So, Crimean Tatars.
Different sources present the history and modernity of this people with their own characteristics and their own vision of this issue.
Here are three links:
1). Russian site rusmirzp.com/2012/09/05/categ… 2). Ukrainian website turlocman.ru/ukraine/1837 3). Tatar website mtss.ru/?page=kryims
I will write your material using the most politically correct Wikipedia ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krymski... and my own impressions.
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a people historically formed in Crimea.
They speak the Crimean Tatar language, which belongs to the Turkic group of the Altai family of languages.
The vast majority of Crimean Tatars are Sunni Muslims and belong to the Hanafi madhhab.
Traditional drinks are coffee, ayran, yazma, buza.
National confectionery products sheker kyyyk, kurabye, baklava.
The national dishes of the Crimean Tatars are chebureks ( fried pies with meat), yantyk (baked pies with meat), saryk burma ( layered cake with meat), sarma (grape and cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and rice), dolma (peppers stuffed with meat and rice), kobete - originally a Greek dish, as evidenced by the name (baked pie with meat, onions and potatoes), burma (layer pie with pumpkin and nuts), Tatar ash (dumplings), Yufak ash (broth with very small dumplings), shish kebab, pilaf (rice with meat and dried apricots, unlike Uzbek without carrots), bak'la shorbasy (meat soup with green bean pods, seasoned sour milk), shurpa, kainatma.
I tried sarma, dolma and shurpa. Delicious.
Settlement.
They live mainly in Crimea (about 260 thousand), adjacent areas of continental Russia (2.4 thousand, mainly in the Krasnodar Territory) and in adjacent areas of Ukraine (2.9 thousand), as well as in Turkey, Romania (24 thousand), Uzbekistan (90 thousand, estimates from 10 thousand to 150 thousand), Bulgaria (3 thousand). According to local Crimean Tatar organizations, the diaspora in Turkey numbers hundreds of thousands of people, but there are no exact data on its numbers, since Turkey does not publish data on the national composition of the country’s population. Total number residents whose ancestors are in different time immigrated to the country from Crimea, estimated in Turkey at 5-6 million people, however, most of these people have assimilated and consider themselves not Crimean Tatars, but Turks of Crimean origin.
Ethnogenesis.
There is a misconception that the Crimean Tatars are predominantly descendants of the 13th century Mongol conquerors. This is wrong.
Crimean Tatars formed as a people in Crimea in the XIII-XVII centuries. The historical core of the Crimean Tatar ethnic group is the Turkic tribes that settled in Crimea, a special place in the ethnogenesis of the Crimean Tatars among the Kipchak tribes, who mixed with the local descendants of the Huns, Khazars, Pechenegs, as well as representatives of the pre-Turkic population of Crimea - together with them they formed the ethnic basis of the Crimean Tatars, Karaites , Krymchakov.
The main ethnic groups that inhabited Crimea in ancient times and the Middle Ages were the Taurians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Bulgars, Greeks, Goths, Khazars, Pechenegs, Polovtsians, Italians, Circassians (Circassians), and Asia Minor Turks. Over the centuries, the peoples who came to Crimea again assimilated those who lived here before their arrival or themselves assimilated into their environment.
An important role in the formation of the Crimean Tatar people belongs to the Western Kipchaks, known in Russian historiography under the name Polovtsy. From the 11th-12th centuries, the Kipchaks began to populate the Volga, Azov and Black Sea steppes (which from then until the 18th century were called Dasht-i Kipchak - “Kypchak steppe”). From the second half of the 11th century they began to actively penetrate into Crimea. A significant part of the Polovtsians took refuge in the mountains of Crimea, fleeing after the defeat of the united Polovtsian-Russian troops from the Mongols and the subsequent defeat of the Polovtsian proto-state formations in the northern Black Sea region.
By the middle of the 13th century, Crimea was conquered by the Mongols under the leadership of Khan Batu and included in the state they founded - the Golden Horde. During the Horde period, representatives of the Shirin, Argyn, Baryn and others clans appeared in Crimea, who then formed the backbone of the Crimean Tatar steppe aristocracy. The spread of the ethnonym “Tatars” in Crimea dates back to the same time - this common name was used to call the Turkic-speaking population of the state created by the Mongols. Internal turmoil and political instability in the Horde led to the fact that in the middle of the 15th century, Crimea fell away from the Horde rulers, and the independent Crimean Khanate was formed.
The key event that left an imprint on the further history of Crimea was the conquest of the southern coast of the peninsula and the adjacent part of the Crimean Mountains by the Ottoman Empire in 1475, which previously belonged to the Genoese Republic and the Principality of Theodoro, the subsequent transformation of the Crimean Khanate into a vassal state in relation to the Ottomans and the entry of the peninsula into Pax Ottomana is the "cultural space" of the Ottoman Empire.
The spread of Islam on the peninsula had a significant impact on the ethnic history of Crimea. According to local legends, Islam was brought to Crimea in the 7th century by the companions of the Prophet Muhammad Malik Ashter and Gazy Mansur. However, Islam began to actively spread in Crimea only after the adoption of Islam as the state religion in the 14th century by the Golden Horde Khan Uzbek.
The vast majority of Crimean Tatars are Sunni Muslims. Historically, the Islamization of the Crimean Tatars occurred in parallel with the formation of the ethnic group itself and was very long-lasting. The first step on this path was the capture of Sudak and the surrounding area by the Seljuks in the 13th century and the beginning of the spread of Sufi brotherhoods in the region, and the last was the mass adoption of Islam significant amount Crimean Christians who wanted to avoid eviction from Crimea in 1778. The bulk of the population of Crimea converted to Islam during the era of the Crimean Khanate and the Golden Horde period preceding it. Now in Crimea there are about three hundred Muslim communities, most of which are united in the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Crimea (adheres to the Hanafi madhhab). It is the Hanafi direction that is historically traditional for the Crimean Tatars.
Takhtali Jam Mosque in Yevpatoriya.
By the end of the 15th century, the main prerequisites were created that led to the formation of an independent Crimean Tatar ethnic group: the political dominance of the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire was established in Crimea, the Turkic languages (Polovtsian-Kypchak in the territory of the Khanate and Ottoman in the Ottoman possessions) became dominant, and Islam acquired the status of state religions throughout the peninsula.
As a result of the predominance of the Polovtsian-speaking population, called “Tatars,” and the Islamic religion, processes of assimilation and consolidation of a motley ethnic conglomerate began, which led to the emergence of the Crimean Tatar people. Over the course of several centuries, the Crimean Tatar language based on the Polovtsian language with noticeable Oghuz influence.
An important component of this process was the linguistic and religious assimilation of the Christian population, which was very mixed in its ethnic composition (Greeks, Alans, Goths, Circassians, Polovtsian-speaking Christians, including the descendants of the Scythians, Sarmatians, etc., assimilated by these peoples in earlier eras), which made up At the end of the 15th century, the majority were in the mountainous and southern coastal regions of Crimea.
The assimilation of the local population began during the Horde period, but it especially intensified in the 17th century.
The Goths and Alans who lived in the mountainous part of Crimea began to adopt Turkic customs and culture, which corresponds to the data of archaeological and paleoethnographic research. On the Ottoman-controlled South Bank, assimilation proceeded noticeably more slowly. Thus, the results of the 1542 census show that the overwhelming majority of the rural population of the Ottoman possessions in Crimea were Christians. Archaeological studies of Crimean Tatar cemeteries on the South Bank also show that Muslim tombstones began to appear en masse in the 17th century.
As a result, by 1778, when the Crimean Greeks (all local Orthodox Christians were then called Greeks) were evicted from Crimea to the Azov region by order of the Russian government, there were just over 18 thousand of them (which was about 2% of the then population of Crimea), and more than half of these The Greeks were Urums, whose native language is Crimean Tatar, while the Greek-speaking Rumeans were a minority, and by that time there were no speakers of Alan, Gothic and other languages left at all.
Subethnic groups.
The Crimean Tatar people consist of three sub-ethnic groups: the steppe people or Nogais (not to be confused with the Nogai people) (çöllüler, noğaylar), the highlanders or Tats (not to be confused with the Caucasian Tats) (tatlar) and the South Coast or Yalyboy (yalıboylular).
South Coast residents - yalyboylu.
Before the deportation, the South Coast residents lived on the Southern Coast of Crimea (Crimean Kotat. Yalı boyu) - a narrow strip 2-6 km wide, stretching along the sea coast from Balakalava in the west to Feodosia in the east. In the ethnogenesis of this group, the main role was played by the Greeks, Goths, Asia Minor Turks and Circassians, and the inhabitants of the eastern part of the South Coast also have the blood of Italians (Genoese). Residents of many villages on the South Coast, until deportation, retained elements of Christian rituals that they inherited from their Greek ancestors. Most of the Yalyboys adopted Islam as a religion quite late, compared to the other two subethnic groups, namely in 1778. Since the South Bank was under the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Empire, the South Bank people never lived in the Crimean Khanate and could move throughout the entire territory of the empire, as evidenced by a large number of marriages of South Coast residents with the Ottomans and other citizens of the empire. Racially, the majority of South Coast residents belong to the South European (Mediterranean) race (outwardly similar to Turks, Greeks, Italians, etc.). However, there are individual representatives of this group with pronounced features of the Northern European race (fair skin, blond hair, blue eyes). For example, residents of the villages of Kuchuk-Lambat (Kiparisnoye) and Arpat (Zelenogorye) belonged to this type. The South Coast Tatars are also noticeably different in physical type from the Turkic ones: they were noted to be taller, lack of cheekbones, “in general, regular facial features; This type is built very slenderly, which is why it can be called handsome. Women are distinguished by soft and regular facial features, dark, with long eyelashes, large eyes, finely defined eyebrows” (writes Starovsky). The described type, however, even within the small space of the Southern Coast is subject to significant fluctuations, depending on the predominance of certain nationalities living here. So, for example, in Simeiz, Limeny, Alupka one could often meet long-headed people with an oblong face, a long hooked nose and light brown, sometimes red hair. The customs of the South Coast Tatars, the freedom of their women, the veneration of certain Christian holidays and monuments, their love of sedentary activities, compared with their external appearance, cannot but convince that these so-called “Tatars” are close to the Indo-European tribe. The dialect of the South Coast residents belongs to the Oguz group of Turkic languages, very close to Turkish. The vocabulary of this dialect contains a noticeable layer of Greek and a number of Italian borrowings. The old Crimean Tatar literary language, created by Ismail Gasprinsky, was based on this dialect.
The steppe people are Nogai.
The Nogai lived in the steppe (Crimean çöl) north of the conditional line Nikolaevka-Gvardeyskoye-Feodosia. The main participants in the ethnogenesis of this group were the Western Kipchaks (Cumans), Eastern Kipchaks and Nogais (this is where the name Nogai came from). Racially, the Nogai are Caucasians with Mongoloid elements (~10%). The Nogai dialect belongs to the Kipchak group of Turkic languages, combining the features of the Polovtsian-Kypchak (Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk) and Nogai-Kypchak (Nogai, Tatar, Bashkir and Kazakh) languages.
