This section focuses on the historical geography of Circassia, with particular attention to the north-eastern Black Sea coast and the regions that later became associated with Russian imperial and post-imperial administrative names. It examines the relationship between territory, conquest, settlement, renaming, and historical erasure.
By foregrounding Circassian historical geography, this section challenges the idea that the Black Sea coast and the north-western Caucasus can be understood only through later Russian place names and imperial administrative categories. It highlights the importance of Indigenous toponyms, local histories, and Circassian territorial memory in reconstructing the history of the region.
The north-eastern Black Sea coast occupies a central place in the history of Circassia, Russian imperial conquest, and the destruction of Circassian sovereignty. It was not a peripheral frontier, nor merely a picturesque coastal zone later incorporated into Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet geography. For Circassians, this coast formed part of the historical homeland: a space of settlement, mobility, trade, diplomacy, political resistance, and cultural memory. For the Russian Empire, it became a strategic corridor to be controlled, fortified, emptied, settled, renamed, and absorbed. The conquest of Circassia was therefore also a conquest of geography. It transformed the Black Sea coast from a Circassian and Caucasian space into an imperial borderland governed through Russian military, administrative, and demographic power.
The geography matters because the Circassian genocide was not only an event of mass killing and expulsion. It was also a process of territorial remaking. The Russian imperial campaign against Circassia aimed to eliminate the political and military autonomy of the north-western Caucasus. But this required more than battlefield victory. It required the control of mountain routes, river valleys, forests, coastal settlements, ports, and lines of communication. The Black Sea coast was especially important because it connected Circassia to the Ottoman world, to foreign observers, to maritime trade, and to possible diplomatic or military assistance. Control of the coast meant isolating Circassian resistance and closing the region to external support.
Russian imperial expansion into the Caucasus unfolded over a long period, but the nineteenth century brought the decisive military transformation of the region. The Russian state sought to secure its southern frontier, consolidate its gains from wars with the Ottoman and Persian empires, and control the Caucasian corridor between the Black and Caspian seas. Charles King’s The Ghost of Freedom is valuable precisely because it presents the Caucasus not as a marginal mountain zone but as a central arena of imperial ambition, local resistance, exile, and competing political projects. The north-eastern Black Sea coast belonged to this wider imperial geography: it was a place where military strategy, colonial settlement, and the remaking of historical memory came together.
Before its final conquest, Circassia was not an empty coastal wilderness. It was inhabited by Circassian communities with their own social institutions, forms of territorial belonging, political alliances, customary law, and systems of defence. Circassian society was not organised as a single centralised state, and this has often led imperial and later observers to misread the region as politically fragmented or underdeveloped. Yet decentralisation did not mean absence of sovereignty. Circassian communities controlled territory, negotiated with outside powers, resisted military occupation, and maintained social and political order. The Russian imperial claim that the region needed pacification was therefore not a neutral description. It was a justification for conquest.
The Black Sea coast was one of the most contested parts of this struggle. Russian forts along the coast were designed to restrict Circassian access to the sea, limit contact with the Ottoman Empire and Britain, and interrupt trade and arms supplies. Charles King’s article on David Urquhart and the making of the North Caucasus question notes that Circassian resistance was a persistent problem for Russian officialdom and that Circassians attacked Russian forts along the Black Sea coast. This is significant because it shows that the coast was not simply an object of imperial possession. It was an active military and political frontier in which Circassians contested Russian occupation.
The coast also had an international dimension. British observers, diplomats, travellers, and political activists paid attention to Circassia in the nineteenth century, especially because of the region’s relationship to the Eastern Question and rivalry between Russia and Britain. David Urquhart, for example, helped popularise the Circassian cause in Britain, presenting Circassian resistance as part of a wider anti-Russian struggle. British interest was not always consistent or selfless; it was shaped by imperial rivalry. Yet it produced a body of correspondence, journalism, and advocacy that now forms an important part of the documentary record. Circassia’s coast was therefore simultaneously local, imperial, and international.
