Ottoman History Podcast - North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

with Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky hosted by Chris Gratien & Can Gümüş | During the late 19th and early 20th century, tens of millions of migrants crossed the seas, settling in the Americas and beyond in a mass migration event that reshaped politics and economies throughout the world. In this episode, we focus on one of the most ignored groups within the history of those momentous events: North Caucasian Muslims. As our guest, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, explains, North Caucasian refugees fleeing Russian expansion became a large segment of the Ottoman migrant (muhacir) population and in turn, became a major new demographic component, constituting about 5% of the empire's citizens by WWI. Under the Muhacirin Commission created to facilitate their movements, they settled in remote provinces, from the edges of the Syrian desert to the plateaus of Central Anatolia, founding what would become major cities like Amman (modern-day Jordan) and constructing new diasporic identities in the process. As we discuss, these migrations not only changed the millions of people who became Ottoman refugees during the empire's last decade and their communities back home. They changed the nature of the Ottoman state itself.    « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History Podcast, I'm Chris Graton, and this is the fourteenth season of our program. We're starting things off big with a deep dive in what has to be the most ignored episode in the history of the Great Migrations. Our listeners will probably be aware that railways and steamships helped convey tens of millions of immigrants to the Americas over the century leading up to the First World War, emptying entire communities in the process, from the famine-stricken villages of Ireland and the impoverished mountains of southern Italy, to the shtetls of the Russian Pal of Settlement and the coastal highlands of Mount Lebanon, the most significant point of origin

for the late Ottoman diaspora. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Armenian, Greek, and Jewish emigres left the Ottoman Empire for the Americas during its last decades. But this episode centers on another group that entered the empire, by the millions, during that same time. Muslim refugees from the North Caucasus of modern-day Russia. Here's our guest, Vladimir Hamid Trojansky. Between the mid-19th century and World War I, about a million Muslims from the North Caucasus

became refugees in the Ottoman Empire. And the scale of displacement was massive. The Russian Empire waged a series of military assaults on indigenous Muslim communities in the North Caucasus, which we know as the Caucasus War. The war was incredibly brutal. In the last stages of the war, in the early 1860s, the Russian army perpetrated an ethnic cleansing on the Circassian coast. In just two years, 1863 and 1864, up to a half million Circassians became refugees to the Ottoman Empire, up to 90% of the entire Western Circassian population. Since the 1990s, many Circassian activists in Turkey, in Jordan, in Russia, called to recognize those horrific events as a genocide.

And that moment was really important in global history. It was the largest refugee crisis that the Ottoman Empire had experienced until then. The government was unprepared for the scale of this humanitarian crisis. Refugees were dying in Ottoman ports, epidemic disease was breaking out, slave merchants were buying and trafficking enslaved refugees. So the Ottomans needed to resettle people quickly. In response to the arrival of several hundred thousand Circassians fleeing Russian occupation

and also several hundred thousand Crimean Tatars, the Ottomans built up an entire refugee regime which lasted until the end of the Empire. This refugee crisis was also important for Russia, because it was one of the largest displacements in Russian imperial history, and this expulsion of indigenous Muslims really solidified Russia's control over the entire Caucasus and transformed the demographics of the region. But then Muslim emigration continued when the Caucasus was fully within the Russian Empire. Several hundred thousand Chechens, Ingush, Kabardians or Eastern Circassians, Karachays,

Balkars, Avars and others kept emigrating to the Ottoman Empire for various reasons. The main reason was really dispossession. Russia passed new land reforms in the Caucasus, redrawing who owned lands. And many Muslim villages lost their land and were forcibly resettled from the highlands to the lowlands. And so dispossession led to new rounds of emigration. People from virtually every ethnic group in the Caucasus became refugees to the Ottoman Empire. We're talking about 30 different ethnic groups. But the largest groups of refugees were Circassian, Abhazian, Abazian, Chechen, Avar, Karachay and Balkar. Most of these communities speak languages

that are unrelated to Indo-European, Turkic or Semitic languages and they're instead part of the northwest Caucasian and northeast Caucasian language families that are unique to the region. Circassian, Abhazian and Chechen, spoken by most refugees, were completely different from languages in Anatolia. And it's really a remarkable case study for the analysis of global diasporas. Usually, diasporas have a good strong sense of pre-existing identity and literary tradition. But the formation of the North Caucasian diaspora in the Ottoman Empire is really extraordinary because it preceded their nation-building