One of the starting points of the ethnogenesis of the Crimean Tatars should be considered the emergence of the Crimean yurt, and then the Crimean Khanate. The nomadic nobility of Crimea took advantage of the weakening of the Golden Horde to create their own state. The long struggle between feudal factions ended in 1443 with the victory of Hadji Giray, who founded the virtually independent Crimean Khanate, whose territory included Crimea, the Black Sea steppes and the Taman Peninsula.
The main force of the Crimean army was the cavalry - fast, maneuverable, with centuries of experience. In the steppe, every man was a warrior, an excellent horseman and archer. This is confirmed by Boplan: “The Tatars know the steppe as well as pilots know sea harbors.”
During the emigration of the Crimean Tatars in the 18th-19th centuries. a significant part of the steppe Crimea was practically deprived of its indigenous population.
The famous scientist, writer and researcher of the Crimea of the 19th century, E.V. Markov, wrote that only the Tatars “endured this dry heat of the steppe, mastering the secrets of extracting and conducting water, raising livestock and gardens in places where a German or a Bulgarian could not get along before. Hundreds of thousands of honest and patient hands have been taken away from the economy. The camel herds have almost disappeared; where previously there were thirty flocks of sheep, there is only one walking there, where there were fountains, there are now empty swimming pools, where there was a crowded industrial village - there is now a wasteland... Drive, for example, Evpatoria district and you will think that you are traveling along the shores of the Dead Sea.”
Highlanders are Tats.
The Tats (not to be confused with the Caucasian people of the same name) lived before the deportation in the mountains (Crimean Tat. dağlar) and the foothills or middle zone (Crimean Tat. orta yolaq), that is, north of the South Coast people and south of the steppe people. The ethnogenesis of the Tats is a very complex and not fully understood process. Almost all the peoples and tribes that ever lived in Crimea took part in the formation of this subethnic group. These are the Taurians, Scythians, Sarmatians and Alans, Avars, Goths, Greeks, Circassians, Bulgars, Khazars, Pechenegs and Western Kipchaks (known in European sources as Cumans or Komans, and in Russians as Polovtsians). The role of the Goths, Greeks and Kipchaks is considered particularly important in this process. The Tats inherited their language from the Kipchaks, and their material and everyday culture from the Greeks and Goths. The Goths mainly took part in the ethnogenesis of the population of the western part of the mountainous Crimea (Bakhchisarai region). The type of houses that the Crimean Tatars built in the mountain villages of this region before the deportation is considered Gothic by some researchers. It should be noted that the given data on the ethnogenesis of the Tats are to some extent a generalization, since the population of almost every village in the mountainous Crimea before the deportation had its own characteristics, in which the influence of one or another people was discernible. Racially, the Tats belong to the Central European race, that is, they are externally similar to representatives of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe (some of them are North Caucasian peoples, and some of them are Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, etc.). The Tat dialect has both Kypchak and Oguz features and is to some extent intermediate between the dialects of the South Coast and the steppe people. The modern Crimean Tatar literary language is based on this dialect.
Until 1944, the listed subethnic groups of the Crimean Tatars practically did not mix with each other, but deportation destroyed traditional settlement areas, and over the past 60 years the process of merging these groups into a single community has gained momentum. The boundaries between them are noticeably blurred today, since there is a significant number of families where spouses belong to different subethnic groups. Due to the fact that after returning to Crimea, the Crimean Tatars, for a number of reasons, and primarily due to the opposition of local authorities, cannot settle in the places of their former traditional residence, the process of mixing continues. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, among the Crimean Tatars living in Crimea, about 30% were South Coast residents, about 20% were Nogais and about 50% were Tats.
The fact that the word “Tatars” is present in the generally accepted name of the Crimean Tatars often causes misunderstandings and questions about whether the Crimean Tatars are a subethnic group of Tatars, and the Crimean Tatar language is a dialect of Tatar. The name “Crimean Tatars” has remained in the Russian language since the times when almost all Turkic-speaking peoples Russian Empire were called Tatars: Karachais (Mountain Tatars), Azerbaijanis (Transcaucasian or Azerbaijani Tatars), Kumyks (Dagestan Tatars), Khakassians (Abakan Tatars), etc. Crimean Tatars have little in common ethnically with historical Tatars or Tatar-Mongols (for with the exception of the steppe ones), and are descendants of Turkic-speaking, Caucasian and other tribes that inhabited eastern Europe before Mongol invasion, when the ethnonym “Tatars” came to the west.
The Crimean Tatars themselves today use two self-names: qırımtatarlar (literally “Crimean Tatars”) and qırımlar (literally “Crimeans”). In everyday colloquial speech (but not in an official context), the word tatarlar (“Tatars”) can also be used as a self-designation.
The Crimean Tatar and Tatar languages are related, since both belong to the Kipchak group of Turkic languages, but are not closest relatives within this group. Due to quite different phonetics (primarily vocalism: the so-called “Volga region vowel interruption”), Crimean Tatars understand by ear only individual words and phrases in Tatar speech and vice versa. Among the Kipchak languages, the closest to the Crimean Tatar are the Kumyk and Karachay languages, and from the Oguz languages, Turkish and Azerbaijani.
At the end of the 19th century, Ismail Gasprinsky made an attempt to create a single literary language for all based on the Crimean Tatar southern coastal dialect Turkic peoples Russian Empire (including the Volga Tatars), but this endeavor did not have serious success.
Crimean Khanate.
The process of formation of the people was finally completed during the period of the Crimean Khanate.
The state of the Crimean Tatars - the Crimean Khanate existed from 1441 to 1783. For most of its history, it was dependent on the Ottoman Empire and was its ally.
The ruling dynasty in Crimea was the Gerayev (Gireyev) clan, whose founder was the first khan Hadji I Giray. The era of the Crimean Khanate is the heyday of Crimean Tatar culture, art and literature.
The classic of Crimean Tatar poetry of that era - Ashik Died.
The main surviving architectural monument of that time is the Khan's palace in Bakhchisarai.
From the beginning of the 16th century, the Crimean Khanate waged constant wars with the Moscow state and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (until the 18th century, mainly offensive), which was accompanied by the capture large quantity captives from among the peaceful Russian, Ukrainian and Polish populations. Those captured as slaves were sold at Crimean slave markets, among which the largest was the market in the city of Kef (modern Feodosia), to Turkey, Arabia, and the Middle East. The mountain and coastal Tatars of the southern coast of Crimea were reluctant to participate in raids, preferring to pay off the khans with payments. In 1571, a 40,000-strong Crimean army under the command of Khan Devlet I Giray, having passed the Moscow fortifications, reached Moscow and, in retaliation for the capture of Kazan, set fire to its suburbs, after which the entire city, with the exception of the Kremlin, burned to the ground. However, the very next year, the 40,000-strong horde that was marching again, hoping, together with the Turks, Nogais, and Circassians (more than 120-130 thousand in total), to finally put an end to the independence of the Muscovite Kingdom, suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Molodi, which forced the Khanate to moderate its political claims. Nevertheless, formally subordinate to the Crimean Khan, but in fact semi-independent Nogai hordes roaming the Northern Black Sea region, regularly carried out extremely devastating raids on Moscow, Ukrainian, Polish lands, reaching Lithuania and Slovakia. The purpose of these raids was to seize booty and numerous slaves, mainly for the purpose of selling slaves to the markets of the Ottoman Empire, brutally exploiting them in the Khanate itself, and receiving a ransom. For this, as a rule, the Muravsky Way was used, which ran from Perekop to Tula. These raids bled all the southern, outlying and central regions of the country, which were practically deserted even before for a long time. The constant threat from the south and east contributed to the formation of the Cossacks, who performed guard and patrol functions in all the border territories of the Moscow State and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with the Wild Field.
As part of the Russian Empire.
In 1736, Russian troops led by Field Marshal Christopher (Christoph) Minich burned Bakhchisarai and devastated the foothills of Crimea. In 1783, as a result of Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire, Crimea was first occupied and then annexed by Russia.
At the same time, the policy of the Russian imperial administration was characterized by a certain flexibility. The Russian government made the ruling circles of Crimea its support: all Crimean Tatar clergy and local feudal aristocracy were equated to the Russian aristocracy with all rights retained.
The oppression of the Russian administration and the expropriation of land from Crimean Tatar peasants caused mass emigration of Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire. The two main waves of emigration occurred in the 1790s and 1850s. According to researchers of the late 19th century F. Lashkov and K. German, the population of the peninsular part of the Crimean Khanate by the 1770s was approximately 500 thousand people, 92% of whom were Crimean Tatars. The first Russian census of 1793 recorded 127.8 thousand people in Crimea, including 87.8% Crimean Tatars. Thus, most of the Tatars emigrated from Crimea, according to various sources amounting to up to half of the population (from Turkish data it is known about 250 thousand Crimean Tatars who settled in Turkey at the end of the 18th century, mainly in Rumelia). After the end of the Crimean War, about 200 thousand Crimean Tatars emigrated from Crimea in the 1850-60s. It is their descendants who now make up the Crimean Tatar diaspora in Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. This led to the decline Agriculture and almost complete desolation of the steppe part of Crimea.
Along with this, the development of Crimea was intensive, mainly the territory of the steppes and large cities (Simferopol, Sevastopol, Feodosia, etc.), due to the Russian government attracting settlers from the territory of Central Russia and Little Russia. Changed ethnic composition population of the peninsula - the proportion of Orthodox Christians increased.
IN mid-19th century, the Crimean Tatars, overcoming disunity, began to move from rebellions to a new stage of national struggle.
It was necessary to mobilize the entire people for collective defense from the oppression of tsarist laws and Russian landowners.
Ismail Gasprinsky was an outstanding educator of the Turkic and other Muslim peoples. One of his main achievements is the creation and dissemination of a system of secular (non-religious) school education among the Crimean Tatars, which also radically changed the essence and structure primary education In many Muslim countries, giving it a more secular character. He became the actual creator of the new literary Crimean Tatar language. Gasprinsky began publishing the first Crimean Tatar newspaper “Terdzhiman” (“Translator”) in 1883, which soon became known far beyond the borders of Crimea, including in Turkey and Central Asia. His educational and publishing activity led, ultimately, to the emergence of a new Crimean Tatar intelligentsia. Gasprinsky is also considered one of the founders of the ideology of pan-Turkism.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ismail Gasprinsky realized that his educational task had been completed and it was necessary to reach new stage national struggle. This stage coincided with the revolutionary events in Russia of 1905-1907. Gasprinsky wrote: “The first long period of mine and my “Translator” is over, and the second, short, but probably more stormy period begins, when the old teacher and popularizer must become a politician.”
