Crimean Tatar Diaspora - Experiences in Exile Within The Ottoman Empire

Experiences in Exile Within The Ottoman Empire

There have been continuously members of Tatar nobility in the Ottoman Empire, due to close relations between the two states. There was a Giray vassal state in the Ottoman province of Bucak (Bessarabia). It was centered on the towns of Bender and Çatal Osman, and considered semi-independent (only controlled by Ottoman Pasha in Rusçuk.) In the 14th and 15th centuries, Ottomans colonized Dobruja with Crimean Tatars from Bucak. Between 1593 and 1595, Crimean Tatars were also settled to Dobruja. (Frederick de Jong) Some Crimean Tatars went to Greece and Turkey.

However, the first Crimean Tatar emigration took place after the Russian annexation of Crimea. Crimean Tatar ruling class (mirzas) and mullahs sought asylum within the North Caucasian people, fearing persecution. Their number were around 8,000. Their relations to Crimea continued from their Caucasian safe havens. Hopes that a Giray from the Caucasus would return to liberate Crimea continued until the very conquest of North Caucasus by the Russians in 1859. The Crimean Tatars in the North Caucasus were exiled to Anatolia in 1877-1878 together with Circassians and Chechens by the Russian Empire. The exiled Muslims from the North Caucasus were around one million.

After the annexation, 4,000 Tatars also escaped to westward direction to the Ottoman fortress of Ozu (Ochakov), and from there to the Ottoman province of Bucak (Bessarabia) where a vassal Giray dynasty existed. With the conquest of Bessarabia by the Russians in 1812, all Tatars here migrated to southwards, to the Dobruja province.

Crimean Tatars immigrated to the Ottoman Empire, where they were welcomed as fellow Muslims and as the populace of the formerly protected Crimean Khanate. The Ottoman territory was called "aqtopraq" ("white soil" or more probably "soil of justice") by the Crimean Tatar immigrants, as they conceived of their migration as a "hijra" similar to the prophet's temporary retreat to Medina under the pressure from enemies of Islam. The outflow of the Crimean Tatars turned into an exodus after the Crimean War (1854–1856), as the Russian government began to treat the Crimean Tatars as internal threats to its security because of their historical relations with the Ottoman Empire.

The majority of the Crimean Tatar immigrants were settled in the Dobruja region of the Balkans by the Ottoman authorities, but some were directed to various parts of Anatolia, where significant numbers of Crimean Tatars perished due to changes in environmental and climate conditions.

Although there were Crimean Tatars who emigrated from the mountainous, coastal, and urban parts of the Crimea among them, the majority of the emigrants were from the steppes of Crimea and its surroundings, who lived largely in closed peasant communities. According to ancient Crimean Tatar traditions, marriage between relatives (e.g. cousins), even very distant ones, has always been strictly prohibited, unlike the local population of Anatolia. The ones who lived in a concentrated manner in adjacent villages, such as the ones around Eskişehir region, were able to maintain their ethnic identity and language intact almost up until the 1970s. The Crimean Tatar diaspora identity emerged over this period in the form of predominantly oral cultural traditions in stories, songs, poems, myths, and legends about the loss of the "homeland" and the miseries of immigration.

An excerpt from Crimean Tatar Exile Literature is as follows:

The angry and wild Black Sea roared,

Rushed to extinguish my burning motherland.

The old Çatırdağ, distressed and worried,

"Where are the Tatars going?" she cried.

Eskender Fazıl, from his poem Stand Up (Çatırdağ is a mountain in Crimea)