Where did the Crimean Tatars actually come from. On the origin of the Crimean Tatars

Crimean Tatars formed as a people in the Crimea in the XIII-XVII centuries. The historical core of the Crimean Tatar ethnos is the Turkic tribes that settled in the Crimea, a special place in the ethnogenesis of the Crimean Tatars among the Kipchak tribes, which mixed with the local descendants of the Huns, Khazars, Pechenegs, as well as representatives of the pre-Turkic population of Crimea - together with them formed the ethnic basis of the Crimean Tatars, Karaites , Krymchaks

By the end of the 15th century, the main prerequisites were created that led to the formation of an independent Crimean Tatar ethnic group: the political dominance of the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire was established in Crimea, the Turkic languages (Polovtsian-Kypchak on the territory of the Khanate and Ottoman in the Ottoman possessions) became dominant, and Islam acquired the status state religion throughout the peninsula. As a result of the predominance of the Polovtsian-speaking population called "Tatars" and the Islamic religion, the processes of assimilation and consolidation of a motley ethnic conglomerate began, which led to the emergence of the Crimean Tatar people. Over the course of several centuries, the Crimean Tatar language developed on the basis of the Polovtsian language with a noticeable Oghuz influence.

The process of formation of the people was finally completed during the period of the Crimean Khanate.

Tatars leaving the mosque in Bakhchisarai.

Tatar cemetery in Bakhchisarai.

The Crimean population, which we now indiscriminately call Crimean Tatars, divided into three groups, both in appearance and in dialect, as well as in some manners and customs: the southern coast, the mountainous and the steppe.

The Crimeans of the southern coast are tall, slender, with black hair and black eyes, with a swarthy, but at the same time quite European complexion; their facial features are very regular and beautiful, and among the South Coast Tatars, both men and women, there are many well-known handsome men and beauties. The noble blood of both the ancient Greeks and medieval Italians is visible in them, and in their language one can also hear a softer pronunciation and an abundance of corrupted Italian and Greek words.

The Crimeans of the steppe strip are not like that at all. They are short to medium height, short-legged and slightly bow-legged, with long arms, large wide head, prominent cheekbones, narrow eyes with a slightly oblique slit. They call themselves Nogai and come from the Nogai hordes.

The mountain Tatars, who lived near Bakhchisaray, along the Baidar valley, near Simferopol, both in appearance and in dialect represent the middle between the steppe and southern coast. They have even more mixture than in the southern coast.

The costumes of the Tatars are very picturesque, but developed under the influence of Turkish culture, in recent times when the Crimea began to be flooded with a mass of tourists penetrating into the most secret corners of the peninsula, it began to change significantly. Therefore, many national parts of the local costume are replaced by pan-European parts of the toilet.

The former, typical Crimean costume consists of a white shirt with a straight collar, dark harem pants girded with a wide, colored belt, morocco shoes or shoes: a narrow scoop jacket embroidered with laces was put on over the shirt; on his head was a low black lambskin hat with a small circle in the middle of its top, trimmed with gold lace.

Mountain Tatars and Tatars of the southern coast.

Steppe Tatars.

The nature of the social life of the Tatars is also expressed in the outward appearance of their villages. All Tatar villages are located in hollows; this may be reflected in the habit of the former steppe-Tatar to hide from the eyes of the Cossack. The houses here are not crowded, as in Russian villages, but are scattered in disorder and separated from each other, if not by a garden, then by a kitchen garden, or simply by a wasteland. Around the village, for the most part, adjacent to the estates, there are fields and hayfields. These fields, in turn, are surrounded by almost every owner with wattle, and sometimes with a stone fence or ditch.

Only in the mountains, due to the tightness of the place, the houses in the Tatar villages are not far from each other, although they are also scattered in disorder. In these villages, low Tatar huts, as a rule, tightly adjoin the mountain with one wall, so that, descending from the latter, one can easily climb the house without noticing it at all.