The period from 1905 to 1917 was a continuous growing process of struggle, moving from humanitarian to political. During the 1905 revolution in Crimea, problems were raised regarding the allocation of land to the Crimean Tatars, the conquest of political rights, and the creation of modern educational institutions. The most active Crimean Tatar revolutionaries grouped around Ali Bodaninsky, this group was under the close attention of the gendarmerie department. After the death of Ismail Gasprinsky in 1914, Ali Bodaninsky remained as the oldest national leader. The authority of Ali Bodaninsky in the national liberation movement of the Crimean Tatars at the beginning of the 20th century was indisputable.
Revolution of 1917.
In February 1917, Crimean Tatar revolutionaries monitored the political situation with great preparedness. As soon as it became known about serious unrest in Petrograd, already on the evening of February 27, that is, on the day of dissolution State Duma, on the initiative of Ali Bodaninsky, the Crimean Muslim Revolutionary Committee was created.
The leadership of the Muslim Revolutionary Committee proposed joint work to the Simferopol Council, but the executive committee of the Council rejected this proposal.
After the All-Crimean election campaign On November 26, 1917 (December 9, new style), the Kurultai - General Assembly, the main advisory, decision-making and representative body, was opened in Bakhchisarai in the Khan's Palace.
Thus, in 1917, the Crimean Tatar Parliament (Kurultai) - the legislative body, and the Crimean Tatar Government (Directory) - the executive body, began to exist in Crimea.
Civil war and the Crimean ASSR.
The Civil War in Russia became a difficult test for the Crimean Tatars. In 1917, after the February Revolution, the first Kurultai (congress) of the Crimean Tatar people was convened, proclaiming a course towards the creation of an independent multinational Crimea. The slogan of the chairman of the first Kurultai, one of the most revered leaders of the Crimean Tatars, Noman Celebidzhikhan, is known - “Crimea is for the Crimeans” (meaning the entire population of the peninsula, regardless of nationality. “Our task,” he said, “is the creation of a state like Switzerland. Peoples of Crimea represent a wonderful bouquet, and equal rights and conditions are necessary for every nation, for we must go hand in hand." However, Celebidzhikhan was captured and shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and the interests of the Crimean Tatars were practically not taken into account during the Civil War by both whites and red.
In 1921, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created as part of the RSFSR. State languages it contained Russian and Crimean Tatar. The basis of administrative division autonomous republic a national principle was established: in 1930, national village councils were created: 106 Russian, 145 Tatar, 27 German, 14 Jewish, 8 Bulgarian, 6 Greek, 3 Ukrainian, 2 Armenian and Estonian. In addition, national districts were organized. In 1930, there were 7 such districts: 5 Tatar (Sudak, Alushta, Bakhchisarai, Yalta and Balaklava), 1 German (Biyuk-Onlar, later Telmansky) and 1 Jewish (Freidorf).
In all schools, children of national minorities were taught in their native language. But after the short rise in national life after the creation of the republic (the opening of national schools, the theater, the publication of newspapers) followed Stalin's repressions 1937.
Crimea under German occupation.
From mid-November 1941 to May 12, 1944, Crimea was occupied by German troops.
In December 1941, Muslim Tatar committees were created in Crimea by the German occupation administration. The central “Crimean Muslim Committee” began work in Simferopol. Their organization and activities took place under the direct supervision of the SS. Subsequently, the leadership of the committees passed to the SD headquarters. In September 1942, the German occupation administration prohibited the use of the word “Crimean” in the name, and the committee began to be called the “Simferopol Muslim Committee”, and from 1943 - the “Simferopol Tatar Committee”. The committee consisted of 6 departments: for the fight against Soviet partisans; on recruiting volunteer units; to provide assistance to the families of volunteers; on culture and propaganda; by religion; administrative and economic department and office. Local committees duplicated the central one in their structure. Their activities were discontinued at the end of 1943.
The initial program of the committee provided for the creation of a state of Crimean Tatars in Crimea under German protectorate, the creation of its own parliament and army, and the resumption of the activities of the Milli Firqa party banned in 1920 by the Bolsheviks (Crimean Milliy Fırqa - national party). However, already in the winter of 1941-42, the German command made it clear that they did not intend to allow the creation of any state entity in Crimea. In December 1941, representatives of the Crimean Tatar community of Turkey, Mustafa Edige Kırımal and Müstecip Ülküsal, visited Berlin in the hope of convincing Hitler of the need to create a Crimean Tatar state, but they were refused. Long-term plans of the Nazis included the annexation of Crimea directly to the Reich as the imperial land of Gotenland and the settlement of the territory by German colonists.
Since October 1941, the creation of volunteer formations from representatives of the Crimean Tatars began - self-defense companies, whose main task was to fight the partisans. Until January 1942, this process proceeded spontaneously, but after the recruitment of volunteers from among the Crimean Tatars was officially sanctioned by Hitler, the solution to this problem passed to the leadership of Einsatzgruppe D. During January 1942, more than 8,600 volunteers were recruited, from among whom 1,632 people were selected to serve in self-defense companies (14 companies were formed). In March 1942, 4 thousand people already served in self-defense companies, and another 5 thousand people were in the reserve. Subsequently, based on the created companies, auxiliary police battalions were deployed, the number of which reached eight by November 1942 (from the 147th to the 154th).
Crimean Tatar formations were used to protect military and civilian facilities, took an active part in the fight against partisans, and in 1944 they actively resisted the Red Army units that liberated Crimea. The remnants of the Crimean Tatar units, along with German and Romanian troops, were evacuated from Crimea by sea. In the summer of 1944, from the remnants of the Crimean Tatar units in Hungary, the Tatar Mountain Jaeger Regiment of the SS was formed, which was soon reorganized into the 1st Tatar Mountain Jaeger Brigade of the SS, which was disbanded on December 31, 1944 and reorganized into the combat group "Crimea", which joined Eastern Turkic SS unit. Crimean Tatar volunteers who were not included in the Tatar Mountain Jaeger Regiment of the SS were transferred to France and included in the reserve battalion of the Volga Tatar Legion or (mostly untrained youth) were enlisted in the auxiliary air defense service.
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, many Crimean Tatars were drafted into the Red Army. Many of them later deserted in 1941.
However, there are other examples.
More than 35 thousand Crimean Tatars served in the ranks of the Red Army from 1941 to 1945. The majority (about 80%) of the civilian population provided active support to the Crimean partisan detachments. Due to the poor organization of partisan warfare and the constant shortage of food, medicine and weapons, the command decided to evacuate most of the partisans from Crimea in the fall of 1942. According to the party archive of the Crimean regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, on June 1, 1943, there were 262 people in the partisan detachments of Crimea. Of these, 145 are Russians, 67 Ukrainians, 6 Tatars. On January 15, 1944, there were 3,733 partisans in Crimea, of which 1,944 were Russians, 348 Ukrainians, 598 Tatars. Finally, according to a certificate of the party, national and age composition of the Crimean partisans as of April 1944, among the partisans there were: Russians - 2075, Tatars - 391, Ukrainians - 356, Belarusians - 71, others - 754.
Deportation.
The accusation of cooperation of the Crimean Tatars, as well as other peoples, with the occupiers became the reason for the eviction of these peoples from Crimea in accordance with the Decree of the State Defense Committee of the USSR No. GOKO-5859 of May 11, 1944. On the morning of May 18, 1944, an operation began to deport peoples accused of collaborating with the German occupiers to Uzbekistan and adjacent areas of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Small groups were sent to the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Urals, and the Kostroma region.
In total, 228,543 people were evicted from Crimea, 191,014 of them were Crimean Tatars (more than 47 thousand families). Every third adult Crimean Tatar was required to sign that he had read the decree, and that escaping from the place of special settlement was punishable by 20 years of hard labor, as a criminal offense.
Officially, the grounds for deportation were also declared to be the mass desertion of the Crimean Tatars from the ranks of the Red Army in 1941 (the number was said to be about 20 thousand people), the good reception of German troops and the active participation of the Crimean Tatars in the formations of the German army, SD, police, gendarmerie, apparatus of prisons and camps. At the same time, the deportation did not affect the overwhelming majority of Crimean Tatar collaborators, since the bulk of them were evacuated by the Germans to Germany. Those who remained in Crimea were identified by the NKVD during the “cleansing operations” in April-May 1944 and condemned as traitors to the homeland (in total, about 5,000 collaborators of all nationalities were identified in Crimea in April-May 1944). Crimean Tatars who fought in Red Army units were also subject to deportation after demobilization and returning home to Crimea from the front. Crimean Tatars who did not live in Crimea during the occupation and who managed to return to Crimea by May 18, 1944 were also deported. In 1949, there were 8,995 Crimean Tatars who participated in the war in the places of deportation, including 524 officers and 1,392 sergeants.
A significant number of displaced people, exhausted after three years of living under occupation, died in places of deportation from hunger and disease in 1944-45.
The fight to return.
Unlike other peoples deported in 1944, who were allowed to return to their homeland in 1956, during the “thaw”, the Crimean Tatars were deprived of this right until 1989 (“perestroika”), despite appeals from representatives of the people to the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and directly to the leaders of the USSR and despite the fact that on January 9, 1974, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the recognition as invalid of certain legislative acts of the USSR, providing for restrictions in the choice of place of residence for certain categories of citizens,” was issued.
Since the 1960s, in the places where deported Crimean Tatars lived in Uzbekistan, a national movement for the restoration of the rights of the people and the return to Crimea arose and began to gain strength.
The activities of public activists who insisted on the return of the Crimean Tatars to their historical homeland were persecuted by the administrative bodies of the Soviet state.
Return to Crimea.
The mass return began in 1989, and today about 250 thousand Crimean Tatars live in Crimea (243,433 people according to the 2001 all-Ukrainian census), of which more than 25 thousand live in Simferopol, over 33 thousand in the Simferopol region, or over 22% of the region's population.
The main problems of the Crimean Tatars after their return were mass unemployment, problems with the allocation of land and the development of infrastructure of the Crimean Tatar villages that had arisen over the past 15 years.
In 1991, the second Kurultai was convened and a system of national self-government of the Crimean Tatars was created. Every five years, elections of the Kurultai (similar to a national parliament) take place, in which all Crimean Tatars participate. The Kurultai forms an executive body - the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people (similar to the national government). This organization was not registered with the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine. From 1991 to October 2013, the Chairman of the Mejlis was Mustafa Dzhemilev. Refat Chubarov was elected the new head of the Mejlis at the first session of the 6th Kurultai (national congress) of the Crimean Tatar people, held on October 26-27 in Simferopol
In August 2006, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern about reports of anti-Muslim and anti-Tatar statements by Orthodox priests in Crimea.
At the beginning, the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people had a negative attitude towards holding a referendum on the annexation of Crimea to Russia in early March 2014.
However, just before the referendum, the situation was turned around with the help of Kadyrov and the State Councilor of Tatarstan Mintimer Shaimiev and Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin signed a decree on measures for the rehabilitation of the Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, German and Crimean Tatar peoples living on the territory of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The President instructed the government, when developing a target program for the development of Crimea and Sevastopol until 2020, to provide for measures for the national, cultural and spiritual revival of these peoples, the development of the territories of their residence (with financing), and to assist the Crimean and Sevastopol authorities in holding commemorative events for the 70th anniversary of the deportation peoples in May of this year, as well as to assist in the creation of national-cultural autonomies.
