Let Our Fame Be Great (5 page)

Our host, who spoke very little English, kept encouraging me to ‘make kebabs with love' – a baffling comment that I only later discovered was a reference to an Israeli hummus advert. Every time he said it, a gale of laughter would sweep the room. Then the fierce competition that had developed between our table and that next door, where a group of older men were trying to match our prodigious kebab output, would resume in even deadlier earnest.

Every task was the excuse for a joke. And when I wiped my eyes after peeling an onion, there was a good half-hour of banter about whether it was or was not habze for a man to cry if he was not actually sad.

The same good-natured rivalry extended to the wedding itself, where the men competed for the most flamboyant dancing. Circassian dancing is a well-developed tradition, in which the women glide on scarcely moving feet within a circle of clapping onlookers, their hands undulating and dipping like fish in a tropical sea. The men, however, are all flash and fire. Their feet stamp, and their arms dart as they shepherd their partner around the ring. With chests out, and their heads thrown back, their dances have a primal quality: a mating
display in its rawest form. That men and women dance together at all is, of course, a rarity in the Middle East and just another sign of the exceptional nature of Circassian culture in the region.

The dancing, the accordion music, and the rules of habze were common elements to all the Circassian communities I visited, even ones where the language had been lost. But, for decades, the Circassians of Israel did not know that. They had only the smallest signs that any Circassians outside their two villages survived at all.

‘In my time,' remembered Khon, ‘there was one radio station from Amman or Syria maybe that played one hour of Circassian music a week, this was the only thing we had outside our own community. And the whole lot of us sat by our radios and listened to this music.'

Khon visited the Caucasus in 1992 for a month and is still excited about it. ‘It was a spiritual journey,' he said. ‘It was more than I expected, I did not expect to ever see that we had a country. I went to the theatre, I heard people in a town speak Circassian. At last we had a chance to raise the nation up again.'

At that time, Israel and Jordan were not to sign a peace treaty for another two years, so Khon could not visit his Circassian compatriots the other side of the Jordan valley. He looked for another way to connect with the diaspora, and found it in the internet. If you searched for the word Circassian on the internet in those days, he remembered, you found nothing. And since the Israeli Circassians got the internet before any of the other diaspora communities, and they could learn from their Jewish neighbours how to mobilize a scattered nation, they hit the ground running.

They used the internet to seek out other Circassians dreaming of creating a united nation for the first time in over a century, and forged ties that have strengthened and spread in the years since.

Kfar-Kama is now home to a radio station called Adiga Radio that broadcasts over the web twenty-four hours a day. It has news in several languages and plays a peculiar selection of Circassian music in which home-made hip-hop will morph into a folk melody and back again, to an audience around the world. The radio site also allows visitors to download Circassian versions of classic films – including
Bambi
, which has been renamed
Nalbi
, perhaps because
Bambi
has an
unfortunate double meaning in Circassian, although none of the locals would explain it to me. Israel's Circassians are also active in chat rooms and discussion forums trying to reach out to their compatriots across the Middle East.

This ability to expand their horizons while remaining Circassian came along just in time. Israel's Circassians were running out of non-relatives to marry and the opening of borders has allowed people to look for wives or husbands in Turkey and Jordan.

The Circassians in Israel now have a professional folk-dancing troupe, coached by a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Caucasus, and the children are well-educated about the history of their nation. But, in reaching out, they did find one problem. Despite being the smallest community, Israel's Circassians are the only ones outside the old homeland to have preserved the language completely. It is so vigorously alive in Israel that even non-Circassian neighbours in Rehaniye speak it well.

But it is hard to talk to compatriots in other countries. Young Circassians elsewhere speak Arabic, Turkish or even English.

Take Sebahattin Diyner, a stern 75-year-old in the Turkish city of Kayseri, for example. He never thought he would visit the Caucasus, and he never thought his children would need the language that he grew up speaking. He was born after all in Turkey – a Turkey where saying you were not a Turk was a political act. He was a Circassian, and his parents taught him to be proud of it. But he did not advertise it.

As the 1980s came to a close, however, change was bubbling over not only in his own country, where the economy's growth was altering society profoundly, but in the Soviet Union too. Suddenly ethnic groups that had long been part of the happy communist family under the Russian ‘older brother' could look around them and explore their past.

The communities began to reach out to each other and, when they found each other, to dream of re-creating what was lost at a ground-breaking conference for the whole nation.

So Diyner was nervous when he stood on stage at the International Circassian Congress held in the Caucasus town of Nalchik in
May 1991. The Soviet Union still existed. Would the dream of forging bonds between the fragments of the shattered nation be pulled away as it had been in the past?

‘There must have been 15,000 people gathered there and I addressed them on behalf of the Turkish delegation. When I was speaking people started crying. When we went out on the street, people came up to us, they wanted to know about relatives in Turkey. An old woman, she must have been eighty, just hugged me, she said she had been told a big lie all her life. The governments had lied, they had been told that the diaspora had lost its culture, that Circassians abroad lived badly. She said she felt like a mother who had found a lost child,' he remembered, seventeen years after that historic speech.

Diyner was seventy-five years old when we met in the central Turkish city of Kayseri, and at first he possessed an austere dignity. He tapped his foot up and down as he answered, leaning back in an overstuffed armchair.

Without being rude, he managed to give the impression of someone who wanted to be doing something else, rather than answering questions about his past. But as he remembered the congress of 1991, he thawed. He leaned forward in his chair, planting both feet on the ground, and began to lose himself in what had been. He talked more quickly about the people he had met and the amazing sights he had seen.

‘We could talk to everyone, we had no problems, our language was identical. I met sixty people from the same family as me, people with the same surname as me. Many of them lived in the little village of Lo'okit. We have a village just near here with the same name.'