The Tatar dwelling, the saklya, is not built in the same way everywhere: on the southern coast of the Crimea, the Tatars make their own houses from rough field stones, grease them and plaster them with clay. And on the northern slope of the mountains, and especially in the steppes, Tatar houses are built from large home-made bricks, prepared from a mixture of clay and straw.

Cleanliness and order are constantly observed in the Tatar sakla; felt laid on the floor is often beaten out and weathered. In general, where the hands and eyes of a Tatar woman are involved, everything is done properly and thoroughly. This applies equally to both poor and rich Tatar families.

Tatar house, plow and cart.

Crimean Tatars eat the following dishes: bread, usually sour, too hard and badly baked; millet and lamb pilaf; katyk, i.e. soured, curdled and then boiled, and sometimes also salted milk, mostly sheep's, something like ours sour milk or cottage cheese, but it is completely unsuitable for the taste of Russians, while the Crimean Tatars are very fond of it.

Occasionally, in some special cases, the Tatars cook: shish kebab - mutton fried on a spit in small pieces; chirchir-burek or chuburek, i.e. fried on mutton fat pies stuffed with minced beef; cabbage rolls in grape leaves, doused, instead of sour cream, with katyk. Shchi cooked from various vegetables and fruits and from various meats is considered the most luxurious dish; the more diverse the composition of this amazing dish, the higher it is valued. Any food among the Tatars is usually overcooked and overcooked to the utmost, and everything is richly seasoned with skinskin fat (lard from the tail of a Crimean ram), capsicum, onion and garlic, which the Tatars absorb in huge quantities.

Grape harvest in the Crimea.

Crimean Tatars

Family of Crimean Tatars on the road.

Crimean Tatars and a mullah.

Murza and his escort.

In the Crimea, which was subordinate to the Ottoman Empire, the composition of the population was quite diverse. The bulk of the population were Crimean Tatars. The subjects of the Khan belonged to different nations and professed various religions. They were divided into national-religious communities - millets, as was customary in the empire.

Only Muslims, who constituted the largest community of the peninsula, enjoyed full rights. Only the faithful carried military service, and for this they enjoyed tax and other benefits.

In addition to the Muslim, there were three more millets: Orthodox, or Greek, Jewish and Armenian. Members of different communities lived, as a rule, in their villages and quarters of cities. Here were their temples and prayer houses.

The communities were ruled by the most respected people who combined spiritual and judicial power. They defended the interests of their people, enjoyed the right to raise funds for community needs and other privileges.

The number of Crimean Tatars

The history of the Crimean Tatars is quite interesting. In the regions of the Crimea, directly subordinate to the Sultan, the Turkish population grew. It increased especially rapidly in the Cafe, which was called Kuchuk-Istanbul, "little Istanbul". However, the main part of the Muslim community of Crimea were Tatars. Now they lived not only in the steppes and foothills, but also in mountain valleys, on the southern coast.

They borrowed the skills of maintaining a settled economy and forms of social life from those who have lived here for centuries. And the local population, in turn, adopted from the Tatars not only the Turkic language, but sometimes the Muslim faith. The captives from the Moscow and Ukrainian lands also accepted Islam: in this way it was possible to avoid slavery, “be fooled”, as the Russians used to say, or “become a poturnak”, in the words of the Ukrainians.

Thousands of captives poured into Tatar families as wives and servants. Their children were brought up in a Tatar environment as devout Muslims. This was common among ordinary Tatars, and among the nobility, up to the Khan's palace.

So, on the basis of Islam and the Turkic language, a new people was formed from various national groups - the Crimean Tatars. It was heterogeneous and broke up according to its habitat into several groups that differed appearance, language features, clothing and activities, and other features.

Settlement and occupation of the Crimean Tatars

The Crimean Tatars of the southern coast of Crimea were under significant Turkish influence (along the southern coast lay the lands of the sanjak of the Turkish sultan). This was reflected in their customs and language. They were tall, with European features. Their dwellings with flat roof, located on the mountain slopes near the sea coast, were built from unhewn stone.

