Historical Guide
Center for Circassian Studies
Genocide Recognition Dossier
This section focuses on the forced displacement of Circassians from their homeland and the formation of Circassian diaspora communities across the Ottoman Empire and beyond. It examines exile not only as a demographic consequence of conquest, but also as a long-term historical condition shaping identity, memory, family histories, and political consciousness.
The section also addresses the lasting impact of displacement on Circassian communities in Turkey, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, as well as the continued relationship between diaspora memory and the historical homeland in the North Caucasus.
The formation of the modern Circassian diaspora cannot be understood apart from the violence of nineteenth-century Russian imperial conquest. Circassian exile was not a conventional migration, nor was it simply the result of voluntary movement from one imperial space to another. It emerged from war, military defeat, forced displacement, mass death, and the destruction of viable Circassian life in much of the historical homeland. By the 1860s, the Russian Empire had brought the Caucasus War in the north-western Caucasus to its final stage. Circassian communities were pushed toward the Black Sea coast, expelled from mountain and coastal regions, and forced into conditions in which departure to Ottoman territory became the only remaining possibility for survival. The Circassian diaspora was therefore born from catastrophe.
The language used to describe this process matters. Terms such as “migration,” “emigration,” “resettlement,” “exile,” “deportation,” “expulsion,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” do not carry the same meaning. “Migration” can imply movement by choice. “Resettlement” can sound administrative and neutral. “Exile” highlights loss of homeland. “Deportation” stresses coercion. “Ethnic cleansing” foregrounds the removal of a people from a territory. “Genocide” points to the destruction of a group as a social, political, territorial, and historical community. In the Circassian case, the historical evidence requires language that captures coercion, destruction, and territorial removal. The mass departure of Circassians from the Caucasus was not the free movement of a population seeking better conditions elsewhere. It was a forced outcome of imperial war.
By the late 1850s and early 1860s, Russian imperial strategy in the western Caucasus had moved beyond military defeat of armed resistance. The continued presence of Circassian communities in their homeland was increasingly treated as incompatible with imperial security. Villages were destroyed, food supplies burned, fields ruined, and populations driven from their lands. Russian commanders and administrators considered removal, resettlement under imperial supervision, or departure to the Ottoman Empire as instruments of pacification. In practice, these policies produced mass expulsion. Walter Richmond’s The Circassian Genocide remains one of the central modern studies of this process, arguing that the final campaign against Circassia involved not merely wartime excess but a deliberate project of demographic transformation. Richmond’s work also situates the deportations within the broader destruction of Circassian political and territorial life.
The Black Sea coast became one of the main landscapes of Circassian suffering. As Russian forces advanced, large numbers of Circassians were forced toward coastal points where they waited for transport to Ottoman territory. These spaces became zones of hunger, disease, exposure, panic, and death. Contemporary observers described overcrowded embarkation points and desperate conditions. Many Circassians died before reaching ships. Others died during the crossing. Still others died after arrival in Ottoman ports, where imperial authorities and local communities struggled to respond to the scale of the refugee crisis. The passage across the Black Sea was not a clean line between homeland and safety. It was itself part of the catastrophe.
Primary sources are crucial for reconstructing this history. Russian military correspondence and administrative records reveal the strategic logic of removal. Ottoman documents record the reception, classification, transportation, and settlement of refugees. British consular correspondence, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts provide important external observations of the crisis. Sarah A. S. Isla Rosser-Owen’s study of the first Circassian exodus to the Ottoman Empire, based primarily on contemporary British observers between 1858 and 1867, remains especially useful for understanding how the refugee crisis appeared to consuls, journalists, and other witnesses connected to the British Foreign Office and press. Her work stresses the unexpected scale of the crisis and the difficulties faced by Ottoman authorities in responding to it.
The Ottoman Empire became the principal destination for Circassian refugees because it was the nearest Muslim imperial power and because Circassians had religious, political, and strategic connections to the Ottoman world. Yet arrival in Ottoman territory did not mean the end of suffering. The empire was itself under military, fiscal, administrative, and demographic pressure. Ottoman authorities had to provide transport, food, land, settlement arrangements, and security for large numbers of refugees arriving from the Caucasus. The scale of displacement was enormous. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and argues that the Ottoman state developed an organised refugee resettlement regime well before the international refugee systems of the twentieth century. His work is especially important because it places North Caucasian Muslim refugees, including Circassians, at the centre of late Ottoman state formation rather than treating them as a peripheral humanitarian episode.
The geography of Circassian resettlement was wide. North Caucasian refugees were eventually settled across regions that today include Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, Greece, Cyprus, and North Macedonia, while Ottoman authorities also considered settlement in other areas such as Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Libya. Temporary camps existed in Palestine, and some North Caucasians moved beyond formal Ottoman support networks. This distribution helps explain why the Circassian diaspora today is not confined to one country or region. It is the product of imperial resettlement across multiple provinces, frontier zones, agricultural districts, military colonies, and urban spaces.