Judging by the results of the referendum, almost half of all Crimean Tatars took part in the vote - despite very severe pressure on them from radicals from among themselves. At the same time, the mood of the Tatars and their attitude towards the return of Crimea to Russia is rather wary rather than hostile. So everything depends on the authorities and on how Russian Muslims accept the new brothers.
Currently, the social life of the Crimean Tatars is experiencing a split.
On the one hand, the chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people, Refat Chubarov, who was not allowed to enter Crimea by prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya.
On the other hand, the Crimean Tatar party “Milli Firka”.
Chairman of the Kenesh (Council) of the Crimean Tatar party “Milli Firka” Vasvi Abduraimov believes that:
"Crimean Tatars are flesh and blood heirs and part of the Great Turkic El - Eurasia.
We definitely have nothing to do in Europe. Most of the Turkic Ale today is also Russia. More than 20 million Turkic Muslims live in Russia. Therefore, Russia is as close to us as it is to the Slavs. All Crimean Tatars speak Russian well, received education in Russian, grew up in Russian culture, live among Russians."gumilev-center.ru/krymskie-ta…
These are the so-called “seizures” of land by the Crimean Tatars.
They simply built several of these buildings side by side on lands that at that time belonged to the Ukrainian State.
As illegally repressed people, the Tatars believe that they have the right to seize the land they like for free.
Of course, squatters do not take place in the remote steppe, but along the Simferopol highway and along the South Coast.
There are few permanent houses built on the site of these squatters.
They just staked out a place for themselves with the help of such sheds.
Subsequently (after legalization) it will be possible to build a cafe here, a house for children, or sell it at a profit.
And a decree of the State Council is already being prepared that squatters will be legalized. vesti.ua/krym/63334-v-krymu-h…
Like this.
Including through the legalization of squatters, Putin decided to ensure the loyalty of the Crimean Tatars in relation to the presence of the Russian Federation in Crimea.
However, the Ukrainian authorities also did not actively fight this phenomenon.
Because it considered the Mejlis as a counterweight to the influence of the Russian-speaking population of Crimea on politics on the peninsula.
The State Council of Crimea adopted in the first reading the draft law “On certain guarantees of the rights of peoples deported extrajudicially on ethnic grounds in 1941-1944 from the Autonomous Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic,” which, among other things, provides for the amount and procedure for paying various one-time compensation to repatriates . kianews.com.ua/news/v-krymu-d... The adopted bill is the implementation of the decree of the President of the Russian Federation “On measures for the rehabilitation of the Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Crimean Tatar and German peoples and state support for their revival and development.”
It is aimed at the social protection of deportees, as well as their children born after deportation in 1941–1944 in places of imprisonment or exile and who returned to permanent residence in Crimea, and those who were outside Crimea at the time of deportation (military service, evacuation, forced labor), but was sent to special settlements. ? 🐒 this is the evolution of city excursions. VIP guide - a city dweller, will show you the most unusual places and will tell urban legends, I tried it, it’s fire 🚀! Prices from 600 rub. - they will definitely please you 🤑
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The question of where the Tatars came from in Crimea has, until recently, caused a lot of controversy. Some believed that the Crimean Tatars were the heirs of the Golden Horde nomads, others called them the original inhabitants of Taurida.
Invasion
In the margins of a Greek handwritten book of religious content (synaxarion) found in Sudak, the following note was made: “On this day (January 27) the Tatars came for the first time, in 6731” (6731 from the Creation of the World corresponds to 1223 AD). Details of the Tatar raid can be read from the Arab writer Ibn al-Athir: “Having come to Sudak, the Tatars took possession of it, and the inhabitants scattered, some of them with their families and their property climbed the mountains, and some went to the sea.”
The Flemish Franciscan monk William de Rubruck, who visited southern Taurica in 1253, left us with terrible details of this invasion: “And when the Tatars came, the Comans (Cumans), who all fled to the seashore, entered this land in such huge numbers that they they devoured each other mutually, the living dead, as a certain merchant who saw this told me; the living devoured and tore with their teeth the raw meat of the dead, like dogs - corpses.”
The devastating invasion of the Golden Horde nomads, without a doubt, radically updated the ethnic composition of the population of the peninsula. However, it is premature to assert that the Turks became the main ancestors of the modern Crimean Tatar ethnic group. Since ancient times, Tavrika has been inhabited by dozens of tribes and peoples, who, thanks to the isolation of the peninsula, actively mixed and wove a motley multinational pattern. It’s not for nothing that Crimea is called the “concentrated Mediterranean”.
Crimean aborigines
The Crimean peninsula has never been empty. During wars, invasions, epidemics or great exoduses, its population did not disappear completely. Until the Tatar invasion, the lands of Crimea were inhabited by Greeks, Romans, Armenians, Goths, Sarmatians, Khazars, Pechenegs, Polovtsians, and Genoese. One wave of immigrants replaced another, to varying degrees, inheriting a multiethnic code, which ultimately found expression in the genotype of modern “Crimeans”.
From the 6th century BC. e. to 1st century AD e. The Tauri were the rightful masters of the southeastern coast of the Crimean Peninsula. Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria noted: “The Tauri live by robbery and war.” Even earlier, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus described the custom of the Tauri, in which they “sacrificed to the Virgin shipwrecked sailors and all Hellenes who were captured on the open sea.” How can one not remember that after many centuries, robbery and war will become constant companions of the “Crimeans” (as the Crimean Tatars were called in the Russian Empire), and pagan sacrifices, according to the spirit of the times, will turn into slave trade.
In the 19th century, Crimean explorer Peter Keppen expressed the idea that “in the veins of all inhabitants of territories rich in dolmen finds” the blood of the Taurians flows. His hypothesis was that “the Taurians, being heavily overpopulated by Tatars in the Middle Ages, remained to live in their old places, but under a different name and gradually switched to the Tatar language, borrowing the Muslim faith.” At the same time, Koeppen drew attention to the fact that the Tatars of the South Coast are of the Greek type, while the mountain Tatars are close to the Indo-European type.
At the beginning of our era, the Tauri were assimilated by the Iranian-speaking Scythian tribes, who subjugated almost the entire peninsula. Although the latter soon disappeared from the historical scene, they could well have left their genetic trace in the later Crimean ethnos. An unnamed author of the 16th century, who knew the population of Crimea of his time well, reports: “Although we consider the Tatars to be barbarians and poor people, they are proud of the abstinence of their lives and the antiquity of their Scythian origin.”
Modern scientists admit the idea that the Tauri and Scythians were not completely destroyed by the Huns who invaded the Crimean Peninsula, but concentrated in the mountains and had a noticeable influence on later settlers.
Of the subsequent inhabitants of Crimea, a special place is given to the Goths, who in the 3rd century, having swept through the north-western Crimea with a crushing wave, remained there for many centuries. The Russian scientist Stanislav Sestrenevich-Bogush noted that at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the Goths living near Mangup still retained their genotype, and their Tatar language was similar to South German. The scientist added that “they are all Muslims and Tatarized.”
Linguists note a number of Gothic words included in the Crimean Tatar language. They also confidently declare the Gothic contribution, albeit relatively small, to the Crimean Tatar gene pool. “Gothia faded away, but its inhabitants disappeared without a trace into the mass of the emerging Tatar nation,” noted Russian ethnographer Alexei Kharuzin.
Aliens from Asia
In 1233, the Golden Horde established their governorship in Sudak, liberated from the Seljuks. This year became the generally recognized starting point of the ethnic history of the Crimean Tatars. In the second half of the 13th century, the Tatars became the masters of the Genoese trading post Solkhata-Solkata (now Old Crimea) and in a short time subjugated almost the entire peninsula. However, this did not prevent the Horde from intermarrying with the local, primarily Italian-Greek population, and even adopting their language and culture.
The question to what extent modern Crimean Tatars can be considered the heirs of the Horde conquerors, and to what extent to have autochthonous or other origins, is still relevant. Thus, the St. Petersburg historian Valery Vozgrin, as well as some representatives of the “Majlis” (parliament of the Crimean Tatars) are trying to establish the opinion that the Tatars are predominantly autochthonous in Crimea, but most scientists do not agree with this.
Even in the Middle Ages, travelers and diplomats considered the Tatars “aliens from the depths of Asia.” In particular, the Russian steward Andrei Lyzlov in his “Scythian History” (1692) wrote that the Tatars, who “are all countries near the Don, and the Meotian (Azov) Sea, and Taurica of Kherson (Crimea) around the Pontus Euxine (Black Sea) "obladasha and satosha" were newcomers.
During the rise of the national liberation movement in 1917, the Tatar press called for relying on the “state wisdom of the Mongol-Tatars, which runs like a red thread through their entire history,” and also with honor to hold “the emblem of the Tatars - the blue banner of Genghis” (“kok- Bayrak" is the national flag of the Tatars living in Crimea).
Speaking in 1993 in Simferopol at the “kurultai”, the eminent descendant of the Girey khans, Dzhezar-Girey, who arrived from London, stated that “we are the sons of the Golden Horde,” emphasizing in every possible way the continuity of the Tatars “from the Great Father, Mr. Genghis Khan, through his grandson Batu and eldest son of Juche."
However, such statements do not quite fit into the ethnic picture of Crimea that was observed before the peninsula was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1782. At that time, among the “Crimeans” two subethnic groups were quite clearly distinguished: narrow-eyed Tatars - a pronounced Mongoloid type of inhabitants of steppe villages and mountain Tatars - characterized by a Caucasoid body structure and facial features: tall, often fair-haired and blue-eyed people who spoke a language other than the steppe, language.
What ethnography says
Before the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, ethnographers drew attention to the fact that these people, albeit to varying degrees, bear the mark of many genotypes that have ever lived on the territory of the Crimean peninsula. Scientists have identified three main ethnographic groups.
“Steppe people” (“Nogai”, “Nogai”) are the descendants of nomadic tribes that were part of the Golden Horde. Back in the 17th century, the Nogais roamed the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region from Moldova to the North Caucasus, but later, mostly forcibly, they were resettled by the Crimean khans to the steppe regions of the peninsula. The Western Kipchaks (Cumans) played a significant role in the ethnogenesis of the Nogais. The race of the Nogai is Caucasian with an admixture of Mongoloidity.
“South Coast Tatars” (“yalyboylu”), mostly from Asia Minor, were formed on the basis of several migration waves from Central Anatolia. The ethnogenesis of this group was largely provided by the Greeks, Goths, Asia Minor Turks and Circassians; Italian (Genoese) blood was traced in the inhabitants of the eastern part of the South Coast. Although most of the Yalyboylu are Muslims, some of them retained elements of Christian rituals for a long time.
“Highlanders” (“Tats”) - lived in the mountains and foothills of the central Crimea (between the steppe people and the southern coast dwellers). The ethnogenesis of the Tats is complex and not fully understood. According to scientists, the majority of the nationalities inhabiting Crimea took part in the formation of this subethnic group.