in the homeland. And so I tell the story in the book. It took two generations in exile only after the Young Turk revolution of 1908 when refugee intellectuals started putting together dictionaries, devising scripts for their different languages, publishing poems and articulating their identity as Circassian at first, because the majority of refugees were Circassian, and then as North Caucasian, and what the limits of those communities were. So it's remarkable that this diaspora between 1908 and 1923 was creating all those new cultural institutions with self-awareness as a multi-ethnic and multilingual refugee community.

In our conversation with Vladimir Hametryansky about the highlights of his new book, Empire of Refugees, out this year from Stanford University Press, we'll examine how North Caucasian migration changed the Ottoman Empire. And along the way, we'll tour the late Ottoman countryside, from the hotly contested Balkans to the Syrian desert, where Circassian refugees founded the capital of modern Jordan. And we'll explore the fascinating world of a place called Uzun Yaila, a remote plateau in the center of Anatolia, which became a melting pot of Muslim communities fleeing Russian persecution, known to their new diaspora as the Little Caucasus.

Join us. Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. I'm Jan Gümüş. We're very excited today to welcome a special guest to the program, Vladimir Hamid Trojansky, who's an assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies

at University of California Santa Barbara. Thank you for having me. It's amazing to be here. It's amazing to have you to talk about your new book, Empire of Refugees, North Caucasian Muslims and the late Ottoman State. It's work that over the years I've learned a lot about from talking to you and seeing you present and reading some of your articles.

I had the pleasure of reading and discussing your book with a small reading group that we have at Boğaziçi University, which includes Professor Cengiz Kirlu and a wonderful group of PhD students. You know, we started Ottoman history podcast in 2011, but really it was in 2012, like when I came to Istanbul to do my dissertation research, so we started interviewing people like generally. And I think that was the year I met you 2012 or 13. And at that time we were interviewing like whoever professor is graduate students. It didn't have to be like a book and that wasn't the expectation.

And we invited Vladimir and he was like, I'm not ready yet. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. More than a decade later, he's ready. Now you have a wonderful book. So. Oh, it was worth the wait. It was worth the wait. And it's, I'm thrilled that we're doing this in Istanbul. I'm just glad we still exist. This is exciting.

This is exciting. Yeah, it is. First, I want to ask about sort of the way where you start out in the book with, you know, the masses, massive impact that this process has on the Ottoman Empire, almost from the very beginning. And you say that by the World War One period, that North Caucasians, who are just a segment of the immigrant or refugee population in the Ottoman Empire, make up about 5% of the empire's population, which would put them as a group on par with a lot of the other major ethnic groups we

talk about in Ottoman history. And it wasn't just that, that because of the nature of displacement and resettlement, they were found in basically every province, in the cities, but also in the countryside. So considering that scale, maybe you can explain for our listeners how, while your work is certainly focused on the experience of migration, it's actually a much larger story about the remaking of the Ottoman state during its last half century. Muslim refugee resettlement changed many things. It transformed the empire, its demographics, its political economy, and eventually how the Ottoman officials thought of their empire. It also had an impact on geopolitics and the longevity of imperial

rule. So one of the main arguments in the book is that on the one hand, Muslim refugee resettlement accelerated the collapse of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. And on the one hand, Muslim refugee resettlement accelerated the collapse of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. And on the other hand, it reinforced Ottoman rule in many outlying regions in Anatolia and in the Levant, especially nomadic areas. In the Balkans, Muslim refugee resettlement intensified inter-communal conflict. Circassian refugees who were settled there after the 1860s played a huge role in the Ottoman suppression of the April Uprising of 1876, the national Bulgarian uprising. And then they played a role in sectarian violence in the Balkans during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78. That was because many Muslim refugees joined Pasha Bozuk groups, the gangs that terrorized