For Russia, however, the coastal problem was ultimately solved through force. Fortification alone could not secure the region as long as Circassian communities remained capable of resistance in the surrounding mountains, valleys, and forests. This is why the final phase of the Caucasus War moved toward demographic removal. Villages were destroyed, fields and food supplies ruined, and populations pushed toward the coast. The coast became the last landscape of Circassian presence before exile. It was where many communities gathered in desperate conditions before being transported across the Black Sea to Ottoman territory.
Walter Richmond’s The Circassian Genocide remains central to understanding this transformation. The book traces the war between Russia and Circassia, describes the final genocidal campaign, and follows Circassian survival in diaspora. Its importance lies in showing that conquest, expulsion, and diaspora formation were connected parts of one historical process, not separate episodes. The Black Sea coast was the hinge of that process: the place where conquest became deportation and where homeland became exile.
The refugee crisis that followed was catastrophic. Circassians were forced toward embarkation points along the coast, where they waited under conditions of overcrowding, hunger, disease, exposure, and despair. Many died before departure. Others died during the crossing. Many more died after arrival in Ottoman ports. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s work on North Caucasian Muslim refugees shows how dramatic the situation became in Ottoman Black Sea port cities: by the end of autumn, Circassian refugees exceeded local populations in some ports, with inns, schools, mosques, bazaars, stables, and streets filled with displaced people, while epidemics such as typhus and smallpox devastated refugee communities.
This history makes clear why the Black Sea was not only a geographic boundary. It became a space of rupture. On one side lay the homeland being emptied and incorporated into the Russian Empire. On the other lay Ottoman territory, where Circassians would begin new lives as refugees, settlers, soldiers, villagers, and diaspora communities. The crossing itself became part of Circassian collective memory: a passage marked by loss, death, and irreversible separation from ancestral land.
Russian imperial conquest also involved the renaming and administrative reorganisation of conquered territory. This is one of the most important but often overlooked dimensions of the Circassian case. After conquest, Circassian historical geography was increasingly overwritten by Russian imperial, Cossack, Soviet, and later post-Soviet place names. The process was not merely linguistic. Names are instruments of power. They determine what appears on maps, what is remembered in official histories, what is taught in schools, and what kinds of belonging become visible or invisible. To rename a place after conquest is to impose a new political memory over an older one.
This is why places such as Sochi, Tuapse, Krasnaya Polyana, and the wider Krasnodar region require careful historical treatment in Circassian Studies. These are not neutral labels outside history. They are modern administrative and imperial names layered over a region with older Circassian geography, memory, and presence. The point is not that every contemporary place name can be replaced with one uncontested historical equivalent. Circassian historical geography was regionally varied, multilingual, and connected to different tribes, valleys, rivers, and coastal zones. The point is rather that Russian naming should not be mistaken for historical origin. Later imperial names often conceal the violence through which the region was incorporated.
The Sochi region is especially important. It is internationally associated with tourism, Soviet leisure culture, Russian state prestige, and the 2014 Winter Olympics. But for Circassians, the broader area is also associated with the final stages of the Caucasus War, mass death, and expulsion. Contemporary commentary on the Sochi Olympics noted that Circassians regarded the games as taking place on ancestral lands marked by nineteenth-century genocide and displacement. The controversy showed how sharply official Russian narratives of development and international spectacle can collide with Circassian memory of conquest.
The final Russian victory in 1864 is commonly associated with Qbaada, later known as Krasnaya Polyana. This symbolic geography matters because it reveals how conquest is remembered differently by conquerors and by the conquered. For Russian imperial memory, 1864 marked the end of a long military campaign and the completion of Caucasian conquest. For Circassians, it marked the destruction of the homeland and the beginning of mass exile. The same landscape can therefore carry radically opposed historical meanings. One narrative celebrates victory and incorporation; the other mourns genocide and dispossession.