All three Crimean Tatar subethnic groups differed in their culture, economy, dialects, anthropology, but, nevertheless, they always felt themselves to be part of a single people.
A word for geneticists
More recently, scientists decided to clarify a difficult question: Where to look for the genetic roots of the Crimean Tatar people? The study of the gene pool of the Crimean Tatars was carried out under the auspices of the largest international project"Genographic".
One of the tasks of geneticists was to discover evidence of the existence of an “extraterritorial” population group that could determine the common origin of the Crimean, Volga and Siberian Tatars. The research tool was the Y chromosome, which is convenient in that it is transmitted only along one line - from father to son, and does not “mix” with genetic variants that came from other ancestors.
The genetic portraits of the three groups turned out to be dissimilar to each other; in other words, the search for common ancestors for all Tatars was unsuccessful. Thus, the Volga Tatars are dominated by haplogroups common in Eastern Europe and the Urals, while the Siberian Tatars are characterized by “Pan-Eurasian” haplogroups.
DNA analysis of the Crimean Tatars shows a high proportion of southern – “Mediterranean” haplogroups and only a small admixture (about 10%) of “Nast Asian” lines. This means that the gene pool of the Crimean Tatars was primarily replenished by immigrants from Asia Minor and the Balkans, and to a much lesser extent by nomads from the steppe strip of Eurasia.
At the same time, an uneven distribution of the main markers in the gene pools of different subethnic groups of the Crimean Tatars was revealed: the maximum contribution of the “eastern” component was noted in the northernmost steppe group, while in the other two (mountain and southern coastal) the “southern” genetic component dominates. It is curious that scientists have not found any similarity in the gene pool of the peoples of Crimea with their geographical neighbors - Russians and Ukrainians.
Article from www.nr2.ru
Is it permissible to use the term “indigenous people” in relation to the TATARS in the CRIMEA in the context of Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization “Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries” (adopted by the ILO General Conference on June 26, 1989)
Historical sources brought to us the exact date the arrival of the Tatars in Taurica. On January 27, 1223 (even before the battle on the Kalka River), a note was made in the margins of a Greek handwritten book of religious content - the synaxarion - in Sudak: “On this day the Tatars came for the first time, in 6731” (6731 from the Creation of the World = 1223 from R .X.). The details of this raid are given by the Arab author Ibn al-Asir: “Having come to Sudak, the Tatars took possession of it, and the inhabitants scattered, some of them with their families and their property climbed the mountains, and some went to the sea.”
Having plundered the cities, the Tatars “left (the land of the Kipchak) [i.e., the Koman-Polovtsy, who had occupied the steppes of the peninsula since the mid-11th century] and returned to their land.” During a campaign in South-Eastern Europe in 1236, they began to settle in the steppe Taurica. In 1239, Sudak was taken a second time, then new raids followed. The Polovtsians were exterminated without exception. The desolation of the Crimean steppes (from the 2nd half of the 13th century this name was used in relation to the city now called Old Crimea, much later, no earlier than a century later, it became the designation of the entire peninsula) and the Northern Black Sea coast was reported by Guillaume de Rubruk, who passed through to these regions in 1253: “And when the Tatars came, the Komans [i.e., Polovtsians], who all fled to the seashore, entered this land [i.e., the coast of Crimea] in such huge numbers that they devoured each other each other, the living dead, as a certain merchant who saw this told me; the living devoured and tore with their teeth the raw meat of the dead, like dogs - corpses." Having left Sudak, Rubruk moved along the deserted steppe, observing only the numerous graves of the Polovtsians, and only on the third day of the journey he met the Tatars.
Having first established themselves in the steppe spaces of Crimea, the Tatars eventually occupied a significant part of its territory, with the exception of the eastern and southern coasts, the mountainous part (the Principality of Theodoro). The Crimean ulus (province) of the Golden Horde is formed.
In the first half of the 15th century, as a result of centrifugal processes occurring in the metropolis, the Crimean Khanate was created (not without the active participation of Polish-Lithuanian diplomacy), led by the Girey dynasty, who considered themselves descendants of Genghis Khan. In 1475 the peninsula is invaded Turkish army, which seized the possessions of the Genoese Italians and the Orthodox principality of Theodoro with its capital on Mount Mangup. Since 1478, the Crimean Khanate became a vassal Turkish Empire, the lands captured by the Turks entered the domain of the Turkish Sultan and were never subordinated to the khans.
Medieval European travelers and diplomats quite rightly considered the Tatars living in Crimea to be newcomers from the depths of Asia. The Turk Evliya Celebi, who visited Crimea in the 17th century, and other Turkish historians and travelers, as well as Russian chroniclers, agree with this. Andrei Lyzlov in his “Scythian History” (1692) writes that, having left Tataria, the Tatars conquered many lands, and after the battle on Kalka “... they destroyed both the towns and the Polovtsian villages to the ground. And all the countries near the Don , and the Sea of Meot [i.e., Azov], and Taurica of Kherson [Crimea], which to this day, from the digging of the intermarium, we call Perekop, and the area around the Pontus Euxine [i.e., the Black Sea] is Tatar-dominated and gray." And until recently, the Tatars themselves living in Crimea did not deny their Asian origin.
During the rise of the national movement in 1917, the Tatar press emphasized the need to take into account and use the “state wisdom of the Mongol-Tatars, which runs like a red thread through their entire history”, with honor to hold the “emblem of the Tatars - the blue banner of Genghis” (the so-called “kok- bairak", from that time to the present day the national flag of the Tatars living in Crimea), to convene a national congress - kurultai, because for the Mongol-Tatars "a state without a Kurultai and a Kurultai without a state was unthinkable [...] Chinggis himself before ascending to the great the khan's throne convened the Kurultai and asked his consent" (newspaper "Voice of the Tatars", October 11, 1917).
During the occupation of Crimea during the Great Patriotic War, in the Tatar language newspaper "Azat Krym" ("Liberated Crimea") published with the consent of the fascist administration on March 20, 1942, the Tatar troops of Sabodai the Bogatyr, who conquered Crimea, were recalled, and in the issue dated April 21, 1942 years it was said: “our [Tatar] ancestors came from the East, and we were waiting for liberation from there, but today we are witnesses that liberation is coming to us from the West.”
Only in recent years, using the pseudoscientific reasoning of the St. Petersburg Scandinavian historian V. Vozgrin, the leaders of the illegal, unregistered organization “Majlis” are trying to establish the opinion that the Tatars are autochthonous in Crimea.
However, even today, speaking on July 28, 1993 at the “kurultai” in Simferopol, the eminent descendant of the Girey khans, Dzhezar-Girey, who arrived from London, stated: “Our former statehood was based on three fundamental unchanging pillars that define us.
The first and most important was our hereditary succession to the Genghisids. Communist propaganda tried to separate the Tatars from the Great Father, Lord Genghis Khan, through his grandson Batu and eldest son Juche. The same propaganda tried to hide the fact that we are the sons of the Golden Horde. Thus, the Crimean Tatars, as communist propaganda tells us, never defeated the Golden Horde in our history, because we were and really are Golden Horde. I am proud to announce that a prominent academician from the University of London, who has spent his entire life researching the origins of the Crimean Tatars, has briefly published the results of his research, which once again revives for us our rightful rich heritage.
The second great pillar of our statehood was the Ottoman Empire, which we can now proudly relate to our Turkic succession. We are all part of this large Turkic nation, with which we are connected by strong and deep ties in the field of Language, history and culture.
The third pillar was Islam. This is our faith. [...]
The examples of our past greatness and our contributions to human civilization are innumerable. The Crimean Tatar people were once (and not so long ago) a superpower in the region."
Among the Tatars living in Crimea, the following main ethnographic groups can be distinguished:
Mongoloid "Nogai" are descendants of nomadic tribes that were part of the Golden Horde. With the formation of the Crimean Khanate, some of the Nogais became the subjects of the Crimean khans. The Nogai hordes roamed the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region from Moldova (Budzhak) to the North Caucasus. In the mid- to late 17th century, the Crimean khans resettled (often forcibly) the Nogais to the steppe Crimea.
The so-called “South Coast Tatars” are basically from Asia Minor and speak a medieval Turkish-Anatolian dialect. They were formed on the basis of several migration waves from the regions of Central Anatolia: Sivas, Kayseri, Tokat from the end of the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Only in 1778, after the resettlement of the majority of the Christian population (Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Moldovans) from the territory of the Khanate, the Muslim population became predominant in Eastern and Southwestern Crimea.
The self-name of this ethnic group in the Middle Ages was “Tatars”. From the first half of the 16th century. in the writings of Europeans the term “Crimean (Perekop, Tauride) Tatars” was recorded (S. Herberstein, M. Bronevsky). It is also used by Evliya Celebi. The word “Crimeans” is typical for Russian chronicles. As we see, foreigners, calling this people this way, emphasized the geographical principle.
In addition to the Tatars, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Turks, and Circassians lived in the Crimean Khanate, which occupied, in addition to the territory of Taurica, significant steppe spaces of the Northern Black Sea region. All non-Muslims in the Khanate were required to pay a special tax.
Initially, the Tatars were nomads and pastoralists. During the 16th - 18th centuries, nomadic cattle breeding was gradually replaced by agriculture. But for the steppe people, cattle breeding remained the main occupation for a long time, and farming techniques remained primitive in the 18th century. The low level of economic development stimulated military raids on neighbors, the seizure of booty and prisoners, most of whom were sold to Turkey. The slave trade was the main source of income for the Crimean Khanate from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Raids were often carried out at the direction of the Turkish Sultan.
From 1450 to 1586, 84 raids were carried out on Ukrainian lands alone, and from 1600 to 1647 - over 70. From the beginning of the 15th to the middle of the 17th century, about 2 million captives from the territory included in modern Ukraine, were taken into slavery.
The prisoners left in Crimea were used on the farm. According to the Polish diplomat M. Bronevsky, who visited Crimea in 1578, noble Tatars “have their own fields cultivated by captured Hungarians, Russians, Wallachians or Moldovans, of whom they have a lot and whom they treat like cattle. [...] The Christian Greeks [local residents] living in some villages work and cultivate the fields as slaves." Bronevsky’s remark about the development of crafts and trade in the Khanate is interesting: “In the cities, not many are engaged in trade; even less often in handicrafts or crafts; and almost all merchants or artisans located there are either Christian slaves, or Turks, Armenians, Circassians, Pyatigorsk people (who also Christians), Philistines, or gypsies, the most insignificant and poor people."
The attitude towards the prisoners amazed not only enlightened Europeans, but also the Muslim Evliya Celebi, who had seen a lot of things, and who had great sympathy for the Tatars living in Crimea. This is how he described the slave market in Karasubazar (Belogorsk):
“This unfortunate bazaar is amazing. The following words are used to describe it: “Whoever sells a person, cuts down a tree or destroys a dam, is cursed by God in this and the next world [...] This applies to sellers of yasir [i.e. captives], for these people are beyond measure merciless. Whoever has not seen this bazaar has not seen anything in the world. The mother is torn there from her son and daughter, the son from his father and brother, and they are sold amid lamentations, cries for help, sobs and crying." Elsewhere he says: "The Tatar people are a merciless people."