Christian civilians. And I show in the book why this happened, the political economy underlying that sectarian violence. The Ottomans didn't invest enough in refugee resettlement. The refugee villages were not set up to succeed in the 1860s. So by the 1870s, refugee economies were failing across the Balkans and many refugees, to survive, joined those paramilitary organizations. The underfunded refugee resettlement accelerated social unraveling in their new province and eventually contributed

to the Russo-Ottoman War, which bled the Ottomans, losing some of their oldest territories, territories that were Ottoman for longer than Istanbul. So the incompetent refugee resettlement played a big role in ending Ottoman rule in the Northern Balkans. Now, in parts of Anatolia and the Levant, refugee resettlement on the contrary fortified Ottoman rule. One of the Ottoman resettlement objectives was anti-nomadic. Muslim refugees were often intentionally settled in nomadic parts of the empire. The government was giving nomads land to refugees. The idea was that refugees would farm the land, defend that land

and help the government assert its control over that territory. And it played out that way government assert its control over that territory. And it played out that way in Central Anatolia and the Levant, the so-called refugee belt running all the way from Samson through Sivas down to Adana and then to Aleppo and Ras al-Ayn down to Homs, Hama, Damascus, the Golan Heights and Amman. Especially in the Levant, refugees were helping to expand productive agricultural taxable land eastward. Land that would be taxed by the government, land that might have new railways going through it, which refugees would then help protect. Through refugee resettlement, the Ottomans were extending their sovereignty into territories that they claimed they controlled,

but that they didn't really control. In many Ottoman regions, Muslim refugee resettlement proved critical to consolidating imperial rule to centralizing Istanbul's control. And we've covered it before on the program and in other interviews, which our listeners will find linked on the post for this episode. But maybe you can briefly explain for those who are encountering this subject on the podcast for the first time, very early on, you mentioned the failures of early settlement policies, but also like it's kind of rather new for this period, rather exceptional among the empire,

the world empire, as the US included, the extent to which the Ottoman Empire put in place a legal framework for regulating and integrating immigrants during this early period. So maybe you can just give our listeners a little sense of some of these big moments in the process. The central argument in the book is that between 1860 and World War I, the Ottoman government constructed a Muslim refugee regime. So what is a refugee regime? A refugee regime is a set of principles, norms, and procedures governing the acceptance and resettlement of refugees.

And typically when we talk about refugee regimes, we think about the international refugee regime, right, set up by the United Nations after World War II with the 1951 Refugee Convention as the key document anchoring that regime. Several historians showed that actually in the interwar era, the League of Nations inaugurated what can be described as the first international refugee regime. So what my book shows is that in the second half of the 19th century, a Muslim country, the Ottoman Empire, was offering something that was remarkably similar to refugee protections that one might expect today.

The legislative basis of that refugee regime rested on two laws. It's the immigration law of 1857 and the land code of 1858. The immigration law allowed immigration in the Ottoman Empire to everyone, irrespective of their religion. The immigration law guaranteed free land and temporary benefits, for example, exemptions from taxation and from military service. The Land Code standardized land tenure and land ownership throughout the empire, and that legislation was very favorable to immigrants. It allowed the government to confiscate the land from local populations, the land that

was not registered, and on which tax was not paid. The government would then give this land to refugees in the hope that one day they would pay taxes. To handle the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Russian Empire, the Ottoman government founded the Ottoman Refugee Commission, Muhacirin Komisyonu, in 1860. And this organization would then take this legislation for immigrants and build on it to construct a refugee regime. Because refugees escaping violence, ethnic cleansing in Crimea and in the Caucasus arrived with nothing. They had very different needs than the immigrants that the Ottomans had originally envisioned.

So the Refugee Commission, in addition to exemptions, provided subsidies to refugees, financial aid and some grain to survive in the first couple of years. Now, the ideological basis for the Ottoman refugee regime was the Ottoman responsibility to protect Muslims. And at the core of this regime was the idea of Hijra. Hijra is the journey of Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina to preserve the early Muslim community in the 7th century. Later in Islamic history, this concept came to denote a migration of Muslims living in a territory under non-Muslim rule to a Muslim territory, and it was widely

interpreted as a religious obligation, a journey one must take to preserve their faith. In the 19th century, Hitler became kind of an anti-colonial movement, with Muslims fleeing European conquests and occupations primarily to the Ottoman Empire, to the Caliphate and to the strongest Muslim sovereign state. Muslim refugees call themselves muhajir, which can be translated into English as refugee, immigrant and emigrant. But in the 19th century, this term had a very strong religious heritage. Muslim refugees from the Caucasus, Crimea, the Balkans, Crete almost exclusively used this term to describe themselves and to communicate with the Ottoman state.