The Black Sea coast also helps us understand why Circassian genocide recognition cannot be separated from questions of territory. Genocide is often imagined primarily through the killing of bodies. But in many colonial contexts, destruction also takes territorial form: villages are emptied, populations removed, land redistributed, names changed, and histories rewritten. In Circassia, the removal of people and the remaking of land were inseparable. The purpose of conquest was not only to defeat Circassian fighters but to make Circassian territorial autonomy impossible. The coast, mountains, and valleys had to be secured for imperial rule.
Peter Henze’s study of Russia’s long struggle to subdue the Circassians describes the western Caucasus as geographically fragmented, with river valleys, mountain terrain, and a difficult Black Sea coastal environment shaping the conflict. This geography helped sustain resistance, but it also shaped the violence of conquest. Russian military power had to overcome not only Circassian fighters but the environmental and social geography that made local autonomy possible. The destruction of villages, forests, food supplies, and settlement patterns was therefore part of the military logic of conquest.
The Circassian case also reveals how imperial conquest produces later ignorance. Once the region was incorporated into Russian administrative space, its earlier Circassian history became increasingly marginalised in broader public knowledge. Maps displayed Russian names. Imperial and Soviet narratives foregrounded military achievement, settlement, modernisation, tourism, or strategic development. Circassian presence became either folklorised, minimised, or displaced into the diaspora. This is why historical geography is so important for the Genocide Recognition Dossier. To recover Circassian geography is to recover the structure of the crime.
The Black Sea coast should also be understood through the lens of Indigenous dispossession. Circassians were not simply one population among many moving through an imperial borderland. They were the people of the land. Their displacement involved the destruction of territorial continuity, political autonomy, and place-based memory. Using the language of indigeneity does not mean imposing a simplistic modern category onto the nineteenth century. It means recognising the relationship between people, land, sovereignty, and historical erasure. Circassian claims to memory are inseparable from the geography from which Circassians were removed.
For public audiences, this point is essential. When one sees names such as Sochi or Krasnodar Krai on a modern map, one is seeing the outcome of conquest, not the beginning of history. The present administrative geography of the Russian Federation rests on older layers of violence, removal, and renaming. Circassian Studies must therefore ask not only what happened to people, but what happened to places. Which names disappeared? Which communities were expelled? Which landscapes were turned into sites of imperial victory? Which histories were made invisible by later maps?
The coast is also important for understanding the diaspora. The Circassian diaspora did not emerge from an abstract displacement. It emerged through very specific coastal routes, embarkation points, ports, ships, and Ottoman reception zones. The Black Sea connected destruction and survival. It separated Circassians from the homeland, but it also became the route through which Circassian communities survived beyond the Caucasus. This dual meaning — sea as expulsion and sea as survival — remains central to Circassian memory.
The history of Circassia and the Black Sea coast therefore requires a double reading. It is a history of military conquest and imperial strategy, but also a history of place, naming, memory, and erasure. Russian conquest transformed a Circassian homeland into an imperial possession. It turned coastal space into a military frontier, then into a deportation zone, and later into a landscape of settlement, tourism, and state symbolism. Circassian memory challenges this transformation by insisting that the coast has another history — older than Russian incorporation and inseparable from the genocide.
For readers new to the topic, the central point is this: Circassia’s Black Sea coast was not empty, marginal, or historically Russian by origin. It was part of the Circassian world. Its conquest was central to the destruction of Circassian sovereignty. Its ports and coastal zones became sites of deportation and mass suffering. Its later names and administrative categories often conceal the history of Indigenous presence and imperial violence. To understand the Circassian genocide, one must therefore look not only at the events of 1864, but also at the geography through which conquest was carried out and later remembered.
Selected Reading
Henze, Paul B. “Russia’s Long Struggle to Subdue the Circassians.” RAND, 1990.
Hamed-Troyansky, Vladimir. Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State. Stanford University Press, 2024.
Halbach, Uwe. “The Circassian Question: Russian Colonial History in the Caucasus and a Case of ‘Long-Distance Nationalism’.” SWP Comments, 2014.
King, Charles. The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus. Oxford University Press, 2008.
King, Charles. “David Urquhart and the Making of the North Caucasus Question, 1835–37.” The English Historical Review 122, no. 498, 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.