Let Our Fame Be Great by Oliver Bullough Read Free Book Online

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.
    The young, idealistic Circassians of the early 1990s found the graveyard where she had lamented her loss, and began to commemorate their nation’s destruction there, choosing as their remembrance day 21 May: the date when Russia proclaimed victory in the Caucasus in 1864.
    Elif ’s village stands a few kilometres inland from the tiny fishing port of Kefken, which also has a special place in the hearts of the
Circassians as one of the arrival sites of the massed refugees. It is a wild and bleak coast, with a few caves pushed into the low cliffs that mark the edge of the beaches. In these caves, Circassians sheltered and scratched the rocks with their names in the Arabic script they then used.
    The memorial ceremony, which I attended in 2008, has become a tribute to how far the Circassians have come in uniting their far-flung nation. They had come from all over Turkey, from America, from Russia, from Israel. Many of them bore the green flag of Circassia, with its crossed arrows and stars, and they all stood together on the jagged rocks to throw flowers into the sea which formed the final grave for so many of their compatriots.
    As the sun touched the horizon, an old man’s voice rose in a lament joined by the quiet hum of other Circassians singing together. Hundreds of carnations arced through the air to land in the water, which heaved beneath them. Song followed song, as the purple stain of evening spread over the sea. Darkness fell and I sat on the clifftop watching as a bonfire flared up on the beach and the assembled Circassians – young and old – took a blazing torch in each hand and made a procession along the shoreline. The haunting melody of the Circassian song ‘Road to Istanbul’ hung in the air like a floating scrap of silk: delicate but