The South Coast Crimean Tatars were famous as gardeners. They were engaged in fishing and animal husbandry. Cultivation of grapes was a real passion. The number of its varieties reached, according to the estimates of foreign travelers, several dozen, and many were unknown outside the Crimea.

Another group of the Tatar population formed in the Crimean Mountains. Along with the Turks and Greeks, the Goths made a significant contribution to its formation, due to which people with red and blond hair were often found among the mountain Tatars.

The local language was formed on the basis of Kipchak with an admixture of Turkish and Greek elements. The main occupations of the highlanders were animal husbandry, tobacco growing, gardening, and horticulture. They grew, as on the South Coast, garlic, onions, and eventually tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, greens. Tatars knew how to harvest fruits and vegetables for the future: they made jam, dried, salted them.

Mountain Crimean Tatars, like the South Coast, also built with flat roofs. Houses with two floors were quite common. In this case, the first floor was made of stone, and the second with gable roof, made of wood.

The second floor was larger than the first, which saved land. The protruding part of the tereme (second floor) was supported by bent wooden supports, which rested with their lower ends against the wall of the first floor.

Finally, the third group formed in the steppe Crimea, mainly from the Kipchaks, Nogays, Tatar-Mongols. The language of this group was Kipchak, which also included individual Mongolian words. FROM The warm Crimean Tatars maintained their adherence to a nomadic way of life for the longest time.

In order to bring them to a settled way of life, Khan Sahib-Girey (1532-1551) ordered to cut the wheels and break the wagons of those who wanted to leave the Crimea for nomadism. The steppe Tatars erected dwellings from unbaked bricks and shell stone. The roofs of houses were made two- or single-pitched. Like many hundreds of years ago, the breeding of sheep and horses remained one of the main occupations. Over time, they began to sow wheat, barley, oats, and millet. High yields made it possible to provide the population of Crimea with grain.

Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic-speaking people that formed on the Crimean peninsula during the 13th-15th centuries. The Republic of Crimea, which is part of Russia, is home to about 260,000 Crimean Tatars (12 percent of the total population of Crimea). Total number There are about 500 thousand Crimean Tatars in the countries of the former USSR, Romania and Bulgaria, and at least 500 thousand people of Crimean Tatar origin live in Turkey.

Despite the fact that the name of the Crimean Tatar people contains the word "Tatars", which has remained since the time when almost all the Turkic-speaking peoples of Russia were called Tatars, the Crimean Tatars are not part of the Tatar people. The Crimean Tatar language differs significantly from the language of the Volga Tatars; the commonality of these languages consists only in the fact that both are included in the Turkic group. The generally accepted classification of the Crimean Tatar language refers it to the transitional Oguz-Kypchak Turkic languages, and the language of the Volga Tatars belongs to the Volga-Kypchak subgroup.

The Top-Antropos.com portal has chosen the most beautiful Crimean Tatar women in the opinion of the editors. Among them are nine singers and three finalists of the Crimean Beauty contest.

12th place: Lenara Osmanova- Crimean Tatar singer, Honored Artist Autonomous Republic Crimea. Lenara was born on May 7, 1986 in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), in 1991 the family moved to Simferopol. The repertoire of the singer includes songs by Ukrainian authors, songs of her own composition, songs and dances of the peoples of the world. Official site of Lenara Osmanova - http://lenara.com.ua

11th place: Alie Fatkulina- finalist of the competition "Crimean Beauty 2011". Aliya's page on the contest website - http://krasavica.crimea.ua/persons.php?person_id=31

10th place: Alie Yakubova(Khadzhabadinova) - Crimean Tatar singer. Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/id20156536

9th place: Elnara Kuchuk- Crimean Tatar singer. Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/id18370007

8th place: Leniya Alyustaeva- Crimean Tatar singer. Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/id131086365

7th place: Elmaz Kakura- Crimean Tatar singer. Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/id10712136