For Europeans, the Tatars living in Crimea are evil, treacherous, savage barbarians. Only, perhaps, the German Thunmann, who, by the way, had never been to Crimea, wrote in 1777: “At present, they are no longer such a rude, dirty, robber people as they were once described in such disgusting colors.”
In the Crimean Khanate, forms of government were in effect that were characteristic of feudal formations that arose from the ruins of the empire of Genghis Khan. However, there were features determined by vassal dependence on the Turkish sultans. Crimean khans were appointed and removed at the will of the sultans. Their fate was also influenced by the opinion of the largest feudal lords - the beys. (The most influential beys - heads of clans who owned semi-independent beyliks (lands) were Shirins, Mansurs, Baryns, Sijiuts, Argins, Yashlaus. Often, without the knowledge of the khans, they themselves organized raids on their neighbors).
In 1774, according to the Kuchuk-Kaypardzhi Treaty between Russia and Turkey, the Crimean Khanate was declared independent. Russian troops were stationed on its territory. On April 19, 1783, with the Manifesto of Catherine the Great, the Crimean Khanate was liquidated, and Crimea was annexed to Russia. On January 9, 1792, the Treaty of Yassy between Russia and Turkey recognized the annexation of Crimea to Russia.
At present, contrary to historical sources, there are attempts to declare the “kurultai” and “medjlis” to be traditional bodies of self-government of the Tatars living in Crimea, and to give the “kurultai” the status of a “national assembly”.
However, neither the “kurultai” nor the “medjlis” are traditional bodies of self-government of the Tatars living in Crimea, and, moreover, they are not a national assembly.
Fundamental works on the history of the Golden Horde state:
“The specific conditions in which the formation and development of the Golden Horde as a state took place gradually gave birth to new forms of social and state life, pushing aside the traditional nomadic customs of the Mongols. In this regard, the question arises about the existence of Kuriltai in the Golden Horde. Sources very often mention these peculiar congresses of the ruling family (hereinafter it is emphasized by us. - Ed.), which took place under Genghis Khan and for a long time after his death.But with the final division of the Mongol empire into states that were independent in all respects, information about the Kuriltai is found less and less often and finally completely disappears from the sources. The need for this institution, which was largely of a state military-democratic nature, disappeared with the advent of hereditary monarchy.In Mongolia, where there were stronger nomadic traditions, the kuriltai gathered until the accession of Kublai Kublai, who officially founded the Yuan dynasty and approved a new system of succession to the throne - without preliminary discussion of the candidacy of the heir at the general congress of the ruling family. There is no specific information in the available sources that kuriltai were held in the Golden Horde. True, when describing the abdication of the throne to Tudamengu, it is reported that “wives, brothers, uncles, relatives and associates” agreed with this. Obviously, a special meeting was convened to discuss this extraordinary case, which can be considered a kuriltai. Another source reports on Nogai Tokte’s proposal to gather the Kuriltai to resolve the dispute that arose between them. However, Nogai's proposal was not accepted. In this case, he acts as a bearer of obsolete traditions that do not find support from the khan of the new, younger generation. After this incident, sources on the history of the Golden Horde no longer mention the Kuriltai, since changes that occurred in the administrative and state structure negated the role of the traditional nomadic institution. There was no longer a need to convene well-born representatives of the aristocracy from the scattered nomads, most of whom now occupied the highest government posts. Having a government in the stationary capital consisting of representatives of the reigning family and major feudal lords, the khan no longer needed the kuriltai. He could discuss the most important state issues, gathering, as needed, the highest administrative and military officials of the state. As for such an important prerogative as approving an heir, it has now become the exclusive competence of the khan. However, a much larger role, especially from the second half of the 14th century, was played by palace conspiracies and all-powerful temporary workers in the changes on the throne." (V.L. Egorov "Historical Geography of the Golden Horde in the 13th - 14th centuries.", Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Institute history of the USSR. Editor-in-chief, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor V.I. Bugapov. - Moscow, "Science", 1985).
Kurultai (as a congress of representatives of the people) cannot be called a traditional form of self-government for Tatars living in Crimea. Sources do not confirm the existence of such meetings in the Crimean Khanate. In this state of the Tatars, under the khan, there was a Divan - a meeting of the nobility, organized according to the Persian model (the term itself is of Persian origin).
After the February revolution in Russia (1917), at the general meeting of Muslims of Crimea on March 25 / April 7, 1917, the Musispolkom (Temporary Muslim Executive Committee) was formed, which over time took control of all issues of public life of the Tatars living in Crimea (from cultural and religious to military-political). Local municipal executive committees were created locally.
At the end of August 1917, in connection with the receipt from the Central Rada of an invitation to send a representative of the Tatars to the Congress of Peoples convened in Kiev, the Musispolkom raised the question of convening a Kurultai (as a Sejm, a parliament of the Tatars) - the highest body of self-government. At the same time, the Tatar press of Crimea emphasized that such a body was characteristic of the Mongol-Tatars, who resolved the most important issues on it, and that it was there that Genghis Khan was elected (1206).
78 delegates of the Kurultai were elected with the participation of more than 70 percent of the Tatar population of Crimea. On November 26/December 9, 1917, meetings of this assembly opened in Bakhchisarai, declaring itself a “national parliament.” The Kurultai elected a Directory from among its members (the national government, following the example of Ukraine). It was dissolved by the Bolsheviks on January 17/30, 1918 and resumed its work during the German occupation on May 10, 1918. In October 1918, the Kurultai dissolved itself due to internal disagreements.
In 1919, the “national parliament” of the Tatars living in Crimea was called by the Turkish term “Majlis-Mebusan” and consisted of 45 deputies. It sat for a little over a week, hearing a report from the Chairman of the Directory and a project for reform of the clergy.
On August 26, 1919, the Directory was dissolved by order of Lieutenant General of the White Army N.I. Schilling.
The current "kurultai-mejlis" is an illegal political organization, operating as a political party: the decisions of its bodies are binding only for its political supporters and cause sharp criticism from political opponents from among the Tatars. "Kurultai Majlis" was created on the basis of an illegal organization - OKND ("Organization of the Crimean Tatar National Movement").
The activities of these organizations are recognized as illegal by resolutions of the Supreme Council of Crimea. In addition to them, the pro-Mejlis illegal party “Adalet” was created.
OKND and the “Kurultai-Majlis” are opposed by the legal association of Tatars - NDKT (National Movement of the Crimean Tatars). The political struggle of these two Tatar parties largely determines the fate of the national movement.
Recently, there has been a split in the “Kurultai-Majlis”: some of its activists created their own party “Millet” (also illegal).
The procedure for the formation and work of the "kurultai", "majlis" has the character not of people's self-government, but of a congress political party and its elected executive body. Elections are gradual. In our opinion, it is possible to legalize the “Kurultai-Majlis” only as a political party or public organization(in accordance with the laws of Ukraine).
In accordance with ILO Convention 169 "On Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries" (adopted by the General Conference of the International Labor Organization on June 26, 1989), Tatars living in Crimea (Crimean Tatars) cannot be considered a group defined in the legal sense as “indigenous” in this territory (Republic of Crimea), because:
1. They are not the first settlers in this territory (Crimean Peninsula). Historical and archaeological sources clearly record their first appearance here in 1223 as conquerors who almost completely destroyed the ethnic group that had inhabited the steppe part of Crimea before them - the Polovtsians (Comans).
Until the first half of the 14th century, they were part of a larger community spread over a large area of Eastern Europe outside the Crimean Peninsula - the Tatar state of the Golden Horde.
2. The Tatars, as an ethnic group, never occupied the entire territory of the Crimean Peninsula and never constituted the majority of the population in all its regions. On the coast from Kafa (Feodosia) to Chembalo (Balaklava), on the former territory of the principality of Feodoro, in the mountainous and foothill parts of Crimea, the population has always been multi-ethnic. According to census data conducted by Turkey at the end of the 16th century. Among the inhabitants of the Kafa vilayet (a province of Turkey in the Crimea), Muslims accounted for only 3 to 5 percent of the population. The Greeks predominated (up to 80%), Armenians and others.
From the end of the 16th to the 18th centuries, there was an intensive process of settlement of these territories by Turkish colonists (mainly from central Anatolia) and the displacement of the Greek and Armenian population. After the annexation of Crimea to Russia, the multi-ethnic character of Crimea intensified to an even greater extent.
3. In the ethnogenesis of the Tatars living in Crimea main role played by communities that formed outside the Northern Black Sea region and Crimea and came here as conquerors or colonists and were not indigenous to this region. These are the Tatars themselves, who arrived in the region from the depths of Asia in the first half of the 13th century, the Nogais - an Asian ethnic group that appeared here in the late Middle Ages and forcibly resettled in the Crimea at the end of the 17th century, Turkish colonists from Anatolia in the 16th - 18th centuries, who were also not in indigenous to this region. With the adoption of Islam into the reign of Uzbek Khan in 1412/13 as the state religion of the Golden Horde, the Tatars were introduced to the Muslim world, which very noticeably determined the development of their spiritual culture and ethnic identity.
4. The Tatars living in Crimea are not subject to the main feature that distinguishes the “indigenous” (in the legal sense) people or group - the preservation of traditional life support systems, primarily special forms of economic activity (land, sea hunting, fishing, gathering, reindeer herding ).
Nomadic cattle breeding, characteristic of the Tatars of the Middle Ages, is not included in this list. Moreover, by the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century it almost disappeared. The process of urbanization of the ethnic group was actively underway. By the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, the Tatars switched to modern forms of management. According to the 1989 census, 70% of Tatars are urban residents.
Tatars are a national group with a complete social structure. Among them are the intelligentsia, workers in various branches of industry and agriculture. The Tatars are actively involved in trade and entrepreneurship and have completely lost traditional forms of economic management.
5.Tatars have long passed the stages of traditional form social organization- tribal (classless) structure of society - and live according to the traditions and laws of modern society. Moreover, the Tatars emphasize that in the past they had their own feudal state (the Crimean Khanate as part of the Ottoman Empire), which was the “superpower of the region,” carried out aggressive campaigns against their neighbors and collected tribute from them.
These facts completely refute the need to classify the Tatars as “indigenous peoples” with traditional forms of social organization of society (for example, the Sami, the Chukchi, the Papuans of New Guinea, the aborigines of Australia, the Indians of Canada, etc.), whose protection is provided for by ILO Convention 169.
6. Tatars living in Crimea, being part of the Golden Horde, Crimean Khanate, Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, Soviet Union, did not have their own traditional bodies of self-government ("kurultai", "medjlis", etc.) that would make decisions on issues that are most important for all Tatars living in Crimea. They were not recorded in historical documents; there was no real tradition of such forms of self-government. The Tatars, unlike the peoples of Northern Europe, America, and Australia, were characterized by the power structures of feudal states, and then by the administrative management of the Russian Empire and the USSR. The authorities with these names were designed by the political leaders of the Tatars in 1918 and existed for less than a year. The model for them was not their own historical tradition, but rather the political experience of the neighboring states that arose on the site of the Ottoman Empire, in particular Turkey, towards which the Tatar political elite was oriented.
