Karachay
The Karachay ( own name : Къарачайлыла / Qaratschajlyla ) are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group of the Caucasus region . They belong to the Turkic peoples and are related to the neighboring Balkars , from which they are spatially separated by the Elbrus massif . Your language Karachay is one of five dialects of the common written language Karachay-Balkar , the other four dialects are spoken by Balkars.
According to the 2010 census, 218,406 Karachay people live in Russia , of which 194,324 (41% of the population) live in the Russian republic of Karachay-Cherkessia . Worldwide, their number is estimated at over 260,000 people, including some native-speaking descendants of 19th century refugees in Turkey .
The Karachay are in addition to the Balkars, Russia Koreans , Russian Germans , Crimean Tatars , Kalmyks , Chechens , Ingush and Meskhetians to the nationalities that completely around the Second World War by the Stalinist NKVD deported units to Central Asia.
Settlement area
Today Karachay live mainly in the Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia , which belongs to Russia , where they form the largest population group with 194,324 people (almost 41%), and in the Stavropol region (15,598 people) in the 2010 census. The main place of their settlement area is today the city of Karachayevsk . They also live in the cities of Ust-Dzheguta , Teberda , Dombai , Cherkessk .
language
Karachay-Balkar is linguistically assigned to the northwestern Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages. The closest relative is Kumyk in Dagestan .
The Karachay-Balkar language has been documented in writing since the beginning of the 18th century. At that time, the Balkars and Karachays had written their language on the basis of the Arabic alphabet on rare occasions, as was the case for the first time in the so-called "Cholam / Chulam inscription" from 1715, found in the Balkarian Aul Cholam, which wrote a political arbitration award from 1709. Since the time of the early Soviet Korenisazija , it was initially written in Latin , later in Cyrillic as a general written language through compulsory schooling.
religion
By the end of the 17th century, the Karachay people embraced a synthesis of Christianity and pre-Christian traditions. Then they converted to Sunni Islam . However, after the atheist upbringing in the Soviet era, larger parts of the population are no longer or only slightly religious.
tradition
The Karachay, like most of the North Caucasian peoples, were semi-nomads or lived in transhumance . Their places of residence changed between higher pasture and cultivation villages in summer and lower wintering areas and the Karachay were considered independent and belligerent. In pre-Soviet times, like the Balkars and other North Caucasian ethnic groups, princely families were at the top of the hierarchy, followed by a lower nobility.
The Karachay society was divided into over 30 clans and a traditional law governed questions of behavior, marriage, hospitality, retribution, celebrations, clan decisions, funerals, etc. In principle, the culture is strongly influenced by the Caucasus.
Ethnogenesis
The question of how Turkic-speaking tribal groups got to the highest regions of the Caucasus while most of the Turkic peoples live on its fringes has preoccupied scientists since the 19th century. The names of the Karachay-Balkar tribes can be found in Georgian and English since the late Middle Ages. a. Observe sources , the language has been handed down in writing since the 18th century, so only circumstantial hypotheses are possible for the time before.
Some older researchers saw this as an indication that the Turkic languages in the Caucasus could be autochthonous , something that authors with a Turkic nationalistic orientation still adhere to today , but who also seek to co-opt many other early cultures. Your arguments are often rejected as implausible. According to today's Turkish Studies , the Turkic probably within the last nearly 2,000 years from eastern parts of the Eurasian steppes and the neighboring region of South and South-West Siberia spread gradually, and many details are still unknown.
Older and nationalist authors often mistakenly equate the language they have learned with the origin of an ethnic group . In history - including Central European - there are many examples that among regional populations with several languages, including sometimes immigrant languages, one of the languages prevailed over the course of generations, which means that the resulting ethnic group is of different origins. The assumption that even only one ethnic group is completely of the same origin has also consistently refuted the younger genetics . Genetic studies of the paternal inheritance of the Y chromosome in Karachay-Balkar families have shown that almost a third of them have a gene cluster that is common in northern, mostly Turkic-speaking steppe inhabitants (R1aZ2123), and almost one third is a cluster that is common in central Caucasian people autochthonous population is typical (G2a1a) and more than a third various other subclusters, which suggests that there has been a partial immigration from northern steppes.
When the immigration of Turkic-speaking groups occurred, there are two scientific historical hypotheses: the older sees it as the result of the immigration of Kipchaks in the 12th / 13th centuries. Century. At the beginning of the 12th century, the Kipchak Empire had conquered areas in the West Caucasus from the Alans , during which time the first graves with steppe nomadic burial customs were found in the archaeological site in Nizhny Archys in Karachay-Cherkessia. The archaeologically ascertainable influx increased sharply with the Mongolian migrations in the 13th century. In addition to the archaeological evidence, the fact that the closest language to Karachay-Balkarian is Kumyk , and the Kumyks' origins through flight from the Mongols are also mentioned in historical sources.
A more recent hypothesis indicates that in the 6./7. In the 19th century, Turkic-speaking Bolgars and Sabirs , and later Khazars, immigrated to western parts of Alania . In addition to archaeological findings and information from historical sources, the fact that the name of the Balkars, still called bolchary or bolgary in Russian sources of the 17th century , probably goes back to the Bolgars. Perhaps the older Bolgars had already disappeared when the Kipchaks arrived, or there were several waves of immigration. Probability calculations based on the first genetic studies on the spread of the Turk nomads, which can still show inaccuracies, showed that it was around the 7th – 11th centuries. Century immigration could have occurred.