6th place: Dilara Mahmudova- Crimean Tatar singer. Dilyara was born on March 3, 1990 in Samarkand (Uzbekistan). In 1995 the family moved to the Crimea. The official website of the singer - http://dilyara.com.ua/, the page "In Contact" - http://vk.com/dilyaramakhmudova

5th place: Emilia Memetova(born December 22, 1987) - Crimean Tatar opera singer. Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/id23371550

4th place: Nazife Reizova(born August 3, 1989) - Crimean Tatar singer. Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/id51969662

3rd place: Elina Tzatskina(born February 13, 1994, Simferopol) - Miss Audience Choice at the contest "Crimean Beauty 2013". Page on the competition website - http://www.krasavica.crimea.ua/persons.php?person_id=39 Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/tsatskina13

2nd place: Elzara Zakiryaeva(born June 21, 1995) - finalist of the Crimean Beauty 2013 contest. Page on the competition site - http://www.krasavica.crimea.ua/persons.php?person_id=50 Page "VKontakte" - http://vk.com/id94716517

1st place: Elzara Batalova- Crimean Tatar singer, Honored Artist of Ukraine, Honored Artist of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

The question of where the Tatars came from in the Crimea, until recently, caused a lot of controversy. Some believed that the Crimean Tatars were the heirs of the Golden Horde nomads, others called them the original inhabitants of Taurida.

Invasion

On the margins of a Greek manuscript book of religious content (synaxarion) found in Sudak, the following note was made: “On this day (January 27) the Tatars first came, in 6731” (6731 from the Creation of the World corresponds to 1223 AD). Details of the Tatar raid can be read from the Arab writer Ibn al-Athir: “Having come to Sudak, the Tatars took possession of it, and the inhabitants dispersed, some of them with their families and their property climbed the mountains, and some went to the sea.”
The Flemish Franciscan monk Guillaume de Rubruck, who visited southern Taurica in 1253, left us eerie details of this invasion: devoured each other mutually, living dead, as a certain merchant who saw this told me; the living devoured and tore with their teeth the raw meat of the dead, like dogs - corpses.
The devastating invasion of the Golden Horde nomads, no doubt, radically updated ethnic composition the population of the peninsula. However, it is premature to assert that the Turks became the main ancestors of the modern Crimean Tatar ethnic group. Since ancient times, Taurica has been inhabited by dozens of tribes and peoples, who, thanks to the isolation of the peninsula, actively mixing, weaved a motley multinational pattern. It is not for nothing that Crimea is called the “concentrated Mediterranean”.