With the ice broken, he allowed me to ask more questions. I probed deeper and suddenly he just opened up. I sat in amazed silence, scribbling in my notebook as he told me his family story. He only stopped – his foot tapping again but this time in impatience – for his words to be translated into English so he could continue.

Some sixteen members of his family left the Caucasus in 1864, with his grandfather's father on the boat as a young boy. Twelve of them survived the voyage and the refugee camp. Three died of disease, while one young man had broken his leg and hurt his head climbing on board ship and died without reaching Turkey.

They arrived in Samsun, and trekked into Anatolia in search of the empty lands that the government had promised them. They reached the Uzunyayla – the ‘Long Plateau' – of central Turkey, where only nomads lived, and they settled down to make it their own.

Uzunyayla is a bleak, terrible place, treeless and windswept. Villages are tucked into folds in the ground but are still dreadfully exposed. Poles along the verges mark the road when it is covered by dense snow in winter.

The Circassian country along the Black Sea could scarcely have been more different. Densely wooded, and made up of rolling hills and tumbling rivers, it provided ample farming and grazing for the nation before its expulsion. It must have been cruel indeed for Circassians to trek from their lush home to this arid and blasted land.

But on a map of Circassian communities in the Middle East, this plateau holds a special meaning as a crossroads. The Circassian villages fan south from the Black Sea city of Samsun in a line, stretching down through Uzunyayla to the border with Syria, then on into Jordan and Israel. To the east, only a handful of villages are scattered near the borders of Armenia and Iraq. To the west, however, a mass of them rings Istanbul in the regions of Sakariya, Eskisehir and Bursa. When Diyner's great-grandfather arrived here, this Circassian world was just being created. Its members were cousins and neighbours and friends. They would serve together in the Ottoman army, and trade together and enjoy each other's company. The Circassians had lost Circassia, but they were still linked in one giant community.

Diyner's grandfather left Turkey in 1911 to go to the Caucasus for a visit. He met those of his aunts and uncles who had remained behind. After staying for two and a half years, he reluctantly turned down offers to find him a bride. He had a wife and children in Turkey and they were waiting for him. But it was cruel homecoming, for he died in 1915 fighting the Russians in the First World War.

He would not have known it but he was one of the last Circassians to have enjoyed the freedom to wander through the newly created diaspora. He just saddled a horse, rode for four and a half months, and came back to Uzunyayla.

Diyner had a picture of him. It was a photograph of a painting, which was in turn taken from a photograph. It showed a young man, straight-backed and handsome with his moustache and astrakhan hat. He wore the tunic of the Circassian, with its cartridge cases in their holders across his chest and the long dagger in front of his crotch. Diyner was seventy-five years old and the very model of the secular Turk, in his checked shirt, glasses and cardigan. But he had the same moustache, the same hooded eyes and the same straight back. The resemblance was striking.

The war that killed his grandfather also destroyed the Russian empire. The communist state that succeeded it built walls that separated the diaspora communities from their homeland for more than seventy years. No one from Diyner's generation had ever been to the Caucasus, nor even dreamed that it would one day be possible.

Uzunyayla is in a way the most Circassian of all Turkey's districts. When the Circassians arrived in the Ottoman Empire, they were distributed wherever the government could afford to give them land. Circassians today like to say they were placed along the frontiers of settled agriculture as guardians of the Ottoman heartland from the wild nomad tribes. It is a pleasant myth, and has a comforting feel to it. In truth, however, it is more likely that the land used by nomads could be given away to the new arrivals without anyone significant complaining. The farmers would then encourage their nomad neighbours to settle. The line from Samsun down to the Holy Land was the line where the farming Turks and Arabs bumped against the Turkoman and Bedouin nomads, and thus the line where there was land available to give to the Circassians.

To the west, where Circassians are clumped around Istanbul, they were moved onto swampy valley floors, which they drained and turned into fertile and profitable fields. Circassians were settled in the Balkans as well, but were driven out when the states of Romania and Bulgaria were created in 1878 – 9, leaving just a handful in Kosovo – a community that now is all but extinct.

Hundreds of thousands of Circassians left the Caucasus. Estimated numbers vary wildly: from a probably overinflated two million, to a clearly too small 300,000. The number was probably somewhere
between a million and 1.2 million, according to the latest research by historians. The death toll of their terrible journey is impossible to estimate, but the mortality rate was probably about a third.

The world's current Circassian population is hard to estimate. The emigrants' descendants today number maybe as many as four million in Turkey, although historians have not studied them and even Western histories of the modern Turkey fail to include them in their indexes. A hundred thousand or so are in Syria, and maybe 70,000 more live in Jordan, while 4,000 live in Israel and a handful cling on in Kosovo. Significant secondary communities also live in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. The diaspora community, therefore, massively outnumbers the 600,000 Circassians who still live in the Caucasus.

There was, therefore, great excitement among these Circassians when, just a few months after Diyner's speech at the International Circassian Congress in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and the prospect of reuniting the nation rose in its place.

Young Circassians take great interest in the traditions of their parents. Today, in Turkey, very few Circassians below thirty or forty years old speak their own language, but they have nonetheless sought to assert their culture.

Listening to old stories, a group of young people in the early 1990s had heard an old folk tale of a woman called Elif Ketsep'ha. She, the story told them, grew up in the Balkans when it was still Ottoman land but was forced to flee in 1877 – 8 and ended up in a small village north of Adapazari in western Turkey. Her family died of disease and famine, leaving just her to honour their corpses. She sat every day by their graves singing the mourning songs of her people, becoming a symbol of the constancy and the tragedy of her nation.