And so did the Ottoman government. That was the terminology they used. So between 1860 and World War I, the Ottoman refugee regime essentially guaranteed admission and resettlement for any displaced Muslim who needed refuge. By 1914, the Ottomans resettled at least two and a half million Muslims, mostly from Russia and the Balkans. Including World War I, we could count up to five million Muslim refugees

falling within this regime. The Ottoman refugee regime was something fairly unique globally at the time. But we can also contextualize this Ottoman resettlement in other ways. The Ottomans were pursuing several goals with refugee resettlement. And I already mentioned the anti-nomadic objective.

There were two other big objectives. One was economic. The government wanted refugees to become farmers. Refugees were only allowed to settle in the countryside and they had to work the land. Boosting agriculture was critical for the empire. So in this respect, Ottoman refugee resettlement had much in common with agricultural expansion

and frontier expansion happening in the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia in the same time period. And then another Ottoman objective was sectarian. That goal became explicit after the Treaty of Berlin of 1878. Because the Ottomans learned quite a bit from that humiliating treaty. They learned the power of counting people in the borderlands. The Ottomans used Muslim refugees to alter demographic ratios in the borderlands, specifically to increase Muslim populations in Greek and

Armenian areas of the empire. So there was that explicit settler-colonial drive to change demographics. Ethnic cleansing and humanitarianism often come together. We may imagine them as complete opposites, but they complement each other by design. The resettlement of Muslim refugees went hand in hand with the displacement of Ottoman Christians, especially during and after the Balkan Wars. By the time of World War I, the Ottoman government intended for Muslim refugees to take homes and lands of Christians, many of whom were murdered in

the Armenian Genocide. So the story that I'm telling, it challenges traditional boundaries between refugee, immigrant and emigrant because of what muhajir meant, but it also challenges boundaries between refugee and settler because North Caucasians were both. So in addition to telling us the greatest story of how North Caucasians refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire and providing some details of the working of the refugee regime that you just summarized. You also zoom into the individual stories of the refugees and show us how they fought

for survival, navigated these imperial policies, and etc. So an important contribution of the book, I think, is giving names and faces to the people who are often reduced to a collective category of migrants or refugees in Ottoman historiography. Can you briefly tell us about one of the individual stories you highlight in the book that adds some texture to the late Ottoman immigrant experience? Thank you very much for this question. It was very important for me to include as many refugee voices as possible in this book. And one story that challenges stereotypes about refugees in the late Ottoman era is the story of the Hutat family. I was very fortunate to work with a unique set of primary

sources, a collection of 58 private letters that this upper status Circassian family, the Khutats, exchanged between 1890 and 1905. The descendants of that family preserved these magnificent letters in Ottoman Turkish and generously granted me access to the letters. So through the letters and family photographs and follow-up interviews with one of the descendants, I reconstruct a family history of the Hutats as they are searching for a perfect place of settlement in the Ottoman Empire. The protagonist is Fuat Hutat, a young Ottoman military officer.

He was born in Circassia and his family survived an ethnic cleansing in the early 1860s. In the 1880s he moves to Istanbul to study and his family, his mother, his half-brother, his sister, they soon follow and they become muhajir. Fuat eventually graduates from the prestigious Ottoman Military Academy and then he's assigned to a desk job in Erzincan. Then he has the patrol duty on the Ottoman-Russian border. His career is fine, but it's not amazing and you get the sense of frustration in his letters. And he's sending so many letters over 15 years to his brother and also to his mom, to his sisters, to many friends, but we don't have access to those letters. In the meantime, his brother, Zhivat, is moving with the rest of the Hutat family throughout

Anatolia, and they are looking for a perfect place to settle. They're dreaming of establishing a Circassian village where they hope they would invite all their friends and relatives to rebuild their lives in their new empire. And Jivat is restless. He trained to be a lawyer in Istanbul, but now he needs to take care of his refugee family. And so in the story, I focus on two places. The Khutats first go to Aziziye, Openarbashi,

a small town near Uzunyayla in central Anatolia, but then they get an unexpected invitation from their friends, also refugees, Circassian refugees, and their friends invite them to join them in this faraway Circassian refugee village, one of the most remote ones in the empire, on the edge of the Syrian desert. And the Khutads, desperate to find a good place with sufficient land, moved there. And that refugee village is Amman. At the time, only several thousand people lived there, and all of them were Circassian refugees.