Crimean natives

The Crimean peninsula has never been empty. During wars, invasions, epidemics or great exoduses, its population did not completely disappear. Until the Tatar invasion, the lands of Crimea were inhabited by Greeks, Romans, Armenians, Goths, Sarmatians, Khazars, Pechenegs, Polovtsy, Genoese. One wave of migrants succeeded another, to varying degrees passing on a multi-ethnic code, which ultimately found expression in the genotype of modern "Crimeans".
From the VI century BC. e. to the 1st century AD e. Tauris were full owners of the southeastern coast of the Crimean peninsula. The Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria noted: "The Taurians live by robbery and war." Even earlier, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus described the custom of the Taurians, in which they "sacrifice the Virgin of shipwrecked sailors and all Hellenes who are captured on the high seas." How can one not remember here that after many centuries robbery and war will become constant companions of the "Crimeans" (as the Crimean Tatars were called in Russian Empire), and pagan sacrifices, according to the spirit of the times, will turn into slave trade.
In the 19th century, the researcher of the Crimea, Peter Keppen, suggested that “in the veins of all the inhabitants of the territories rich in dolmen finds” the blood of Taurians flows. His hypothesis was that "the Taurians, being heavily overpopulated by Tatars in the Middle Ages, remained to live in the old places, but under a different name and gradually switching to the Tatar language, borrowing the Muslim faith." At the same time, Koeppen drew attention to the fact that the Tatars of the South Bank are of the Greek type, while the mountain Tatars are close to the Indo-European type.
At the beginning of our era, the Taurians were assimilated by the Iranian-speaking tribes of the Scythians who subjugated almost the entire peninsula. Although the latter soon left the historical scene, they could well have left their genetic trace in the later Crimean ethnos. An unnamed author of the 16th century, who knew well the population of the Crimea of his time, reports: “Although we consider the Tatars to be barbarians and poor, they are proud of the abstinence of their life and the antiquity of their Scythian origin.”
Modern scientists admit the idea that the Taurians and Scythians were not completely destroyed by the Huns who invaded the Crimean Peninsula, but concentrated in the mountains, they had a noticeable influence on the later settlers.
Of the subsequent inhabitants of the Crimea, a special place is given to the Goths, who in the 3rd century, having passed a crushing rampart through the northwestern Crimea, remained there for many centuries. The Russian scientist Stanislav Sestrenevich-Bogush noted that at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the Goths living near Mangup still retained their genotype, and their Tatar language was similar to South German. The scientist added that "they are all Muslims and Tatarized."
Linguists note a number of Gothic words included in the fund of the Crimean Tatar language. They also confidently declare about the Gothic contribution, albeit relatively small, to the Crimean Tatar gene pool. “Gothia died out, but its inhabitants completely disappeared into the mass of the emerging Tatar nation,” noted Russian ethnographer Alexei Kharuzin.

Aliens from Asia

In 1233, the Golden Horde established their governorship in Sudak, liberated from the Seljuks. This year has become a universally recognized starting point in the ethnic history of the Crimean Tatars. In the second half of the 13th century, the Tatars became the owners of the Genoese trading post of Solkhata-Solkata (now Stary Krym) and in short term subjugated almost the entire peninsula. However, this did not prevent the Horde from intermarrying with the local, primarily the Italian-Greek population, and even adopting their language and culture.
The question of how modern Crimean Tatars can be considered the heirs of the Horde conquerors, and to what extent have autochthonous or other origin, is still relevant. Thus, the St. Petersburg historian Valery Vozgrin, as well as some representatives of the "Mejlis" (the parliament of the Crimean Tatars) are trying to approve the opinion that the Tatars are predominantly autochthonous in the Crimea, but most scientists do not agree with this.
Even in the Middle Ages, travelers and diplomats considered the Tatars "aliens from the depths of Asia." In particular, the Russian stolnik Andrey Lyzlov in his Scythian History (1692) wrote that the Tatars, who are “all countries near the Don, and the Meotian (Azov) Sea, and Taurica of Kherson (Crimea) around Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea) possessed and gray-haired "were newcomers.
During the rise of the national liberation movement in 1917, the Tatar press called for relying on “the state wisdom of the Mongol-Tatars, which runs like a red thread through their entire history”, and also to hold with honor “the emblem of the Tatars - the blue banner of Genghis” (“kok- bayrak" - the national flag of the Tatars living in the Crimea).
Speaking in 1993 in Simferopol at the “kurultai”, the eminent descendant of the Girey khans Jezar-Girey, who arrived from London, declared that “we are the sons of the Golden Horde”, emphasizing in every possible way the succession of the Tatars “from the Great Father, Lord Genghis Khan, through his grandson Batu and eldest son Juche.
However, such statements do not quite fit into the ethnic picture of Crimea, which was observed before the annexation of the peninsula to the Russian Empire in 1782. At that time, two subethnoi were quite clearly distinguished among the "Crimeans": narrow-eyed Tatars - a pronounced Mongoloid type of inhabitants of the steppe villages and mountain Tatars - characteristic of the Caucasoid body structure and facial features: tall, often fair-haired and blue-eyed people who spoke other than the steppe, language.

