Legend & origins
The Nart sagas and the year of the ships
Circassian memory keeps two epics. The old one is the Nart sagas, tales of giant heroes shared with the whole Caucasus and perhaps older than any scripture in the region. The new one is 1864, the year of the ships.
After a century of Russian conquest the Tsar's generals settled the Circassian question by expulsion. Villages were burned, people were driven down to the Black Sea beaches, and hundreds of thousands were packed onto Ottoman boats.
How many died is contested. Circassian organisations say a million and a half were deported or killed, Russian historians give lower figures, and the honest answer is that nobody has a reliable count. The community commemorates it every 21 May as genocide.
The Ottomans settled the survivors along their inner frontiers, first in Anatolia, then down the pilgrim road into Syria and Transjordan. In 1878 Circassian settlers put up houses among Roman ruins beside a stream. The place had been more or less empty for centuries. It was called Amman, and it now holds four million people.
They also drained marshes in the Golan and founded Quneitra. And they sold their loyalty, reliably, to whichever ruler kept faith with them. A Circassian honour guard has protected Jordan's kings since the first day of the emirate.
What sets them apart
Exile administered by a code of honour
What holds Circassians together across five countries is not religion. It is the khabze, an unwritten code of conduct that covers more or less everything.
The khabze
The code covers hospitality, deference, silence in front of elders, and how you hold your body. It is not written down anywhere and it is taught by correction. Circassians will tell you that a man's khabze is visible from across a street.
The cherkeska and the dance
The cherkeska is the fitted black coat with rows of silver cartridge holders across the chest. With it go the couple dances, where the man circles like a hawk and the woman glides. Both turn up at every wedding.
Guards of kings
From Ottoman gendarmes to the ceremonial guard of the Hashemite court, a military reputation became the community's social contract in exile.
21 May
The commemoration of the 1864 deportations, with black flags and processions towards the sea. It ties the diaspora to a homeland cause: recognition, and a right of return.
1878 — today
Founders of Amman, farmers of ruins
The Levantine communities went different ways. Jordan's Circassians, maybe 100,000 of them, became something close to an administrative aristocracy. Ministers, generals, the royal guard, and reserved seats in parliament. The founding families still have quarters of Amman named after them.
Syria's community was centred on Quneitra and the Golan and got broken twice: first in 1967, when Israel took the Golan and Quneitra was later razed, then again in the civil war, after which a few thousand made it back — despite Russian obstruction — to the Caucasus their ancestors had been expelled from — exile running backwards after a hundred and fifty years.
Israel's two Circassian towns, Kfar Kama and Rehaniya, hold about 5,000 people between them. They are the community's linguistic success story, with schooling in Adyghe, which is one of the two Circassian languages, and the best-preserved dialect outside the Caucasus.
Turkey has the great mass, two million or more of Circassian descent on most estimates, largely assimilated but stirring. Associations, language courses and 21 May marches have made Çerkes a public identity again. UNESCO lists both Circassian languages as at risk everywhere they are spoken, so the next fight is with the dictionary.
We built Amman among the ruins — as the ruins of our own country smoked behind us.On the Circassian founding of Jordan's capital, 1878
Geography
Where they live
Based on work by Dr. M. Izady, Atlas of the Islamic World and Vicinity (New York: Columbia Univ, 2006–present) @ gulf2000.columbia.edu/maps.shtml
Through time
Timeline
- 1763–1864The Russo-Circassian war. A century of conquest ends in the destruction of Circassia.
- 1864The year of the ships. Mass deportation across the Black Sea; hundreds of thousands die. Commemorated as genocide every 21 May.
- 1878Amman founded. Circassian settlers build among the Roman ruins; Quneitra and the Golan villages follow.
- 1921The Hashemite compact. Circassians provide the new Emirate of Transjordan its guard, officers and administrators.
- 1967 / 1974The Golan lost, Quneitra razed. Syria's Circassian heartland is emptied; families scatter to Damascus and abroad.
- 2011–War and return. Syrian Circassians flee; a few thousand reach the Caucasus republics, despite Russian obstruction.
- TodayThe language front. Adyghe and Kabardian are at risk everywhere they are spoken; schools in Kfar Kama and Amman fight the tide.
The exile's arithmetic
Estimated population (descent)
Descent-based estimates; active identity and language run far lower. Syria's figure has fallen steeply since 2011. The Caucasus republics hold ≈700,000 Circassians — the homeland as diaspora's mirror.
What they gave the region
Founders, guards, choreographers
The Circassian gift starts with a capital city. Amman was founded by exile settlers in 1878, and Quneitra in the Golan came about the same way. Jordan's army, police and court protocol still carry Circassian fingerprints a century later; the ceremonial guard in black cherkeska is the most visible signature the community has, and Circassian dance ensembles set the standard for folk performance across the Levant.
Costume history owes them something too. The cartridge-chest design of the cherkeska was picked up across the Caucasus and by the Cossacks: elegance engineered for horseback.
Looking forward
A people between two homelands
Two tracks, running at once. In the Levant, prosperity and assimilation thin the language, while associations, Adyghe classes and the schools at Kfar Kama push back against it. Jordan's community keeps its reserved seats and the trust of the palace.
Northward, the politics of 1864 keep the Caucasus option alive; a few thousand Syrian Circassians fleeing the war managed the return, with little help from Russia.
UNESCO's endangered listing is the official metric. The community's own is blunter: do the wedding dances still find dancers? In Amman they do, for now.
The emblem
Three arrows beneath the stars
Twelve gold stars over three crossed arrows on green. The flag was raised during the last attempt to unite the tribes in the 1830s. Twelve principalities, and arrows enough to defend them. It flies today from clubs in Amman to a schoolyard in Kfar Kama.
Sources9
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, Circassian. britannica.com
- John Colarusso, Nart sagas from the Caucasus: myths and legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs (Princeton University Press), 2002.
- Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide (Rutgers University Press), 2013.
- Charles King, The ghost of freedom: a history of the Caucasus (Oxford University Press), 2008.
- Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the state in the late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850-1921 (Cambridge University Press), 1999.
- Seteney Shami, Prehistories of globalization: Circassian identity in motion (Public Culture), 2000.
- UNESCO, World Atlas of Languages – Adyghe and Kabardian listings.
- Zeynel Abidin Besleney, The Circassian diaspora in Turkey: a political history (Routledge), 2014.
- UNESCO, Atlas of the world's languages in danger, third edition (UNESCO Publishing), 2010.