So this story, it provides remarkable insight into how one Muhajir family made critical decisions, whether to stay or move somewhere else, how to make money, how to negotiate with officials, where to educate their children, how to buy land, whether to buy a gun to protect their land. This story demonstrates that connections mattered a great deal and that more privileged refugees had access to better knowledge about resettlement and about the empire.

Private letters also show, and so does oral history, how much refugees relied on each other in their exile, how much they relied on their kin and on their friends from the Caucasus to survive. So the kinds of things that we rarely see in the state archive. And by that same token, you also deal with a lot of material from the Ottoman State Archive that does give us a real multiplicity of refugee experiences.

And that's a very important contribution of this work that makes it differ from maybe some of the stuff that was available to me when I was a graduate student that really didn't give you more than the sense of, you know, this obviously mass death and displacement and then inserting people very passively into what you've already discussed as, you know, kind of a challenging political landscape. And in these kind of framings, refugees, as they often do in historiography, kind of appear as like helpless pawns, right? And this is not the right way to write about people's

migrant experiences, because it kind of reifies, however, a particular national or imperial narrative seeking to frame them. The other great thing that comes out of this book in terms of its larger contribution to thinking about the late Ottoman Empire is the geographical dimension you've already kind of touched upon and that this particular community or set of communities really allows us to look at. You've already mentioned the Balkans, modern-day Romania, parts of the European Union. You talk about the Golan Heights area controlled by Israel since 1967. You talk about sort of frontier settlements in places like Ras Al Ain, which is now divided by the border between Syria and Turkey.

You've already mentioned in this conversation, Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. And in addition to all these places that sound really important, there's also a lot of little small places that maybe people are going to read about for the first time. So the one I want to ask about is one that, you know, I've had some experience learning about myself through my own research and it's a place you call a kind of little Caucasus in the Taurus Mountains, a region called Uzun Yaila in central Anatolia, which you say is one of the few places where even today people's not only ethnic identities but also knowledge of their native languages are still alive and have survived for so many generations. Can you tell us more about that story

of the making of this little Caucasus? Of course, indeed. In the book I'm taking everyone on a ride around the Ottoman Empire. I'm looking at three main regions, right? I'm looking at Anatolia, the Balkans and the Levant. And then within them, I'm looking at three main regions, right? I'm looking at Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Libyans, and then within them, I focus on the largest refugee resettlement provinces, respectively Danube, sorry, respectively Sivas, Danube, and Damascus. And then I zoom in to tell a more detailed story about local political economies of refugee resettlement. So in Sivas, I focus on this magical place

called Uzun Yaila, Long Plateau in Turkish. It is situated to the east of Kayseri. And the geography of that area is remarkable. Imagine you're high in the mountains, about 5,000 feet in an elongated narrow valley. On all four sides, you are surrounded by mountains – Tahtaly, Tejger, Yama Mountains. The only opening out of that valley is to the west. A river flows through the valley, the Zamante River, and exits it through the opening at

a place called Pynarbashi. And then that river flows all the way down to Chukurova, joins the Seyhan River, and through Adana flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Now, up in Uzun Yala, in the 1860s, about 40,000 North Caucasian refugees from different ethnic groups, Western and Eastern Circassians, Abazians, Chechians, Ascetians, and others, established over 70 villages. So it was a very compact resettlement area. And in the Circassian diaspora today, it's known as Kishuk-Kavkasia, the little Caucasus, because in many ways, muhajirs reconstructed the Caucasus

there. But when they arrived, Uzun Yaila was not empty. It was a yailakh, a summer pasture for the Afshars. And of course, Chris knows all about this because he wrote about Afshars and their migrations between Shukurovo and Uzun Yaila in his beautiful book. Uzun Yaila is very high up. Winters are unforgiving there. Snow blankets the valley. It's very difficult to keep horses or cattle alive. So nomads would spend winters at lower elevations and then come back to Uzun Yaila in the summer.

