Let Our Fame Be Great (7 page)

The then 23-year-old prince struggled to get a Russian visa for his trip, however, and had to leave four of his horses behind in Turkey to avoid a customs infringement. It was a disappointment for the idealistic group to strike the stifling bureaucracy of Russian rule in the Caucasus. Hatyk was to come to know the suffocating legal culture even better. At that time, he had the prized
vid na zhitelstvo
, or Russian residency permit. But he would not have it for long.

‘For the Russians, they cannot distinguish if you are a Chechen or a Circassian, or if you are going to fight against them or not. They cancelled my vid na zhitelstvo, for example, on the charge that I am a nationalist. They've made it harder for us to get visas. It costs more
money and it takes longer. There is a law that Circassians should be able to get passports, but they've made it harder. You have to give up your old passport, and you have to speak Russian. It's easier perhaps if you're fifty or sixty years old, then they know you're not going to fight them.'

I walked away from the meeting more depressed than I'd expected. The students might be trying to set up a television station, but if the Circassian population was still divided, then the chances of uniting its far-flung elements were slight. Struggling for a metaphor, I thought of the people as a pot that had been smashed, and then tumbled around in a river for a hundred years. The shards would still match in colour and pattern, but their edges would have been knocked about and chipped and scarred and encrusted. It would not be possible to slot them back together.

But enough of the pattern survived to make the culture recognizable, and people who visited the Caucasus in the nineteenth century would still have seen flashes of their familiar Circassians in what was all around me two centuries later.

In Kayseri, where I met Sebahattin Diyner, I was adopted by a young man called Aytek, who, as a friend of a friend of a friend, afforded me all the wonders of Circassian hospitality. He was a cynical and amusing man, with at times a very jaundiced view of his own people, but he loved the glory of its traditions. As we drove out to the village where he grew up, he told me about his aunt: a woman of a character strong even for a Circassian. Aged thirty, she was told that she could never climb a particular mountain while playing her accordion. Unable to resist the challenge, she set off and did so, marching up the mountain – which is a 45-degree scree slope – and down again. At the bottom, she promptly died. ‘Someone had told her she could not do it, you see,' Aytek said.

That evening, he took me to a wedding to see how Turkey's Circassians – otherwise indistinguishable from other Turkish citizens on the streets – revelled in the traditions of their ancestors.

The dancing circle was if anything even more frenetic here than in Israel. The men were sweating as they competed with each other for ever more macho poses. They remained careful, however, to never
shame themselves by turning their backs on their partners, who responded by looking ever more graceful and demure.

All this dancing was thirsty work, and Aytek took me by the arm and steered me out to the car park where his friends had gathered around the open boot of a car to drink Johnnie Walker Red Label out of plastic cups and discuss the action inside. The dancing partners, although they appear to an onlooker to be entirely random, were it would seem part of an important ritual. One man and one woman are empowered with the right of selecting the partners for each dance, and if a party guest is interested in a particular woman, he asks the controllers to organize a dance for him. A few dances and they are considered to be an item, or
kashen
as the Circassian word has it.

Aytek's explanation of the intricacy of Circassian wedding lore was interrupted by a succession of loud gunshots from nearby. A Turkish wedding was taking place in a hall the other side of the car park wall and the groom was being saluted by his friends. My companions could not let such a challenge pass and one guest pulled a pistol from his pocket and loosed off a volley into the night. He masked the muzzle flashes with his jacket, but the noise was loud enough for the Turks to hear. There was no response.

I was thrilled, for firing into the air is a standard celebration in accounts of Circassian life in the 1830s. And here it was, used again in 2008.

This, however, is one tradition that the Circassian community is not united in defending.

Circassian culture, like many others based on family ties, diaspora, respect and martial prowess, has been at times prone to develop into the kind of mafia clans that have marred Sicilian and Italian communities in the United States. The Circassian villages near Istanbul are well-known for their giant palaces built with the proceeds of criminal empires. In the 1990s, the area between the cities of Dubze, Adapazari and Izmit was known as the ‘Bermuda Triangle' because so many pro-Kurdish businessmen would vanish and be found dead there. The mafia groups apparently take habze to the extreme. One chieftain, according to local legend, was shot in a bar in an argument that began when someone else paid the bill for him. Paying the bill
was seen as a mark of disrespect, an argument began, guns were drawn, and the mafia boss paid for it with his life.

As such, the communities east of Istanbul were awash with automatic weapons and, in the 1980s, people began arriving at weddings with boxes of ammunition all ready to be poured into the air in greeting, in exuberance or in celebration of particularly impressive dancing.

Sadly, the bullets that went up also came down. Most Circassians I spoke to had at least one family member who had been killed or wounded by falling bullets at a wedding, and the situation had been getting worse.

Eventually, the community had to act, as I heard from a group of old men who were attending a wedding in the village of Balballi east of Istanbul, where most of the residents were enjoying a few dances and a small celebration. Jihan Agumba, aged sixty-five, said that he and a number of other old men had decided to rein in their younger neighbours after a mother of two was killed at a wedding five years before.

‘Even before this woman was killed we had discussed what we could do to stop this,' he said. ‘When we were young, not everyone had guns and shooting was very regulated. If someone danced beautifully then people would shoot to honour him. If someone who was dancing well was honoured with a shot he would stop and gesture at the shooter to show how happy he was to be honoured.'

But when more guns arrived, things got out of hand, with shooting unregulated and uncontrolled. In short, this Circassian tradition had become excessive and, thus, non-Circassian.

