described corpses of women, children and elderly persons, torn to pieces and half-eaten by dogs.

  No one knows the full toll. Researchers have suggested that 75, 90, 94 or even 95-97 percent of Circassians were affected, and estimates of those lost run from 600,000 to 1,500,000. Historian Walter Richmond writes that by 1864 three-fourths of the population was annihilated, leaving Circassians among the first stateless peoples of the modern era.

  The Russians had been looking for a way to remove the Circassians as early as 1859, and they found one in the Ottoman Empire. The two empires, despite old quarrels, negotiated the movement. Russia promised a gradual process that would send fewer than 100,000 people to the Ottomans. The Ottomans formed a new Emigrant Commission to manage retrieval and resettlement.

  The plan collapsed almost at once. Far more people crowded onto the Circassian coast than anyone had expected, easily reaching tens of thousands at a time. Food and shelter ran short, Russian soldiers raided occasionally, and typhus and smallpox spread through the packed camps.

  By 1864, hundreds of thousands of Circassians had either entered the Ottoman Empire or were still waiting on the shore. The Ottomans overloaded boats and dropped earlier safety rules. Many vessels sank, and disease passed among migrants and crews alike. The first arrivals, in 1859, had been mostly wealthy aristocrats.

  On arrival, the Emigrant Commission moved people on as fast as it could to relieve the port cities. Exiles were settled in the Empire's remaining Balkan lands, in Ottoman Syria and Transjordan, and in Anatolia, with a smaller number sent to the major cities.

  The descendants of the exiles later began a campaign for international recognition of genocide. On the 20th of May 2011, the Georgian parliament voted 95 to 0 to declare that Russia had committed genocide against the Circassians. As of 2025, Georgia and Ukraine are the only countries to classify the events that way.

  Roughly half of all Circassians live in Turkey, mainly in provinces such as Samsun, Ordu, Kahramanmaraş, Kayseri and Düzce. An estimated two million are ethnic Circassians, though the state counts all citizens as Turks. Many no longer speak the ancestral language. Many Young Turks were of Circassian origin.

  In December 1922, and again in May and June 1923, the Turkish government removed 14 Circassian villages from the Gönen and Manyas regions. Women and children were not separated from the men, and the villagers were driven to places stretching from Konya to Sivas and Bitlis. After 1923, bans on the Circassian language, changed village names and the surname law pushed assimilation further.

  Jordan tells a different story. Circassians founded or re-established five sites between 1878 and 1904, among them Amman in 1878 and Jerash in 1884. Amman remained mainly a Circassian village until the First World War, and then grew fast with the Hejaz Railway. Sa'id al-Mufti served as prime minister, and Circassians form the royal honour guard. They represented Jordan at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in 2010.

  Before the Six-Day War in 1967, about 30,000 Circassians lived in Syria's Golan Heights and made up its majority. Their main town was Quneitra. In 2013, as civil conflict deepened, Syrian Circassians began exploring a return to the Caucasus. Russia issued some visas.

  In Israel, settlers first made homes at Kfar Kama, Rehaniya and near Hadera, but left the last after a malaria epidemic. In Egypt, the Abaza family became the country's largest aristocratic clan and settled in the Nile Delta in the 18th century. Iran's Safavid and Qajar rulers brought Circassians to Persia, where the kings Abbas II and Suleiman I had Circassian ancestry.

  Smaller groups reach farther. Kosovo's Circassian community partly moved to Adygea in 1998 after reprisals from Serbian forces. In Ukraine, only 181 of 1,010 Circassians declared fluency in the native language.

  The two surviving Circassian languages, Adyghe in the west and Kabardian in the east, are mutually intelligible. Adyghe is based on the Temirgoy dialect, and Kabardian on the dialect of the same name. Linguists place both in the Northwest Caucasian family, alongside Ubykh and the Abkhaz and Abaza branch. Circassian and Abaza are related but cannot be understood across.

  Walter Richmond calls the Circassian languages in Russia gravely threatened. He argues that surrounding small Circassian communities with Slavic populations makes it likely the languages and the nation will disappear. By the 1990s, Russian had become the standard business language in the Republic of Adygea, even in communities with Circassian majorities.

  Sochi, once the Circassian capital, hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014. Venues were built on land claimed to hold mass graves from the killings of 1860-1864. Circassian groups in Russia and abroad asked for construction to stop. Iyad Youghar, who headed the International Circassian Council, said: "We want the athletes to know that if they compete here they will be skiing on the bones of our relatives."

  The year 2014 was also the 150th anniversary of the genocide, which deepened the anger. Protests were held around the world, but they did not stop the Games.

  Today about 800,000 Circassians remain in historical Circassia, while 4,500,000 live elsewhere, mostly in Turkey.

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