Whether in the 6./7. or 12./13. Immigrated in the 19th century, the Turkic-speaking groups were probably part of the Alan tribal union until the 14th century , linguistically assimilated the previous inhabitants and established their Turkic language in the west, before they became higher in the 15th century before the war campaigns of Timur and the subsequent expansion of Cabardian princes into the Central Caucasus moved to the mountains or were themselves assimilated.
history
The Karachay can be traced back to the 15th century. In the 16th century they came under the influence of the Crimean Khanate and a little later under the influence of the Ottoman Empire . At the end of the 17th century, they were converted to Islam mainly by the Crimean Tatars . Karachay was conquered by the Russian Empire in 1828 after the 12-hour battle near Mount Hasauk. After the defeat in the battle, the ruler of Karachay, Prince Islam Krymshamchalov, accepted citizenship of the Russian Empire. Many Karachay people then took part in the uprising under Imam Shamil in the Caucasus War of the 19th century , after which it is estimated that the majority of Karachay people fled to the Ottoman Empire. Those who stayed behind were left to extensive self-government in the Tsarist empire, which is why they were partly loyal. Some Karachay soldiers served in the Wild Division during the First World War .
In the time of the Stalinist forcible collectivization of agriculture 1929–33 and the great terror cleansing of 1936–38, resistance arose in the mountain areas of the Karachay, as well as in the mountain areas of Kabardino-Balkaria and Checheno-Ingushetia , that the collectivization was temporarily had to be canceled. During the Second World War, the Karachay settlement area was temporarily occupied by the Wehrmacht from July 1942 ( Edelweiss Company ) to January 1943 ( North Caucasian Operation ) . Due to their resistance against the Red Army , which re-entered in 1943 , they were arrested by NKVD units from November 2nd to 22nd, 1943 by NKVD units on orders from Josef Stalin on charges of collaboration with the Wehrmacht and exiled to Central Asia , whereby very many deportees perished. The background of the accusation of collaboration against an entire ethnic group has been discussed for a long time. Although there was a self-proclaimed “Karachay National Committee” under Kadi Bairamukow, which openly collaborated with the Germans, its popular support was probably much lower than the name suggests. Many historians therefore assume that the resistance before the World War, problems in reaching the volunteer quota for the Red Army and finally resistance to the reintroduction of Stalinist measures in 1943 were more the cause of the deportation with its large numbers of victims than the one officially cited Collaboration in which only a minority participated. Nikita Khrushchev rehabilitated the Karachay in 1957 and they were allowed to return.
Together with the Circassians, they have their own autonomous Karachay-Cherkessia republic within Russia in the Caucasus. Their cohesion was temporarily jeopardized from 1996 to 1999 because Circassian associations demanded independence. After the year 2000 the situation stabilized. The Elbrus area has been an economically up-and-coming tourism region since the 1960s.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Excel table 5, line 85 .
- ^ Results of the 2010 Russian Census , Excel table 7, line 488.
- ^ Results of the 2010 Census of Russia , Excel table 7, line 488 and line 537.
- ↑ Hamid Haschimowitsch Malkondujew: About the Balkar-Karachay gates . (a kind of village council) , 2010.
- ^ Lars Johanson, Éva Ágnes Csató: The Turkic Languages. London, New York 1998, p. 68; Wolfgang-Ekkehard Scharlipp : The early Turks in Central Asia: An introduction to their history and culture. Darmstadt 2011, pp. 5–29.
- ↑ Results of the Y-DNA examinations broken down into the individual families in: A.-Ch. A. Katschijew, TB Usdenow, Ch. B. Chasanow: Structures of the Karachay family origin and their correlation to the results of Y-chromosomal DNA examinations. Cherkessk, Moscow, Karachayevsk 2016. (Russian)
- ↑ Cf. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov: Outline of the Iranian history. Chapter 9.1, ninth paragraph (Russian). He also considers this 2nd hypothesis to be quite possible.
- ↑ Yunusbayev B., Metspalu M., Metspalu E., Valeev A., Litvinov S., Valiev R. et al. (2015): The Genetic Legacy of the Expansion of Turkic-Speaking Nomads across Eurasia. PLoS Genet 11 (4). - see the "ALDER" test in the middle of the text, in which they admit possible errors and which also shows some unexpected results in Central Asia and West Asia.
- ↑ For the history of the settlement, see this map in the atlas of the North Caucasian history of the historian Artur Zuzijew (Russian). Red dashed: borders of the Alanian tribal union in the 6th – 13th centuries Century, blue field: Bolgaren u. a. in Alania in the 7th century, region A: Kipchaks, who were involved in the ethnogenesis of the Karachay-Balkars, region B: Kipchaks, who were involved in the ethnogenesis of the Kumyks, yellow field: Karachay-Balkar tribes higher in the Caucasus in the 17th century .Century
- ↑ Heinz-Gerhard Zimpel: Lexicon of the World Population , p. 260
- ↑ RM Begeulow: Karachay in the Caucasus War of the 19th century. (Russian), Tscherkessk 2002, p. 115.
- ^ Gerhard Simon : Nationalism and Nationality Policy in the Soviet Union: From Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society. P. 120.
- ↑ Jeronim Perović : The North Caucasus under Russian rule. Cologne 2015, pp. 430–441.
literature
- Rudolf A. Mark : The peoples of the former Soviet Union / CIS. The nationalities of the CIS, Georgia and the Baltic republics. A lexicon. Opladen 1992, entry "Karatschaier".
- Svetlana Tscherwonnaja: The Karachay and Balkars in the North Caucasus: Conflicts and unsolved problems. Cologne 1999.
- Heinz-Gerhard Zimpel: Lexicon of the world population. Geography - Culture - Society , Nikol Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-933203-84-8 .
Web links
- The Karachay, the Circassian and the Abazine Report from the radio station "Voice of Russia"