Nations & States

The Expulsion of the Circassians

The Caucasus emptied, a remembrance, 1864 CE

1281 AH / 1864 CE

Imagined 360° reconstruction of The Expulsion of the Circassians

Educational historical reconstruction

Where

The Black Sea coast of the north-western Caucasus

43.9000, 39.3000 · View on OpenStreetMap

Background

The Circassians, who call themselves the Adyghe, are a group of Muslim peoples native to the north-western Caucasus, the mountains and the Black Sea coast at the boundary of Europe and Asia, where they had lived since ancient times. For decades through the nineteenth century they resisted, in a long and bitter war, the southward conquest of the Caucasus by the expanding Russian Empire; and when at last, in 1864, that resistance was broken and the Russian conquest completed, the empire resolved not merely to subdue the Circassians but to remove them from their land altogether. In a vast campaign of expulsion the Russian forces burned the Circassian villages and drove the people, by the hundreds of thousands, down from their mountains to the shore of the Black Sea, to be deported by sea to the lands of the Ottoman Empire. The suffering was immense: great numbers were killed or perished of starvation, exposure and disease in the destruction of their homeland, in the long forced march, and in the desperate, crowded, disease-ridden encampments on the coast where they waited, often for weeks, for passage; and of those who were at last loaded into overcrowded boats, many more died of sickness or drowned on the crossing and in the harbours of the Ottoman shore. The total who died is uncertain and disputed, but it is reckoned in the hundreds of thousands, and the whole event is widely regarded as one of the great ethnic cleansings, indeed by many as a genocide, of the nineteenth century. The Circassian homeland in the north-west Caucasus was emptied of its native people and largely resettled by others; and the survivors, perhaps a million or more, were scattered as refugees across the Ottoman world, in Anatolia, in Syria, in the Balkans and beyond, where the great Circassian diaspora and the memory of the expulsion endure to this day. This scene is a sober remembrance of the expulsion on the Black Sea shore; in keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and no graphic violence is depicted.

What you see

A bleak pebble shore on the edge of a grey sea, beneath green mountains; the beach is strewn with abandoned belongings, a broken cart, scattered bundles, and out on the water small overloaded boats pull away toward the far horizon.

Left among the abandoned things on the empty shore lies a child's wooden cradle; a whole people has been driven down from its mountain homeland to this coast to be carried away over the sea, and not all who waited here would live to embark.

This is the expulsion of the Circassians in 1864, when, at the end of the long Russian conquest of the Caucasus, the Russian Empire drove the Muslim peoples of the north-western mountains from the homeland they had held since ancient times and forced them into exile across the Black Sea.

Hundreds of thousands were killed or died of hunger, cold and disease in the burning of their villages, the long flight to the coast, and the wait on these shores; and of those who at last were packed into boats for the Ottoman lands, great numbers perished of sickness and drowning on the crossing and on landing.

The Circassian homeland was emptied of its people and resettled by others; the survivors were scattered across the Ottoman world, in Anatolia, Syria and beyond, where their descendants live to this day, a nation severed from its land in one of the great expulsions of the age.

The expulsion of the Circassians in 1864 is historically documented. The scene is a sober remembrance; no individual is shown by likeness, and no graphic violence is depicted.

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