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

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    Our beautiful caps lie on the edge of our foreheads,
The steeds we ride, alas, we shall also have to leave behind.
Woe, our forefathers and foremothers are weeping over us!
Wailing and mourning we are exiled from our motherland,
We utter our farewells to the fatherland with bleeding hearts!

2.
    We Share Happiness, We Share Sadness
    I sat in the bus driving back to Istanbul from Kefken musing on the amazing strength of the Circassians, and on how, after so many years apart, they had reforged the links connecting their nation together so quickly. It was only our small bus-full that was leaving the event. A horde of young Circassians remained, and they would drink and talk and dance all night at a building on the jagged cliffs. New friendships would be born, new courtships would begin, and maybe new marriages be agreed.
    But, in some ways, the impression of a newly united nation was a misleading one. The nineteenth-century travellers who had been so amazed by the Circassians would have struggled to recognize some of their traits in their descendants. Circassians all over the world were often profoundly troubled by what they found in the communities of their compatriots in other countries.
    It is not surprising perhaps that a Circassian who has grown up in the democracy of Israel has a different mentality to one who grew up in the communism of Russia, or the authoritarian strictness of Jordan or Kosovo. But it still came as a disappointment to Circassians – overjoyed by the new freedoms they found after 1991, and by their chance to visit the Russian Caucasus – to find their ancestors’ homeland so, well, Russian.
    I found Selim Abazi, fifty-four years old, in Milosheve, one of two villages in Kosovo where Circassians once predominated. He moved to southern Russia in 1993, and was joined by the whole Kosovo Circassian community in 1998 when the war with the Serbians started in earnest. He remained a fiercely patriotic Circassian, with the green-and-yellow flag tacked to the wall of his shack, but he had left the Caucasus to go back to Kosovo in 2000.
    â€˜I did not like these Russians, they are communists and we had no relations with them at all, they were scared of us. We could speak to
the Circassians, but they too had become like Russians. They would ask us if we had only come to their country to find work and they would swear at us and say they did not have enough to eat for themselves, ’ he told me in the broken Russian he had learned in his time in the Caucasus.
    â€˜The Caucasus is beautiful, it is subtropical. But the people are bad, when they got democracy everything fell apart. There is too much alcohol, too many drugs.’
    I got the impression Abazi was not being entirely open with me. He certainly never explained how he’d lost his arm, which was just a bandage-swathed stump. But his story was echoed by the few Circassians I managed to track down in the wretchedly poor Kosovan villages they had returned to in preference to the nice, red-brick houses the Russian government gave them to live in.
    The graveyards were still full of Circassian surnames, the mosque – built by Circassians – stood tall, but the few old men and women left here would be the end of Kosovo’s Circassian community.
    Murat Cej’s brother Musa lives in the Caucasus along with many other of his former neighbours, but he also came back to Kosovo when the war ended. We stood out of the rain and chatted – a translator having to help since Cej had not learned Russian during his stay – about the history of his people.
    â€˜When we first got to Russia we were so excited,’ he said, with a broad smile raising crinkles all around his watery blue eyes. ‘All the Circassians were asking how had we saved our language. These Circassians were very nice, but not the Russians, they did not like us. My wife, even though she’s Albanian, wanted to stay there but I wanted to come back