And so one summer Afshars come back to Uzun Yaila and then they find thousands of refugees in their valley. The conflict was inevitable. The Afshars and the North Caucasians were fighting for the control of Uzunyala. And the Ottomans chose to intervene and they chose to back the refugees, which wasn't really a difficult choice. The Ottomans were trying to sedentaryize the Afshars for several decades now. And also, Uzunyala emerged as the most popular destination for North Caucasian refugees. The government's response to this was under the microscope. Many refugees were watching how the government would respond and whether it would defend their rights to the land that it had promised them in the Ottoman Empire.

So the government pulled the military from surrounding provinces. The governor of Sivas personally arrived in the valley and forced the two sides into negotiation. The government was definitely not impartial and it pressured the Afshars to cede their claims to Zunyala and to pledge peaceful relations with refugees. And then in the following years, the government forcibly resettled Afshars outside of the valley. It's one of those rare cases where the Ottoman government directly intervened to back up the refugees.

Usually the authorities let refugees fight over land on their own, but when the survival of an entire refugee community was at stake, or when the state's authority was at stake, then the government would intervene. So in the coming decades, North Caucasians established all these villages that became

new sites of cultural production. Not only did Circassians preserve their songs and dances, but they created new versions of them. So today the Circassian diaspora in Turkey makes references to Uzunyalist-style weddings and Uzunyalist-style chit-chat and ways of storytelling. Today the ethnographers from the Circassian republics in the Russian Federation visit Uzunyayla to study the dialects and the traditions that are no longer present in the Caucasus and are in fact something new.

And there's more. North Caucasians brought with them all kinds of gods and heroes and monsters of their mythology. And in Uzunyala, that mythology from the Caucasus evolved. For example, Circassians have this feared creature, Blagwa, a red dragon guarding the water. And then in Uzunyala, it becomes something else. It is described as a python that had swallowed a young woman. The djinn, the shape-shifting

creatures that are known throughout the Muslim world, in Uzun Yala folklore, they appear as foxes. So North Caucasians helped their guardians and their demons to adapt to the Uzun Yala landscape and they created new storylines for them within their own new historical timeline, post-expulsion, post-1864 timeline. Uzunyalı is this remarkable place and as you said, Chris, it's one of the few places in Turkey where North Caucasian languages, including different dialects of Circassian, still survive and are still spoken by younger generations. Another interesting part of that story, I think, is that you mentioned kind of implicitly displacing nomadic pastoralist people from their summer pastures and forcing them into

village life that maybe in the long term is not really advantageous to them in certain ways. However, another side of that story is that region is also, like in folkloric terms, quite significant for people interested in those communities, and that those settled villages become a place where oral traditions are preserved. And obviously, to talk about them as completely separate communities would be a fiction. There's extensive intermarriage. You have elite members who capitalize on the ability to be both notables of the Avshars and say the Circassians at the same time.

I think that's another dimension of the Uzunyayla story that is really intriguing. It's that preserving the identity but also integration into the Ottoman rural society was something that happened for these groups? 100%. So throughout the empire, we see a lot of conflict. And obviously, that's what often shows up in archival sources. Circassians and other North Caucasians, they are fighting their neighbors because the neighbors are challenging their right to the land. It happens with Christian communities, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs. It happens with Muslim, settled and nomadic communities, Afshars, Druze, Berun in the Levant and many different groups in Anatolia.

But there's also of course, a lot of cooperation, a lot of helping each other in the time of need. When refugees arrive, they get quite a lot of aid and help, some solicited, some forced by the government, some not from their surrounding communities. Refugees receive help to survive. And then in Zunyala, in the town of Azizi, and now Pinarbashi, there was a petition from the final decade of the 19th century when the Afshar leadership and the North Caucasian leadership write this petition together to the Ottoman government asking

to allow their children to enroll in Ashiret Mehtabi, the tribal school in Istanbul. And Circassians and North Caucasians fascinatingly try, tried to present themselves as an ashiret, one of the few sources saying that, well, we are disadvantaged just like those ashiret in the empire for whom the school is established and therefore we deserve admission there as well. It did not happen either for the Afshars or for the Circassians. About Uzuniyah Ailekez, I think one interesting thing is the role of climate. One of the reasons behind its quote unquote success was climate, the cold winters, right?