‘The night this woman was killed, we were sat drinking coffee here and I used very strong words,' remembered Agumba. ‘I said that anyone who shoots in the air should be shamed before his family, that he should be dishonoured. Anyone who serves them at the wedding should be dishonoured, we should not attend the weddings of these people, or their funerals. There were very strong words.'

We were sitting in a corner of the wedding set aside for the old men. The men – grey-haired, straight-backed and dressed in suits and trilbys – nodded at Agumba's emphatic points. Some of them even turned
away from the dancing, which in this mainly Abkhaz village was more intricate and involved less obvious courtship than at the Circassian weddings. Abkhaz, though ethnically very close to the Circassians, have customs of their own and this dance appeared to have more in common with those of Ireland than those of their ethnic kin.

‘These youths who were shooting were influenced by gun culture on television. They did not learn like we did how to use guns, and how to control themselves. The main thing in our culture is respect. This is like an unwritten constitution. If someone dies, all sixty or seventy Circassian and Abkhaz villages in this region send people to the funeral. It is the same for a wedding. We share happiness, we share sadness. And if someone is older than you, you respect him, even if he is two or three years older. It took time, but the young people agreed to stop shooting.'

In the nearby village of Tashkorpru, I asked the young men if they were prepared to submit to the authority of the elders like their ancestors always had. The general response was that, yes, they would stop shooting if it was insisted on, but they were not happy about it.

‘I have never talked to anyone of our age who thinks it is right that we cannot shoot in the air. Probably 80 per cent of us do not agree with this,' grumbled Omer Shakoomda, a 45-year-old sitting in the village coffee house with a crowd of younger men.

‘If the hosts of the wedding insist that we should not shoot then we will not shoot. We still think though that if there are thousands of gunshots it shows the amount of respect people have for that family,' said Nejat, one of his friends at the bar.

‘At the last wedding I went to there was shooting. The man who asked us to stop was not really respected so people shot in the air anyway. If there is a sign saying “Please do not shoot” then people will obey it. But this is a logistical issue. If a new group arrives, they will not know you cannot shoot. It is mainly the ladies who want us to stop shooting. And groups with a lot of girls in them will leave if there is a lot of shooting.'

There was a lot of nodding around the table at this comment, and some heads were shaken in disappointment at the shame of it, but it
seemed the community leaders were determined to enforce the ban. Circassians would not bring in the police – it is an article of faith that they sort out their own problems – but they had mobilized to create a regional council to sort things out. The council's development was particularly interesting, since Turkey is very sensitive to any sign of separatism, but it appeared to have been tolerated by the government so far.

Afitap Altan, a woman in her fifties who heads the cultural centre in the city of Dubze and who acts as a delegate at the council, said Abkhaz weddings were now largely shooting-free, but the Circassians still shot a little.

‘You do not have the power to stop people shooting but when the elders say stop, there is a feeling that people should stop. I do not share the same ideas as the elders, but I will not argue with them. The elders will have found a compromise among themselves.'

The next weekend, she was due to attend a meeting of a thousand or so elders from the region, where they would discuss, according to the invitation, ‘keeping the culture alive, making sure shooting in the air at weddings is stopped, and that no alcohol is consumed'.

‘They have tried to do this outside the official societies, so that no politics is involved. The problem is though that everyone likes to speak, and if you give them the time, then all thousand people will speak,' she said.

The Circassians' tradition of natural democracy, of allowing anyone to speak who felt he had something to say, was remarked on wonderingly in the nineteenth century, and has survived over the centuries. Although the Circassians might bemoan the decline of habze and their traditions, they are clearly still alive in the modern world.

‘People from Dubze are very brave, very brave. Some people think this is mafia but it is not, we are just brave. If I have a problem on the street, then it can be solved by the family but that does not mean we are mafia. If there are problems the elders will say, “You are Circassian, how can you do this?” We solve most problems without the police. It is the same if you are poor, you will not ask for money but people will help you, we help each other,' said Altan.

What she told me reminded me of something, but it was only later I remembered a story I had heard in Israel, when I had asked why there was no theft in the Circassian villages.

It turned out that there had been a spate of thefts in Kfar-Kama some fifteen or twenty years before, which had initially confused a community where people leave their doors open and are not used to things going missing. After two weeks, the villagers realized what was happening and caught the thief, who was a Bedouin.

‘They did not involve the police. No, he got what he deserved. After he was released, his mouth was the only bit of him still working. We have not had a theft since,' I was told.

Circassians, I thought, are wonderful people to be friends with. But I would not like to fall out with them.

Some 170 years before me, two other British men were wandering wide-eyed through the Circassian world, trying to make sense of the strange culture that surrounded them. These were John Longworth and James Bell, and they had come on a mission.

A friend of theirs and a minor British diplomat, David Urquhart, had formulated his own foreign policy and, with great self-confidence, had set out to implement it by trying to provoke a war between London and St Petersburg. The plan involved entrapping the Russians into seizing a British ship (the
Vixen
) trading with the Circassians, and thus forcing London to intervene to secure Circassian independence. Circassian freedom would ensure the Ottoman Empire would be safe from Russian expansion, which would in turn guarantee the British hold on India.

The strategic clash created by the contradictions between Ottoman weakness, British imperialism and Russian expansion was the same one that would spark the Crimean War a couple of decades later, but that does not mean the plan was sensible. It was barmy and years ahead of its time. That did not bother Urquhart, however.

The Scot was a strangely persuasive man, and his position in the British embassy in Istanbul allowed him to come dangerously close to succeeding in his warmongering. Notes of protest were exchanged between the British and Russians over the ship. But sense prevailed, the war was avoided, and Urquhart was left as a footnote to history, rather than as the great strategic visionary that he believed himself to be.