There are few places in the world where the migrations of peoples, the ebb and flow of empires, have left so many and such diverse traces in such a small area as Crimea. Scythians, Sarmatians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Jews, Italians, Mongols, Turks, Russians, all have passed through. Some have been swept out or assimilated by the next wave of invaders; others have hung on for thousands of years. Their remains have been left, layer upon layer, the remnants, in some cases, of civilisations that have passed away.
The Crimean Tartars have been more tenacious than most. The Crimean Khanate, with its capital in Bakhchisaray, a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, was annexed by imperial Russia in the 1780s. Their homeland steadily swamped by Russians, politically marginalised, over subsequent decades the Tartars left in droves for Turkey, many of them perishing on the journey.
The Khan's palace, Bakhchisaray
Persecuted by the Soviet regime, their elite killed or imprisoned, those that remained suffered their greatest tragedy in May 1944. As a collective punishment for the collaboration of some of their community with the Germans (hardly surprising considering their sufferings at the hands of the Soviet regime), the Crimean Tartar population was deported en masse to central Asia. As my guest house hostess in Bakhchisaray explained, they were given only 15 minutes to pack their things, before being herded into trains. Many did not survive the journey, and others died not long after their arrival. This despite the fact that thousands of Crimean Tartar men served in the Soviet army. They returned to Crimea at the end of the war to find their families gone, and were themselves packed off into exile.
Yet my hostess spoke proudly of the resilience of her people. Many of those who survived prospered in central Asia. She and her husband were teachers in Uzbekistan, and built themselves a big house. According to her, the Crimean Tartars were harder working and better educated than the Uzbeks. But, she said, they always knew they would return one day to Crimea. It was a rich and beautiful land, and it was theirs, even though she herself was born in Uzbekistan.
Their chance came as the communists began to lose their grip. She and her family came back in 1991, just before the end of the Soviet Union. It was easier then, as it was still one country. As they were already settled in Crimea when independence came, they automatically received Ukrainian citizenship. And because they bought a house before the new, Ukrainian currency was introduced, they did not, like some later returnees, see the Roubles they received for their home in Uzbekistan lose their value. They were luckier than many, who having sold their homes in central Asia, were left without money to buy a new place in Crimea. Even so, initially the best they could afford was a tumble-down old house, much poorer than the one they had had in Uzbekistan.
As my hostess told me, no Crimean Tartar had tried to reclaim the homes their families had owned, now occupied by Russians, even though in some cases the keys they had taken with them into exile still fitted the locks. Many Russians had not welcomed the Tartars’ return, and, said my hostess, there had been peer pressure not to sell houses to Tartars. Those returnees who had not been able to buy houses, as her family had, had taken over unoccupied land and built shacks there. According to the law, after a certain period of occupation, they could claim the land as their own, and build proper houses. All this, my hostess averred, was evidence of the determination and resilience of the Crimean Tartars. And just as she was proud of their success as exiles, in Uzbekistan, so she contrasted the spirit of the Tartars with the Russian settlers who had taken their homes. You can imagine, she said, what kind of people would take over the houses of others. They were lazy, she said. They had not even maintained the Tartar houses they had occupied.
And indeed, walking through Bakhchisaray there is plenty of evidence of Tartar success since their return to Crimea, with thriving restaurants and guest houses catering for tourists. My hostess told me that, on her return, she had only been able to get a teaching job in a village several kilometres away from Bakhchisaray. But she had got up early every morning and walked there. She and her husband had saved and eventually knocked down the rickety house they had bought, and built a bigger, better one, with space for paying guests. Now her son was studying to be a lawyer, because, as she said, it is important to know your rights and how to fight for them. The Crimean Tartars, she told me, had twice been left with almost nothing, when they were sent to central Asia, and when they returned to Crimea. And both times they picked themselves up and thrived. Hers was a story of tragedy, but also of pride and of hope.
The Crimean Tartars are back, and though a minority in their land, they are a force that cannot be ignored. But who are they? My hostess told me that it is in fact incorrect to refer to them as ‘Tartars’, a name given to them by the Russians. Indeed, the name ‘Tartar’ is a misnomer. The Tartars were one of the tribes conquered by Genghis Khan as he united the people who became the Mongols. According to my hostess, the Crimean Tartars were an ethnic mixture of the varied peoples who had lived in Crimea, including Mongols, Goths, Greeks, Italians and others who had been united by their conversion to Islam. They were the native people of Crimea, and should be known simply as Crimeans.
Not all Crimeans speak their own, Tartar tongue, a Turkic language, closely related to Turkish. In their exile, many switched to Russian. Indeed, although my hostess told me she and her family spoke Tartar, I noticed that, among themselves the family spoke Russian. When introducing me to her (non-English speaking) husband, I noted a look of surprise on his face that she spoke to him in Tartar, and they quickly switched to Russian. She told me there were now 14 Tartar schools in Crimea, including one in Bakhchisaray, but most of the tuition was in Russian. Before the exile, she told me, many of the Russians in Bakhchisaray, the minority at that time, could speak Tartar. On their return, they found some elderly Russians who had been there since before their departure, who could speak the Tartar language better than many Tartars themselves.
The former palace of the Crimean khans has been renovated and turned into a museum. And even if one cannot help suspecting that some features, such as the stained glass and the rose gardens, might be more in the taste of 21st Century Russians than of the 18th Century Khans, it gives some impression of the Islamic civilisation that preceded the Russian takeover, a provincial outpost of the Ottoman Empire. Especially famous is the Fountain of Tears, commissioned for the last Khan, to mark his grief for the unrequited love for a Polish woman, enslaved in his harem, who had pined away, unable to accept her new life. Moved by the story, Pushkin wrote a poem about it. He also started the tradition of leaving a red rose for love, and a yellow one for chagrin, at the fountain. The story may have its charm, but it reveals a dark side of Crimea’s past. Under the Khans the slave trade was one of the most important pillars of the economy, with raids into Ukraine, Poland and Russia to provide perhaps millions of slaves for the Ottoman Empire.
No comments:
Post a Comment