What do you think about this? So it's often said that it became such a popular destination for many North Caucasians, especially for Circassians, especially for Kabardians who live in the north central Caucasus, because the climate of Uzun Yala resemble the climate of Kabarda. And so for many refugees, it was easier for them to settle there. And they were already familiar with different kinds of pastoralism that may have been similar to Afshar pastoralism. But there was a lot of adaptation to Zunyala because the climate there really is harsh. So it's fascinating that Circassians and others, they chose the nomadic routes that Afshars followed for their cattle, for the horses to survive in winters, and they

were doing the same thing. Yeah, it's very fascinating that the petitions for resettlement often do have this kind of dimension. You know, in the migration law, claiming that you can't adapt to the place you've been settled becomes a pretext, a legitimate legal pretext for demanding resettlement. Whether or not people are motivated by other interests, they could invoke, say, you know, it's so hot here, everyone's getting sick, we want to migrate somewhere more salubrious like Uzun Yaila. And the Ottoman government would actually accept that as a legitimate reason to overturn its larger demographic engineering policy in terms of how it was doling out land and moving people around. I found that to be a very interesting side story in this larger story of settlement of both refugees

and nomadic people during that time period. So petitioning is a big part of refugee regime, right? It was very important for refugees to know that they can petition the Ottoman government and that someone is listening to their concerns. And not only the Ottoman government, district officials, sub-provincial, provincial officials, the Refugee Commission and the Sultan himself. And so many of the petitions were exactly about where they were settled and that they were unsatisfied with the climate, with different

diseases that were breaking out there and with the kind of land that they were given. So for example, many refugees did not want to go to Syria because they had that perception that they wouldn't survive in that climate. Also there were lots of complaints about stony land that was given to them, about all the extra work, extra labor they had to do to either irrigate or to drain the swamps. And that part is also related to why so many refugees were trying or dreaming to go back to the Caucasus. Return migration is a big part of the story. And those refugees who did manage to return to the Caucasus, when they were asked why they're returning, the dissatisfaction with the land that they were given, uh, was, was one of the main reasons.

This is another place where Empire of refugees, even though it's very much focused on and embedded in the Ottoman context, actually speaks in a really big way to global migration history. Cause you're highlighting a dimension that was long ignored in the American immigrant story. The people actually came to the United States for all sorts of reasons, often intending to go back or maybe thinking they were going to find something

different than they did. And in case of each group, despite whatever they were leaving behind, there was a creation of a sort of diasporic connections, what people today would call often in our field, call transnational homeland. In the Ottoman case, very few scholars writing in English or Turkish had really attended to this dimension of the North Caucasian experience. The extent to which even in the wake of ethnic cleansing and genocide, people continued to go back,

continued to maintain their connections to the place they came from for generation upon generation, well beyond the demise of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that's one of the places where we really see the interesting source base that's at work in this book. So can you tell us more about that you know, that research experience, however you want to address the question, you know, some of the unique stuff you looked at and where it took you, I'm assuming like there were like, there was no roadmap,

right? For this project, you had to kind of follow the breadcrumbs wherever you found them. So in terms of my source base, I did research for this book in over 20 archives in 10 countries. I designed this research experience as a transnational one from the get-go, but then the number of archives sort of snowballed. My documents are mostly in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic,

Russian, and some in Bulgarian and French. For the Ottoman side of the story, I worked in archives in Turkey, Jordan, Bulgaria, and Romania. And for the Russian side of the story, in archives in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia, including autonomous republics in the North Caucasus, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetiaia and Dagestan. And I was of course fortunate that I could do that kind of research on Russia back in mid 2010s. Plus research in the United Kingdom and the United States.

