Veterans Today

Tomorrow, the winter Olympic games begin in Sochi. For most sport fans worldwide, this event marks a celebratory moment of the world coming together in the spirit of “excellence”, “friendship”; and “respect” — core values of the Olympic Movement.

However, as this symbolic beacon of togetherness travels to the Caucasian coastal city, another flame is burning — that of a Diaspora community, the Circassians, who called Sochi home before being ousted from it by Tsarist troops 150 years ago.

But who are these people?

Well like many Jordanians and other Middle Easterners of Circassian origin, they have neither visited Sochi nor other parts of the Northwestern Caucuses, the motherland of the Circassians. However, like other minorities across the region, they associate with their ethnic identity and all it embodies in history and culture.

Loyal to the countries they have migrated to in the late 19th century (then the Ottoman Empire), the Circassians have gently worked to preserve their cultural heritage through the magical folkloric dance, music and to a much lesser extent the language. In Jordan, for example, multiple Circassian cultural and charitable organizations have been set up as early as 1932.

However, the Circassian Diaspora have chosen to stay away from the convoluted politics of the Caucuses and remained largely “invisible” and “quiescent” across time And with time, Circassia’s tragic saga was rendered a missing chapter from world history.

History Untold

The ancestral homeland of the Circassians is Northwest Caucasia (between the Black Sea to the west, Caucasus Mountains to the south, Ukraine to the north and Chechnya to the east).

Having lived in this homeland for millennia, the Circassians encountered many peoples of different cultures and ethnicities, maintaining relative quietude and peace from the Middle Ages up to the 17th century.

Amjad Jaimoukha, a Jordanian Circassian scholar notes that towards the end of the 16th century, “Russia began to push south towards the northern steppes of the Caucasus in a process of gradual encroachments,” until the first quarter of the 19th century when Russian troops “embarked on a vicious war of attrition,” which the Circassians resisted courageously for 35 years, despite their meager resources, “until the last battle was fought and lost in 1864.”

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