It should be especially emphasized that the unfounded definition of “kurultai” and “majlis” by the current political leaders of the Tatars living in Crimea, as a traditional form of self-government of the indigenous people, contradicts their own statement about the originality of the Tatars living in Crimea on the land of Taurida. As all researchers unanimously assert and sources testify, kurultai is a form of self-government characteristic only of the peoples of Central Asia, in particular Mongolia. In the states created on the ruins of Genghis Khan's empire, it was replaced by feudal forms of government (as evidenced by the example of the Golden Horde and the Crimean Khanate). Moreover, it cannot be characteristic and traditional for Taurida, since there are no historical sources confirming the holding of at least one kurultai here, not to mention the tradition. Statements by Tatar leaders about the traditional nature of kurultai for their people once again confirm that the Tatars appeared in Eastern Europe as conquerors, aliens, bringing here and introducing by force the culture and traditions of Central Asia. The Tatars living in Crimea are descendants of the Golden Horde Tatar conquerors and cannot be considered the local pioneers, original inhabitants, or indigenous people.
7. Tatars do not profess ancient forms of religion (shamanism, etc.). Believing Tatars are Sunni Muslims. Many of them are atheists.
8. The Tatars were subjected to forced resettlement by the Soviet authorities in 1944. Today, a large (overwhelming) part of the Tatars have returned to Crimea. The process of their integration into Crimean society is carried out quite intensively. The difficulties accompanying this process are not caused by the characteristics of the Tatars, as a people “leading a traditional way of life,” but by the social and economic problems of modern people changing their place of residence in conditions of the economic crisis. They are not faced with the problem of preserving pastures for reindeer, traditional hunting and gathering places, etc., which would ensure the traditional way of life.
Tatars want to work in accordance with their education and profession: engineers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, university teachers. They want to engage in business, trade, etc., as they did in the Central Asian republics. They do not build dwellings characteristic of “indigenous peoples” leading a traditional way of life, but receive or build 2-3-story cottages on allocated plots. Therefore, providing assistance to them should not involve measures provided for in ILO Convention 169.
9. There are neither historical nor legal grounds for introducing amendments to the current legislation of Ukraine and the Republic of Crimea with the aim of legislatively securing the status of an “indigenous ethnic community of Ukraine” for the Tatars of Crimea, since they are not such.
10. The requirement for guaranteed representation of Tatars living in Crimea in the Supreme Council, local self-government bodies and executive authorities of Crimea on a national basis (national quotas) is also unfounded, since they are not an indigenous national group leading a traditional way of life and, due to this requiring special protection by law.
As practice shows, the ethnic group of 244 thousand 637 people living in Crimea (according to the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs in Crimea of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine as of February 1, 1997), constituting about 10% of the total population, on the basis of general democratic election norms may well send their representatives to government bodies at all levels. The Tatars created their own powerful political structures and political elite in a short period of time. They have significantly strengthened their position in the economy. They have media on a much larger scale than other political forces in Crimea. They actively influence political processes in Crimea and Ukraine.
Ostensibly for better integration of the Tatars into Crimean society, they were given seats in the Crimean parliament of the first convocation (1994) on the basis of national quotas for “deported peoples”, for one term of election. Practice has shown that this measure is not justified.
The quotas provided were significantly inflated and did not correspond to the share of the Tatar electorate in the electoral corps of Crimea. Seats in parliament were used by their holders for political intrigue, and by some for self-enrichment, but not to protect the interests of the so-called “indigenous citizens”.
As researchers note, contradictory trends have emerged in the position of the leaders of the national Tatar movement living in Crimea on the issue of political rights of Tatars since 1993.
Based on the program “Ways of self-determination of the Crimean Tatar people”, developed by the Moscow Center for Ethnopolitical and Regional Studies, headed by the Advisor to the President Russian Federation E. Pain, the leadership of the Tatar national movement in 1993 put forward the idea of recognizing the Tatars of Crimea as an “indigenous people” and extending to them the principles arising from special international documents and, above all, ILO Convention No. 169 (1989) “On Indigenous Peoples”. peoples and tribal peoples in independent countries."
This has led to a rather interesting situation in which today the national movement is guided by two virtually mutually exclusive approaches to the problem of implementing the political customs of the Tatars.
One of them is based on considering the entire ethnic group as a titular one and contains a demand for the restoration of its “national statehood” (at the same time, a new formulation introduced at the 3rd “kurultai”, according to which the national movement intends to achieve “self-determination on the national-territorial principle”, does not fundamentally change anything, since, just like the demand for “national statehood,” it presupposes the establishment of political priority for the Tatars over other ethnic groups). The second comes from the actual recognition of the status of an ethnic minority for the Tatars, one of the varieties of which are “indigenous peoples”.
The leaders and ideologists of the “Majlis” do not seem to notice that recognition of the Tatars as “indigenous people” in the international legal sense automatically excludes the recognition of their right to “statehood.”
The latter apparently indicates that softening the movement’s positions is a tactical move for more successful implementation of the goals outlined in the “Declaration on the National Sovereignty of the Crimean Tatars.” The fact that the new formulation of the demand for statehood is nothing more than a clarification of the previous position, and not a significant change, is not hidden by the leaders of the movement themselves: “the clarification of the program goals of the movement was very successful,” said the first deputy chairman of the “Majlis” in the summer of 1996. R. Chubarov. “I think that with the adoption of such a clarification, any speculation on the Crimean Tatar topic can no longer appear.” Unfortunately, the field for speculation has not decreased at all, since the documents of the 3rd “kurultai” are in no way subject to revision key points“Declaration on the National Sovereignty of the Crimean Tatars,” which continues to be the main defining document of the movement.
This circumstance significantly complicates the search for acceptable approaches to taking into account the political customs of the Tatars living in Crimea in the process of modern state building in Ukraine. The existing concepts put forward by the leaders of the national movement, firstly, largely do not take into account political, ethnic and legal realities and, secondly, contradict each other.
Thus, given the above, the use of the term “indigenous people” in relation to Tatars living in Crimea is unacceptable.
Crimean Tatars are a people that originated on the Crimean peninsula and southern Ukraine. Experts say that these people came to the peninsula in 1223 and settled in 1236. The interpretation of the history and culture of this ethnic group is vague and multifaceted, which arouses additional interest.
Description of the nationality
Crimeans, Krymchaks, Murzaks are the names of this people. They live in the Republic of Crimea, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, etc. Despite the assumption of a difference between the Kazan and Crimean Tatars, experts claim the unity of the origins of these two directions. Differences arose due to the specifics of assimilation.
The Islamization of the ethnic group occurred at the end of the 13th century. It has symbols of statehood: a flag, a coat of arms, an anthem. The blue flag depicts a tamga - a symbol of the steppe nomads.
As of 2010, about 260 thousand were registered in Crimea, and in Turkey there are 4-6 million representatives of this nationality who consider themselves Turks of Crimean origin. 67% live in non-urban areas of the peninsula: Simferopol, Bakhchisaray and Dzhankoy.
They speak three languages fluently: Russian and Ukrainian. Most speak Turkish and Azerbaijani. Native language is Crimean Tatar.
History of the Crimean Khanate
Crimea is a peninsula inhabited by the Greeks already by the 5th-4th centuries BC. e. Chersonesus and Feodosia are large Greek settlements of this period.
According to historians, the Slavs settled on the peninsula after repeated, not always successful, invasions of the peninsula in the 6th century AD. e., merging with the local population - the Scythians, Huns and Goths.
The Tatars began to raid Taurida (Crimea) from the 13th century. This led to the creation of a Tatar administration in the city of Solkhat, later renamed Kyrym. This is how the peninsula began to be called.
The first khan was recognized as Khadzhi Girey, a descendant of the khan of the Golden Horde Tash-Timur, the grandson of Genghis Khan. The Girays, calling themselves Genghisids, laid claim to the Khanate after the division of the Golden Horde. In 1449 he was recognized as the Crimean Khan. The capital became the city of the Palace in the Gardens - Bakhchisarai.
The collapse of the Golden Horde led to the migration of tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Prince Vitovt used them in military operations and to impose discipline among the Lithuanian feudal lords. In return, the Tatars received land and built mosques. Gradually they assimilated with the local residents, switching to Russian or Polish. Muslim Tatars were not persecuted by the church, since they did not interfere with the spread of Catholicism.
Turkish-Tatar Union
In 1454, the Crimean Khan concluded an agreement with Turkey to fight the Genoese. As a result of the Turkish-Tatar alliance in 1456, the colonies agreed to pay tribute to the Turks and Crimean Tatars. In 1475 Turkish troops with the assistance of the Tatars, they occupied the Genoese city of Cafu (Kefe in Turkish), then the Taman Peninsula, ending the presence of the Genoese.
In 1484, Turkish-Tatar troops captured the Black Sea coast. The Budrzycka Horde state was founded on this square.
The opinions of historians regarding the Turkish-Tatar alliance are divided: some are sure that the Crimean Khanate turned into a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, others consider them equal allies, since the interests of both states coincided.
In reality, the Khanate depended on Turkey:
- Sultan - leader of the Crimean Muslims;
- Khan's family lived in Turkey;
- Türkiye bought slaves and loot;
- Türkiye supported the attacks of the Crimean Tatars;
- Türkiye helped with weapons and troops.
The Khanate's long military operations with the Moscow state and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth stopped Russian troops in 1572 at the Battle of Molodi. After the battle, the Nogai hordes, formally subordinate to the Crimean Khanate, continued their raids, but their numbers were greatly reduced. The formed Cossacks took over guard functions.
Life of Crimean Tatars
The peculiarity of the people was the non-recognition of a sedentary way of life until the 17th century. Agriculture developed poorly and was mainly nomadic: the land was cultivated in the spring, the harvest was harvested in the fall, after returning. The result was a small harvest. It was impossible to feed people through such farming.
The source of life for the Crimean Tatars remained raids and robberies. The khan's army was not regular and consisted of volunteers. 1/3 of the men of the khanate took part in major campaigns. In especially large ones - all men. Only tens of thousands of slaves and women with children remained in the Khanate.
Life on a hike
The Tatars did not use carts on campaigns. The carts at home were harnessed not to horses, but to oxen and camels. These animals are not suitable for hiking. Horses themselves found food in the steppes even in winter, breaking the snow with their hoofs. Each warrior took 3-5 horses with him on a campaign to increase speed when replacing tired animals. In addition, horses are additional food for a warrior.