Ottoman resettlement policy was not purely humanitarian. Refugees were victims of Russian imperial violence, but they also became important to Ottoman state projects. Circassians and other North Caucasian Muslims were settled in areas where the Ottoman state sought to strengthen Muslim demographic presence, secure frontiers, cultivate land, or counterbalance other populations. Some communities were placed in the Balkans, others in Anatolia, and others in the Levant. These settlements could generate tension with local populations, especially where land was scarce or where refugees were inserted into already fragile social and political environments. Hamed-Troyansky’s work is valuable precisely because it shows that refugee resettlement was both a response to catastrophe and a tool of imperial governance. The refugee was not only a humanitarian subject; he or she was also part of state-building, frontier management, and demographic engineering.
For Circassians, exile produced a profound transformation of social life. Families were separated. Villages were destroyed and reconstituted elsewhere. Oral histories carried memories of places left behind, ancestors lost, sea crossings, hunger, disease, and the difficulties of settlement. Exile became not only a demographic fact but a structure of memory. The homeland survived in stories, genealogies, commemorations, songs, place names, and political claims. In many diaspora communities, Circassian identity was preserved through language, kinship, marriage patterns, customary law, dance, music, foodways, and collective memory. But preservation was never simple. Diaspora life also meant adaptation, multilingualism, military service, intercommunal tension, integration into Ottoman and post-Ottoman states, and varying degrees of assimilation.
The Circassian diaspora was therefore not a single uniform entity. Circassians in Anatolia, the Balkans, the Levant, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, and later Europe and North America developed under different political and social conditions. Some communities maintained strong village-based forms of identity. Others became urban, professional, military, or politically integrated into state institutions. In Jordan, for example, Circassians became a recognised minority with a distinctive role in the formation of the modern state. In Turkey, Circassians became part of a much larger and more complex North Caucasian and Muslim refugee history, shaped by Ottoman collapse, Turkish nation-building, language politics, and debates over minority identity. In Syria, Circassian communities experienced another layer of displacement during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These differences matter because there is no single diaspora experience. There are multiple Circassian diasporic histories linked by a common catastrophe.
The formation of the diaspora also changed the meaning of Circassian politics. Before conquest, Circassian political life was grounded in the homeland. After exile, politics increasingly became memory-based, transnational, and often mediated through host states. Circassian claims to recognition, return, cultural rights, and historical justice developed across borders. The diaspora became a site where memory of the genocide was preserved, transmitted, and politicised. This is why the recognition of the Circassian genocide is not only a question of historical classification. It is also a question of diasporic memory and the political rights of a people whose displacement was created by imperial violence.
The relationship between homeland and diaspora remains central to Circassian identity. The north-western Caucasus is not simply an ancestral reference point; it is the historical ground of Circassian political and cultural existence. Yet most Circassians today live outside the Caucasus. This imbalance is itself one of the enduring consequences of the nineteenth-century catastrophe. The diaspora is not an accidental extension of Circassian history. It is one of the principal outcomes of genocide, deportation, and imperial territorial transformation.
At the same time, it is important not to write the history of the Circassian diaspora only as a history of victimhood. Circassian communities rebuilt lives under difficult circumstances. They created villages, associations, cultural institutions, oral traditions, political organisations, and transnational networks. They contributed to the societies in which they lived while preserving distinct forms of memory and identity. Diaspora formation was therefore both a consequence of destruction and a field of survival. The same historical process that removed Circassians from their homeland also produced new forms of Circassian social life across the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world.
The study of Circassian exile also belongs to a wider history of forced migration from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire. North Caucasian Muslims, Crimean Tatars, Nogais, Abkhazians, and other communities experienced displacement in overlapping but distinct ways. The late Ottoman world was shaped by these movements. Refugee settlement affected landholding, labour, military recruitment, intercommunal relations, and state policy. Hamed-Troyansky’s argument that the Ottoman Empire developed a refugee regime through these crises is therefore significant for Circassian studies as well. It moves the Circassian case from the margins of Ottoman history to the centre of debates on empire, displacement, and modern refugee governance.
For readers new to the topic, the central point is this: the Circassian diaspora was not created by ordinary migration. It was produced by conquest, expulsion, and the destruction of Circassian life in the homeland. The diaspora’s geography reflects the routes of survival available after imperial violence. Its memory reflects the trauma of forced departure. Its politics reflects the unresolved consequences of genocide and exile. To understand Circassian history after 1864 is therefore to understand a people living across several states while carrying the memory of a homeland transformed by conquest.
The Circassian case also invites broader reflection on the relationship between genocide and diaspora. Some diasporas are formed through trade, labour, education, or voluntary migration. Others are formed through catastrophe. The Circassian diaspora belongs to the latter category. It is a diaspora of survival after territorial destruction. Its existence testifies both to the scale of Russian imperial violence and to the endurance of Circassian collective life beyond the homeland. Exile did not end Circassian history. It changed its geography.
Selected Reading
Rosser-Owen, Sarah A. S. Isla. The First ‘Circassian Exodus’ to the Ottoman Empire (1858–1867), and the Ottoman Response, Based on the Accounts of Contemporary British Observers. MA thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2007.
Richmond, Walter. The Circassian Genocide. Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Shenfield, Stephen D. “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?” In The Massacre in History, edited by Mark Levene and Penny Roberts. Berghahn Books, 1999.
King, Charles. The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Grassi, Fabio L. A New Homeland: The Massacre of the Circassians, Their Exodus to the Ottoman Empire and Their Place in Modern Turkey. Acar Publishing, 2018.