The Circassian Diaspora

with Şölen Şanlı Vasquez

hosted by Brittany White

| Over the course its final decades, millions of Muslim immigrants, many of them refugees of war and Russian conquest, settled in the Ottoman Empire. Between a quarter and a third of people in Turkey today have ancestors who arrived with those migrations. Yet their history often stops short of capturing the personal experiences of such people, what was erased, and what they have sought to preserve. In this episode, we speak with sociologist Şölen Şanlı Vasquez about how to write a more empathetic history of migration in Turkey through the lens of the Circassian diaspora. For her, this history is not just the story of how people from the North Caucasus were expelled from one empire and settled in an another. It is also a personal story about continuity, rupture, and recovery within the families of immigrants across generations and continents. Through a conversation about her ongoing research project called "The Home Within," we explore the themes of family, gender, ethnicity, race, and erasure --- not only in Turkey --- but across contexts of migration and displacement in the US and elsewhere. And we also reflect on the importance of public history that makes these issues relevant and relatable to a wider audience.

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Over the course its final decades, millions of Muslim immigrants, many of them refugees of war and Russian conquest, settled in the Ottoman Empire. Between a quarter and a third of people in Turkey today have ancestors who arrived with those migrations. Yet their history often stops short of capturing the personal experiences of such people, what was erased, and what they have sought to preserve. In this episode, we speak with sociologist Şölen Şanlı Vasquez about how to write a more empathetic history of migration in Turkey through the lens of the Circassian diaspora. For her, this history is not just the story of how people from the North Caucasus were expelled from one empire and settled in an another. It is also a personal story about continuity, rupture, and recovery within the families of immigrants across generations and continents. Through a conversation about her ongoing research project called "The Home Within," we explore the themes of family, gender, ethnicity, race, and erasure --- not only in Turkey --- but across contexts of migration and displacement in the US and elsewhere. And we also reflect on the importance of public history that makes these issues relevant and relatable to a wider audience.

Click for a transcript of the interview.

Contributor Bios

Şölen Şanlı Vasquez teaches sociology at the Santa Rosa Junior College. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in 2009 and her M.Sc. in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics in 2000. Her book "Women and Cultural Citizenship in Turkey: Mass Media and 'Woman's Voice' Television" has been published by I.B. Tauris in 2016. Her most recent research project, The Home Within, is a digital history project about the Circassian diaspora in Turkey.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

Credits

Episode No. 513
Release Date: 16 September 2021
Recording Location: San Francisco, CA / Charlottesville, VA
Sound production and transcript by Chris Gratien
Additional thanks to Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Christine Philliou, and Sam Dolbee 

Music: Chad Crouch
Bibliography and images courtesy of Şölen Şanlı Vasquez

Further Listening

	Ella Fratantuono	331 9/1/17	Migrants in the Late Ottoman Empire
	James Meyer	185 2/14/15	Turks Across Empires
	Lale Can	191 4/18/15	Central Asians and the Ottoman Empire
	Ian Campbell & Maria Blackwood	374 9/1/18	Kazakhs and the State in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union
	Eileen Kane	219 1/7/16	Russian Hajj
	Zeynep Gürsel	502 6/9/21	Portraits of Unbelonging collaboration with AnthroPod
	Christine Philliou	506 7/16/21	Refik Halit: A Life of Opposition

Images

The Circassian grandmother of Şölen Şanlı Vasquez at 18, as a newlywed in Kayseri, ca. 1938. Source: Gürsoy Family Archive


"The Mountaineers leave the Aul" by Pyotr Nikolayevich Gruzinsky (1837-1892) depicts Circassians leaving their homeland. CC: Wikimedia Commons.


Imam Shamil (Şeyh Şamil in Turkish) is widely credited as the leader who united the politically independent tribes of Caucasia and the face of their resistance to Russian rule. Image by Andrey Denyer, 1859. CC: Wikipedia Commons.


Circassians waiting to board the ships. Source: https://www.yenisafak.com/foto-galeri/hayat/cerkesler-neden-balik-yemez-2015931?page=1


Tevfik Esenç (1904-1992). "His gravestone read: This is the grave of Tevfik Esenç. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh." Source: Wikipedia


Hamte Ahmet, the great-grandfather of Şölen Şanlı Vasquez, #73 in the list of the 150 denaturalized and deported men. Source: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C3%BCzellilikler


Circassian flag with twelve stars, representing the twelve tribes. CC BY-SA 3.0

Select Bibliography

Click here to learn more about "The Home Within"

Alankuş, Sevda and Esra Oktay Arı. 2014. Geçmişten Geleceğe Çerkesler: Kimlik, Kültür ve Siyaset (Circassians from the Past to the Future: Identity, Culture, and Politics). Ankara: Kafdav Yayınları.

Besleney, Zeynel Abidin. 2014. The Circassian Diaspora in Turkey: A Political History. Oxfordshire: Routledge.

Hamed-Troyansky, Vladimir. 2018. Imperial Refuge: Resettlement Of Muslims From Russia In The Ottoman Empire, 1860-1914. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University.

Kaya, Ayhan. 2011. Türkiye’de Çerkesler: Diasporada Geleneğin Yeninden İcadı (Circassians in Turkey: Reinvention of Tradition in Diaspora). Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları.

Özoğlu, Hakan. 2011. Cumhuriyetin Kuruluşunda İktidar Kavgası: 150’likler, Takrir-i Sükun ve İzmir Suikastı (Power Struggle at the Establishment of the Republic: The 150'ers, Takrir-i Sükun and the İzmir Assassination). Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi.

Seteney Shami. 1998. Circassian Encounters: The Self as Other and the Production of the Homeland in the North Caucasus. Development and Change 29, 617-646.

Sunata, Ulaş. 2020. Hafızam Çerkesçe (My Memory is in Circassian). İstanbul: İletişim. 

Ünal, Muhittin. 1996. Kurtuluş Savaşında Çerkeslerin Rolü (The Role of Circassians in the War of Independence). Istanbul: Cem Yayınevi.