What does ethnography say

Before the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, ethnographers noticed that this people, albeit to varying degrees, bears the stamp of many genotypes that have ever lived on the territory of the Crimean peninsula. Scientists have identified three main ethnographic groups.
“Stepnyaks” (“Nogai”, “Nogai”) are the descendants of nomadic tribes that were part of the Golden Horde. Back in the 17th century, the Nogais plowed the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region from Moldova to the North Caucasus, but later, mostly forcibly, they were resettled by the Crimean khans in the steppe regions of the peninsula. A significant role in the ethnogenesis of the Nogai was played by the Western Kipchaks (Polovtsy). The racial identity of the Nogai is Caucasoid with an admixture of Mongoloidity.
The “South Coast Tatars” (“yalyboilu”), mostly from Asia Minor, were formed on the basis of several migration waves from Central Anatolia. The ethnogenesis of this group was largely provided by the Greeks, Goths, Asia Minor Turks and Circassians; in the inhabitants of the eastern part of the South Bank, Italian (Genoese) blood was traced. Although most of the Yalyboylu are Muslims, some of them for a long time preserved elements of Christian rites.
"Highlanders" ("Tats") - lived in the mountains and foothills middle lane Crimea (between the steppes and the South Coast). The ethnogenesis of the Tats is complex and not fully understood. According to the assumption of scientists, the majority of the peoples inhabiting the Crimea took part in the formation of this sub-ethnos.
All three Crimean Tatar sub-ethnic groups differed in their culture, economy, dialects, anthropology, but, nevertheless, they always felt themselves to be part of a single people.

Word to geneticists

More recently, scientists decided to clarify a difficult question: Where to look for the genetic roots of the Crimean Tatar people? The study of the gene pool of the Crimean Tatars was carried out under the auspices of the largest international project "Genographic".
One of the tasks of geneticists was to find evidence of the existence of an "extraterritorial" population group that could determine the common origin of the Crimean, Volga and Siberian Tatars. The research tool was the Y chromosome, convenient theme, which is transmitted only along one line - from father to son, and does not "mix" with genetic variants that came from other ancestors.
The genetic portraits of the three groups were not similar to each other, in other words, the search for common ancestors for all Tatars was not successful. Thus, the Volga Tatars are dominated by haplogroups common in Eastern Europe and the Urals, Siberian Tatars are characterized by "pan-Eurasian" haplogroups.
Analysis of the DNA of the Crimean Tatars shows a high proportion of the southern - "Mediterranean" haplogroups and only a small admixture (about 10%) of the "Mediterranean" lines. This means that the gene pool of the Crimean Tatars was primarily replenished by people from Asia Minor and the Balkans, and to a much lesser extent by nomads from the steppe zone of Eurasia.
At the same time, an uneven distribution of the main markers in the gene pools of different sub-ethnic groups of the Crimean Tatars was revealed: the maximum contribution of the "eastern" component was noted in the northernmost steppe group, and the "southern" genetic component dominates in the other two (mountainous and southern coastal ones). Curiously, scientists have not found any similarities between the gene pool of the peoples of the Crimea and their geographical neighbors - Russians and Ukrainians.

Crimean Tatars are an Eastern European Turkic people who historically formed on the territory of the Crimean peninsula. Belongs to the Turkic group of the Altaic language family.

The national flag of the Crimean Tatars is a banner blue color with a yellow emblem on the left upper corner. The first time this flag was adopted at the national congress of the Crimean Tatars in 1917, shortly after the Federal Revolution in Russia.

Crimean Tatar activists will gather on September 20 or 21, 2015 to completely close off the temporarily occupied peninsula. This was announced on September 14 by Refat Chubarov, MP from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction, chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people, during a meeting of the Parliamentary Conciliation Council.

The leadership of the Turkish Republic does not recognize and does not recognize the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia, and will do everything possible to protect the indigenous population of the peninsula - the Crimean Tatars, the press service of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people reports.

In a greeting to the participants of the II World Congress of Crimean Tatars, which takes place in (Turkey) on August 1-2, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also stated that the security of the Crimean Tatars in their homeland is a top priority for Turkey.