So Empire of Refugees is a history of migration and it operates on two levels. I tell the top down story of imperial migration policies, of how empires managed migration. And for that, I looked at government correspondence and land records. I was very fortunate to get access to all land transactions in Ottoman Amman when I was doing fieldwork in Jordan. I also looked at court records, Ottoman registers for population and land allotments, financial aid and for tax payments. But it's also a bottom-up history of migration. I was interested in refugee voices, in documents that showed how refugees experienced their displacement and resettlement. And so I worked with hundreds of petitions to the Ottoman government and also with private letters in Arabic and in

Ottoman Turkish, private letters that refugees exchanged within their families or that they sent to their relatives in the Caucasus. And I found quite a few letters like the Khutat family collection in private hands. I also interviewed descendants of Circassian and Chechen refugees in Jordan and in Turkey. And just so everyone's following, you mentioned all these different languages and it should be noted that I guess a lot of the writing that was taking place in the Caucasus was itself in Arabic. So you didn't mention that much about the indigenous languages that were spoken, but that's because of sort of a diglossic situation, right, where people are writing in a different

language and they speak in many cases. In the mid-19th century, the dominant literary language in the Caucasus was Arabic, despite not being native to anyone in the region. And many elites also knew Ottoman Turkish. So the documents that we have written by refugees already in the Ottoman Empire, most of them would be in Ottoman Turkish, some of them will be in Arabic,

especially documents written by the ulama, by the religious elites. In the early 20th century, after the Young Turk revolution of 1908, the North Caucasians established an association in Istanbul, which would become the dominant diasporic organization for all North Caucasians between 1908 and 1923. And that association does a lot of work in devising scripts for different North Caucasian languages, prioritizing Circassian.

How did you navigate the challenges of working in multiple archives, multiple countries? As a follow-up to this, I'm also curious if you have any suggestions for graduate students who are curious about the subject. What are some dimensions of this history that you wish you had more room to explore in the text, for instance? I think archives are hugely important. I obviously love transnational archival research, so I recommend to everyone to diversify the range of archives

you work in as much as you can. For me, the unexpected gift when researching this book was meeting people and speaking with people about their history. That opened up completely different avenues of research, including trips to refugee villages. And there were over 1,100 North Caucasian refugee villages established in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel,

in the last 50 years of Ottoman rule. I had some interviews with muhajir elders. I got to work with new types of documents that people had in their collections and that they generously shared with me. So for those working on the 19th and 20th centuries, combining archival research and oral historical fieldwork can challenge and enrich one's methodology and ways of storytelling. So my advice for graduate students would be if you can, talk to people about your topic and what it means to them and what it means to their parents and grandparents.

For those working specifically on Middle East migration histories, so here are some promising research dimensions. Local dynamics of demographic transformation in the 1910s and 1920s, we have so much more to learn about that critical period, about transition from empire to nation state. In that lane, the role of Muslim immigrants in the making of the Turkish nation and of Turkishness. It has a lot to offer to researchers. Environmental aspects of migration, which we briefly touched upon today, why people settled where they did,

how they transformed the landscapes and the agriculture and the foods. History of Middle East migration on the local levels and transnationally across the Atlantic, religious migration, labor migration, refugee displacement. This has been an amazingly vibrant subfield in the last 10 to 15 years, and there's so much work still to be done and so many histories to be written.

It is really an inspiring topic for all the things you mentioned. And though our conversation has definitely tried to emphasize, you know, one of the most important contributions of the book, which is, you know, actually thinking about people who are immigrants and refugees in their experience of how they were approaching, you know, all the things, all the perils and possibilities that face them. You know, it's also a topic that allows us to really narrate the big histories of the modern Middle East in a new way. And for those who do check out the book, they'll find quite a bit of that as well in Empire of Refugees.

So, Professor Hamid Trojanski, if I may be formal, we really appreciate you coming on the podcast and finally sharing this work with us. Thank you, Ledemir. That formal, we really appreciate you coming on the podcast and finally sharing this work with us. Thank you, Ledemir. That was a pleasure. Thank you very much, Chris and John. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. For those who want to learn more about the topic, as always, we've got a bibliography

on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. That's also where you'll find no shortage of links to episodes directly related to today's subject. Thanks for tuning in and join us next time.