Impacts of Return, Construction of Ethnicity, and Diaspora Diasporas: Some Final Thoughts on the Circassian and Abkhaz Experiences

Like the Circassians and other groups I wrote about in a previous blog post, the Russian campaigns in the Caucasus in the 1800s resulted in over half of the Abkhaz population leaving their historical homeland on the northwest shore of the Black Sea for Turkey, in what Abkhaz historian Stanislav Lakoba called an “ethnic catastrophe”  […]

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The People and Culture of Meskhetia

What is a community? What does it mean to be a part of a community, especially when that community is not in its homeland? These are the main questions that I have been investigating during my research of the Meskhetian Turks and their experiences in Central Asia. In my first post I provided a short […]

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