Crimea's Tatars: A fragile revival
After persecution during Soviet times, Crimean Tatars have returned to their homeland in Ukraine where they are trying to rebuild their lives.
Rustem Eminov, now in his mid-40s, was sent into exile when he was just three-months-old. His family was forced to leave the Crimea and was resettled in far-away Central Asia.
It was not until the breakup of the Soviet Union, when he was in his 20s, that Eminov was finally able to live in the land of his birth.
Over cups of green tea in a room shaded against the fierce sun, he tells me his story.
Now a specialist in the history of the Crimean Tatars, Eminov is the director of ethnography at the Historical and Culture Reserve in the old Crimean town of Bakhchisaray.
A handsome clean-shaven man, with a smile on his face and an open manner, my wife and I meet him in his little office across the moat from the palace of the old Khan - the Crimea's last Muslim ruler. It's one of the few remaining monuments to the history of Crimean Tatar people.
Despite his exile, Eminov acknowledges that he is one of the lucky ones. Many Tatars suffered much worse treatment.
In 1944, Stalin decided to send the entire Tatar population of the Crimea into exile.
The excuse for the collective punishment of old men, women, and children was that they had collaborated with the occupying German forces during the Second World War. Around 200,000 people were pushed on to trains and sent - for the most part - to Uzbekistan.
It was disastrous - almost half the population died within a year. They were forced to live in what Eminov ironically calls "reservations".
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Who are the Crimean Tatars?
- Speak a Turkic language and can understand Turkish
- Majority Sunni Muslims
- Large diaspora in Turkey
- Around 250,000 currently living in Crimea
It was not till the 1960s, that the Soviet government softened its stance towards them - the charge of collaboration was dropped, and in 1967 the Crimean Tatars were pardoned.
But they still were not allowed to go home. It wasn't until 1987, when Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his reforms, that the Tatars were finally allowed to return to Crimea. But in the previous 40 years their homeland had changed. Their houses were now lived in by others, mainly Russians and Ukrainians, who had no wish to give them up.
To make things worse, few Tatars had been able to bring back much in the way of wealth from Uzbekistan.
"Just imagine what 200,000 people trying to move at the same time does to the price of flats," says Eminov. Families had to start from scratch.
I heard one such story from a man called Ruslan, who did not want to use his surname. Born in Uzbekistan, he was 10 when his family managed to move back to Crimea.
Ruslan worked as a shepherd in a kolkhoz, a collective farm, on the north Crimean steppe. When the Soviet Union split up the collective farm simply collapsed.
Without much education or many marketable skills - there isn't much call for sheep-shearing these days in Ukraine - Ruslan moved down to the coast and now works as a driver.
Crimean Tatars are starting small businesses but reviving their culture is a much harder task. One of the great difficulties is just how little of it has survived.
The Crimea has always been a contested land. The peninsula has been fought over for centuries.
Russian armies twice devastated Bakhchisaray. All that now survives are a few private houses and mosques - crumbling away in the town's backstreets - and the magnificent palace of the Khans.
In the 1820s, some 40 years after the end of the Crimean Khanate, the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin visited the palace and wrote a poem about the unhappy love of a Crimean Khan for his Polish concubine.
The white marble fountain he described in The Fountain of Bakhchisaray is still there, dropping a single tear-like droplet of water, again and again.
The association with Russia's national poet seems to have helped preserve this sad little fountain - rather ugly black bust of Pushkin now stands next to it - and indeed helped to save the entire exquisite complex of halls, courtyards and gardens.
The Crimean Tatar revival is real but it is still fragile. Eminov talks of the religious pressures and is concerned that, despite Ukraine's secular constitution, in practice the state favours Christianity, and even builds churches.
An Islamic revival is under way, but will it be the Islam of old Crimea or of modern Arabia?
Many Crimean Tatars fled to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century and the Turkish government is currently paying for a new madrassa - or Koranic school - and what is described as an "archaeological reconstruction" - which sounds rather like a contradiction in terms.
There is a great risk of an artificial version of the Crimean past. However, as I sit on the terrace of a Bakhchisaray restaurant enjoying its hearty Central Asian dishes of lagmam and shorpa - noodles and stew - my worries about an ersatz future drift away.
The Tartars are home. They are clearly survivors.
shared with courtesy of BBC
Well, firstly it must be said: actually all Tatars are one nation. Only in the anti-Tatar and anti Horde ideology they are divided into “different nation."
ReplyDeletePerhaps you know, that an outstanding Tatar historian-scientist D. Iskhakov wrote in 2000: “the real history of Tatars, of the people in every respect historical, is not written yet”.
However, recently were published books about the unwritten (hidden) real history of Tatars, written by independent Tatar Historian Galy Yenikeyev.
There are a lot of previously little-known historical facts, as well as 16 maps and illustrations in this book.
This book presents a new, or rather "well-forgotten old" information about the true history of the Tatars and other Turkic peoples.
It must be said, that there are many pro-Chinese and Persian falsifications of the "wild nomads" etc. in the official history.
Therefore, primarily we should know the truth about the meaning of the names "Mongol" and "Tatar" (“Tartar") in the medieval Eurasia:
the name "Mongol" until the 17th-18th centuries meant belonging to a political community, and was not the ethnic name. While “the name "Tatar" was “the name of the native ethnos (nation) of Genghis Khan …” , “…Genghis Khan and his people did not speak the language, which we now call the "Mongolian”…" (Russian academic-orientalist V.P.Vasiliev, 19th century). This is also confirmed by many other little known facts.
So in fact Genghis Khan was a Tatar and a great leader of the all Turkic peoples. But with time many of his descendants and tribesmen became spiritually disabled and forgot him and his invaluable doctrine and covenants... Tatars of Genghis Khan -medieval Tatars - were one of the Turkic nations, whose descendants now live in many of the fraternal Turkic peoples of Eurasia - among the Tatars, Kazakhs, Bashkirs, Uighurs, and many others.
And few people know that the ethnos of medieval Tatars, which stopped the expansion of the Persians and the Chinese to the West of the World in Medieval centuries, is still alive. Despite the politicians of the tsars Romanovs and Bolsheviks dictators had divided and scattered this ethnos to different nations...
About everything above mentioned and a lot of the true history of the Tatars and other fraternal Turkic peoples, which was hidden from us, had been written, in detail and proved, in the book "Forgotten Heritage of Tatars" (by Galy Yenikeyev).
There are a lot of previously little-known historical facts, as well as 16 maps and illustrations in this book.
On the cover of this book you can see the true appearance of Genghis Khan. It is his lifetime portrait. Notes to the portrait from the book says: "...In the ancient Tatar historical source «About the clan of Genghis-Khan» the author gives the words of the mother of Genghis-Khan: «My son Genghis looks like this: he has a golden bushy beard, he wears a white fur coat and rides on a white horse» [34, p. 14]. As we can see, the portrait of an unknown medieval artist in many ways corresponds to the words of the mother of the Hero, which have come down to us in this ancient Tatar story. Therefore, this portrait, which corresponds to the information of the Tatar source and to data from other sources, we believe, the most reliably transmits the appearance of Genghis-Khan...".
This e-book you can easily find in the Internet, on Smashwords company website: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/MIG17