Urum
The ethnic group of Urum (urumisch Ουρούμ / Urum ) forms a small Turkish-speaking minority of Greek descent.
etymology
The name Urum is a derivative of the Turkish word rum and means Greek .
The term Graeko-Tatars is also known from German Turkology and Urumler from popular literature . For a long time, the Urum were also counted among the Mountain Tatars because of their Turkic language and referred to as such.
Distribution area
Today's main settlement area is the south of Georgia (northern Samtskhe-Javakheti , where they migrated in the 19th century and settled near the Meschetian settlement areas ) and the east of today's Turkey ( Trebizond , Giresun , Erzurum and Kars ). The Urum can also be found as a minority in Ukraine , Crimea , Greece and the entire Balkan Peninsula .
Origin and religion
The 13,000 or so Urum are ethnic Greeks by origin . The ancestors of the Urum came to the Caucasus in the 18th century and were primarily settled in Abkhazia by the Georgian king . They eventually adopted the Tatar language , which today still has strong influences from the Greek language . The language itself is also called Urum after its speakers .
The Urum are one of the few Turkic-speaking peoples who have not adopted Islam , but have remained Greek Orthodox Christians to this day. Because of their Greek Orthodox belief, they are still listed as "Greeks" and not as Turkic people in censuses in Georgia . This also corresponds to their own view of the Urum, who also continue to regard themselves as Greeks and not as Turks or Tatars, although they speak one of the forty or so Turkic languages today. So the Urum give their children mostly Greek names. In extreme cases, although not uncommon, the children are named after Greek place names such as Makedon , Ellada , etc.
history
Around the year 1780 around 9,600 Greeks were brought from Anatolia to Georgia. There, as Christians, they were supposed to replace the Circassians and Abkhazians who had meanwhile converted to Islam and who in turn had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire . But these Anatolian Greeks were already linguistically strongly influenced by "Ottomanism"; some of them spoke Turkish as well as Greek .
In the new settlement areas, the Urum came into contact with the Crimean Tatars and other neighboring Turkic peoples and were strongly linguistically influenced by them. The Urum now finally adopted Tatar as their mother tongue, without giving up their old faith. The influence of Crimean Turkish on the Urum language was particularly great here . Today this variant of Tatar is considered the closest relative of the Urumian language.
After the subjugation of the Khanate of Crimea and the subsequent suppression of the Caucasian Turkic peoples by the Russian administrative authorities, large parts of the Urum also moved to southern Georgia and eastern Anatolia between 1821 and 1825 .
After the collapse of the Soviet Union , the Urum began to emigrate to Greece on a massive scale.
See also
literature
- Heinz-Gerhard Zimpel: Lexicon of the world population. Geography - Culture - Society , Nikol Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-933203-84-8