The main weapon of the Tatars is bows. They hit the target from a hundred paces. During the campaign they had sabers, bows, whips and wooden poles, which served as supports for tents. On the belt they kept a knife, a crosshair, an awl, 12 meters of leather rope for prisoners and a tool for orienting in the steppe. For ten people there was one pot and a drum. Everyone had a pipe for warning and a bucket for water. During the hike we ate oatmeal - a mixture of flour from barley and millet. From this the drink pexinet was made, to which salt was added. In addition, everyone had fried meat and crackers. The source of nutrition is weak and injured horses. From horse meat they prepared boiled blood with flour, thin layers of meat from under the saddle of a horse after a two-hour race, boiled pieces of meat, etc.
Taking care of horses is the most important thing for a Crimean Tatar. The horses were poorly fed, believing that they were restoring their strength on their own after long marches. For horses, lightweight saddles were used, parts of which were used by the rider: the lower part of the saddle was a carpet, the base was for the head, a cloak stretched over poles was a tent.
Tatar horses - bakemans - were not shod. They are small and clumsy, but at the same time resilient and fast. Rich people used beautiful cow horns for their purposes.
Crimeans on campaigns
The Tatars have a special tactics for conducting a campaign: on their territory, the speed of transition is low, with the concealment of traces of movement. Beyond it, the speed dropped to a minimum. During raids, the Crimean Tatars hid in ravines and hollows from enemies, did not light fires at night, did not allow horses to neigh, caught tongues to obtain intelligence information, and before going to bed, lassoed themselves to horses to quickly escape from the enemy.
As part of the Russian Empire
In 1783, the “Black Century” began for the people: annexation to Russia. In the decree of 1784 “On the structure of the Tauride region,” governance on the peninsula is implemented according to the Russian model.
The noble nobles of Crimea and the supreme clergy became equal in rights to the Russian aristocracy. Massive land seizures led to emigration in the 1790s and 1860s, during the Crimean War, to the Ottoman Empire. Three quarters of the Crimean Tatars left the peninsula in the first decade of the Russian Empire. The descendants of these migrants created Turkish, Romanian and Bulgarian diasporas. These processes led to devastation and desolation of agriculture on the peninsula.
Life within the USSR
After the February Revolution, an attempt was made to create autonomy in Crimea. For this purpose, a Crimean Tatar kurultai of 2,000 delegates was convened. At the event, the Temporary Crimean Muslim Executive Committee (VKMIK) was elected. The Bolsheviks did not take into account the decisions of the committee, and in 1921 the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formed.
Crimea during the Great Patriotic War
During the occupation, since 1941, Muslim committees were created, which were renamed Crimean and Simferopol. Since 1943, the organization was renamed the Simferopol Tatar Committee. Regardless of the name, its functions included:
- opposition to partisans - resistance to the liberation of Crimea;
- the formation of voluntary detachments - the creation of Einsatzgruppe D, which numbered about 9,000 people;
- creation of auxiliary police - by 1943 there were 10 battalions;
- propaganda of Nazi ideology, etc.
The committee acted in the interests of forming a separate state of the Crimean Tatars under the auspices of Germany. However, this was not part of the Nazi plans, which envisaged the annexation of the peninsula to the Reich.
But there was also the opposite attitude towards the Nazis: by 1942, a sixth of the partisan formations were Crimean Tatars, who made up the Sudak partisan detachment. Since 1943, clandestine work has been carried out on the peninsula. About 25 thousand representatives of the nationality fought in the Red Army.
Collaboration with the Nazis led to mass evictions to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, the Urals and other territories in 1944. During the two days of the operation, 47 thousand families were deported.
You were allowed to take clothes, personal belongings, dishes and food with you in an amount of no more than 500 kg per family. In the summer months, the settlers were provided with food in exchange for the property they left behind. Only 1.5 thousand representatives of the nationality remained on the peninsula.
Returning to Crimea became possible only in 1989.
Holidays and traditions of the Crimean Tatars
Customs and rituals include Muslim, Christian and pagan traditions. The holidays are based on the agricultural calendar.
The animal calendar, introduced by the Mongols, depicts the influence of a specific animal in each year of a twelve-year cycle. Spring is the beginning of the year, so Navruz ( New Year) is celebrated on the day spring equinox. This is due to the beginning of field work. On the holiday it is necessary to boil eggs as symbols of new life, bake pies, and burn old things at the stake. For young people, jumping over a fire and going home in masks while the girls told fortunes were organized. To this day, the graves of relatives are traditionally visited on this holiday.
May 6 - Khyderlez - the day of the two saints Khydyr and Ilyas. Christians celebrate St. George's Day. On this day, work began in the field, cattle were driven out to pastures, fresh milk the barn was sprayed to protect against evil forces.
Autumn equinox coincided with the holiday of Derviz - the harvest. Shepherds returned from mountain pastures and weddings were held in the settlements. At the beginning of the celebration, according to tradition, prayer and ritual sacrifice were carried out. Then the residents of the settlement went to the fair and dances.
The holiday of the beginning of winter - Yil Gejesi - fell on the winter solstice. On this day, it is customary to bake pies with chicken and rice, make halva, and go from house to house as mummers to buy sweets.
Crimean Tatars also recognize Muslim holidays: Uraza Bayram, Kurban Bayram, Ashir-Kunyu, etc.
Crimean Tatar wedding
A Crimean Tatar wedding (photo below) lasts two days: first for the groom, then for the bride. The bride's parents are not present at the festivities on the first day, and vice versa. Invite from 150 to 500 people from each side. According to tradition, the beginning of the wedding is marked by the bride price. This is a quiet stage. The bride's father ties a red scarf around her waist. This symbolizes the strength of the bride who becomes a woman and devotes herself to order in the family. On the second day, the groom's father will remove this scarf.
After the ransom, the bride and groom perform the wedding ceremony in the mosque. Parents do not participate in the ceremony. After the mullah reads the prayer and issues a marriage certificate, the bride and groom are considered husband and wife. The bride makes a wish during prayer. The groom is obliged to fulfill it within the time frame established by the mullah. The desire can be anything: from decorating to building a house.
After the mosque, the newlyweds go to the registry office to officially register the marriage. The ceremony is no different from the Christian one, except for the absence of a kiss in front of other people.
Before the banquet, the parents of the bride and groom are obliged to buy the Koran for any money without bargaining from the small child at the wedding. Congratulations are accepted not by the newlyweds, but by the bride's parents. There are no competitions at the wedding, only performances by artists.
The wedding ends with two dances:
- national dance of the bride and groom - haitarma;
- Horan - guests, holding hands, dance in a circle, and the newlyweds in the center dance a slow dance.
Crimean Tatars are a nation with multicultural traditions that go deep into history. Despite assimilation, they retain their own identity and national flavor.
Arsen BekirovFrom the outside, the Crimean Tatar people seem monolithic, but when communicating with Tatars, you can often hear: “Zarema’s father-in-law is “thirty”, and her mother-in-law is a Kerch Nogayka” or “my dad is a Tatar from Bakhchisarai, and my mother is a Uskut.” These are the names of subethnic groups - sort of “peoples within a people.”
It is believed that the Crimean Tatar people consist of three sub-ethnic groups: steppe people (Nogai), highlanders (Tats) and south-coast people (Yalyboylu). Deportation weakened, but did not erase the differences: sympathy for “one’s own” is manifested at the everyday level, and in business, and in politics.
“The Slavs call this phenomenon nepotism. It is, to one degree or another, characteristic of all nations,” says political scientist Alime Apselyamova.
Some are politicians, others are scientists
In the leadership of the Crimean Tatar Majlis, the leading role is played by people from the South Coast. Head of the Majlis Mustafa Dzhemilev and his right hand Refat Chubarov is considered the native village of Ai-Serez (Mezhdurechye, near Sudak). Mufti of Crimea Emirali Ablaev is from the same place. However, Dzhemilev denies that he selected his associates based on their place of birth.
“I learned that Refat had roots from Ai-Serez only after he became my first deputy,” says the Crimean Tatar leader. Although his opponents claim that Dzhemilev and Chubarov are distant relatives.
The Stepnyakov-Nogays are distinguished by their passion for education and science. For example, the rector of the Crimean Engineering and Pedagogical University Fevzi Yakubov was born in the Black Sea region. Many heads of KIPU are also Nogai - most of the deans and vice-rectors. Yakubov claims that the compatriot factor does not matter to him, but at the same time he admits that relations between subethnic types affect the atmosphere in the team.
“It happens that a person is incompetent, and then goes around and says that the tats or otuz did not let him work,” says the rector.
Nogai - people from the steppe
The Nogai type of Crimean Tatars was formed in the steppe regions of the peninsula. The Nogai mixed the blood of the Polovtsians, Kypchaks and partly the Nogais - a people who now live in the North Caucasus. In the appearance of most steppe people there are elements of Mongoloidity: they are distinguished by their short stature and narrow eyes. According to linguistic and folklore characteristics, the steppe Crimean Tatars are divided into three groups: people from the northwestern Crimea (the current Saki, Black Sea and Razdolnensky regions), residents central steppe and eastern Nogai - mainly people from the Leninsky region. The latter consider themselves “real” steppe inhabitants, in contrast, for example, to the Evpatoria Nogai, among whom there are many fair-skinned people with brown or dark brown hair.
Features: among the Crimean Tatars there is a widespread belief that Nogai men are distinguished by their prudence and calm disposition. Women, on the contrary, are more temperamental and often control their husbands.
Tats - children of the mountains
Before deportation, the Tats lived in the mountainous and foothill regions of Crimea. Crimean Tatars call this territory “orta yolak” - middle zone. They contain the genes of almost all the tribes and peoples that have inhabited Crimea since ancient times: Taurians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Goths, Greeks, Circassians, Khazars and others. Outwardly, Tats are similar to residents of Eastern Europe, including Ukrainians. Historians are still arguing about the origin of the word “tats” - according to one version, this is how Christians who converted to the Muslim faith were called during the time of the Crimean Khanate.
Features: Bakhchisarai Tats are considered intelligent, Balaklava Tats are stubborn and hot-tempered.
Yalyboylyu - southern guys
This is what the natives of the Southern Coast of Crimea are called, but in fact, the real Yalyboylu lived in the area from Foros to Alushta. The inhabitants of the Sudak region - the Uskuts - have their own characteristics.
The South Coast Tatars are descendants of the Greeks, Goths, Turks, Circassians and Genoese. Outwardly, the Yalyboylu are similar to the Greeks and Italians, but there are blue-eyed and light-skinned blonds.
Features: It is believed that South Coast people are distinguished by entrepreneurship and business acumen.
Many peoples have ethnographic types. For example, among Ukrainians there are Boikos, Polishchuks, Litvins, Lemkos
Families do not prevent mixed marriages. True, if family quarrels occur, husband and wife may reproach each other for “Yalyboy show-off” or “Nogai bitchiness”
“Differences are not at all an indicator of the disunity of the people. On the contrary, the presence of clearly defined ethnic groups indicates that the Crimean Tatars are a developing ethnic group,” says culturologist Vetana Veysova
The way they say
The dialects of the Nogais and Yalyboys differ in much the same way as Russian and Ukrainian language. The literary Crimean Tatar language is based on the Tat language - it combines the characteristics of the “northern” and “southern” dialects.