1.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
2.
Kazakhstan
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Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in northern Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Kazakhstan is the worlds largest landlocked country, and the ninth largest in the world, Kazakhstan is the dominant nation of Central Asia economically, generating 60% of the regions GDP, primarily through its oil/gas industry. It also has vast mineral resources, Kazakhstan is officially a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic with a diverse cultural heritage. Kazakhstan shares borders with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the terrain of Kazakhstan includes flatlands, steppe, taiga, rock canyons, hills, deltas, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Kazakhstan has an estimated 18 million people as of 2014, Given its large area, its population density is among the lowest. The capital is Astana, where it was moved in 1997 from Almaty, the territory of Kazakhstan has historically been inhabited by nomadic tribes. This changed in the 13th century, when Genghis Khan occupied the country as part of the Mongolian Empire, following internal struggles among the conquerors, power eventually reverted to the nomads. By the 16th century, the Kazakh emerged as a distinct group, the Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppe in the 18th century, and by the mid-19th century, they nominally ruled all of Kazakhstan as part of the Russian Empire. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganised several times, in 1936, it was made the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan has worked to develop its economy, especially its dominant hydrocarbon industry. Kazakhstans 131 ethnicities include Kazakhs, Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, the Kazakh language is the state language, and Russian has equal official status for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes. The name Kazakh comes from the ancient Turkic word qaz, to wander, the name Cossack is of the same origin. The Persian suffix -stan means land or place of, so Kazakhstan can be translated as land of the wanderers. Kazakhstan has been inhabited since the Neolithic Age, the regions climate, archaeologists believe that humans first domesticated the horse in the regions vast steppes. Central Asia was originally inhabited by the Scythians, the Cuman entered the steppes of modern-day Kazakhstan around the early 11th century, where they later joined with the Kipchak and established the vast Cuman-Kipchak confederation. Under the Mongol Empire, the largest in history, administrative districts were established. These eventually came under the rule of the emergent Kazakh Khanate, throughout this period, traditional nomadic life and a livestock-based economy continued to dominate the steppe. Nevertheless, the region was the focus of ever-increasing disputes between the native Kazakh emirs and the neighbouring Persian-speaking peoples to the south, at its height the Khanate would rule parts of Central Asia and control Cumania
3.
Tatar language
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The Tatar language is a Turkic language spoken by Volga Tatars mainly located in modern Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. It should not be confused with the Crimean Tatar language, to which it is remotely related, there are more than 7 million speakers of Tatar in the world. Tatar is also native for several thousand Maris, mordvas Qaratay group also speak a variant of Kazan Tatar. In the 2010 census, 69% of Russian Tatars who responded to the question about language ability claimed a knowledge of the Tatar language, in Tatarstan, 93% of Tatars and 3, 6% of Russians did so. In neighbouring Bashkortostan, 67% of Tatars, 27% of Bashkirs, Tatar, along with Russian, is the official language of the Republic of Tatarstan. The official script of Tatar language is based on the Cyrillic script with some additional letters, the Republic of Tatarstan passed a law in 1999, which came into force in 2001, establishing an official Tatar Latin alphabet. A Russian federal law overrode it in 2002, making Cyrillic the sole official script in Tatarstan since, unofficially, other scripts are used as well, mostly Latin and Arabic. All official sources in Tatarstan must use Cyrillic on their websites, in other cases, where Tatar has no official status, the use of a specific alphabet depends on the preference of the author. The Tatar language was made a de facto official language in Russia in 1917, Tatar is also considered to have been the official language in the short-lived Idel-Ural State, briefly formed during the Russian Civil War. One should note, however, that Bolshevist Russia did not recognize official languages as such, however, in the Soviet era, Tatar was such a language in Bashkortostan, Mari El and other regions of the Russian SFSR. The usage of Tatar declined from the 1930s onwards, in the 1980s, the study and teaching of Tatar in the public education system was limited to rural schools. However, Tatar-speaking pupils had little chance of entering university because higher education was available in Russian almost exclusively, as of 2001 Tatar was considered a potentially endangered language while Siberian and Crimean Tatar languages received endangered and seriously endangered statuses, respectively. Higher education in Tatar can only be found in Tatarstan, and is restricted to the humanities, in other regions Tatar is primarily a spoken language and the number of speakers as well as their proficiency tends to decrease. Tatar is popular as a language only in Tatar-speaking areas where schools with Tatar language lessons are situated. On the other hand, Tatar is the language in use in rural districts of Tatarstan. There are three dialects of Tatar, Western, Middle, and Eastern. All of these also have subdivisions. In the Western dialect Ç is pronounced and as, there are no differences between v and w, q and k, g and ğ in the Mişär dialect
4.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
5.
Russian Orthodox Church
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The Russian Orthodox Church, alternatively legally known as the Moscow Patriarchate, is one of the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches, in full communion with other Eastern Orthodox patriarchates. The Primate of the ROC is the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus and it also exercises ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the autonomous Church of Japan and the Orthodox Christians resident in the Peoples Republic of China. The ROC branches in Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova and Ukraine since the 1990s enjoy various degrees of self-government, in Ukraine, ROC has tensions with schismatic groups supported by the current government, while it enjoys the position of numerically dominant religious organisation. The ROC should also not be confused with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, headquartered in New York, New York, the two Churches reconciled on May 17,2007, the ROCOR is now a self-governing part of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to one of the legends, Andrew reached the location of Kiev. The spot where he erected a cross is now marked by St. Andrews Cathedral. By the end of the first millennium AD, eastern Slavic lands started to come under the influence of the Eastern Roman Empire. There is evidence that the first Christian bishop was sent to Novgorod from Constantinople either by Patriarch Photius or Patriarch Ignatios, by the mid-10th century, there was already a Christian community among Kievan nobility, under the leadership of Byzantine Greek priests, although paganism remained the dominant religion. Princess Olga of Kiev was the first ruler of Kievan Rus′ to convert to Christianity and her grandson, Vladimir of Kiev, made Rus officially a Christian state. The Kievan church was a metropolitanate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Ecumenical patriarch appointed the metropolitan, who usually was a Greek. The Metropolitans residence was located in Kiev itself, the capital of the medieval Rus state. Following the tribulations of the Mongol invasion, the Russian Church was pivotal in the survival, despite the politically motivated murders of Mikhail of Chernigov and Mikhail of Tver, the Mongols were generally tolerant and even granted tax exemption to the Church. Such holy figures as Sergius of Radonezh and Metropolitan Alexis helped the country to withstand years of Tatar oppression, the Trinity monastery founded by Sergius of Radonezh became the setting for the flourishing of spiritual art, exemplified by the work of Andrey Rublev, among others. The followers of Sergius founded four hundred monasteries, thus extending the geographical extent of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. However, the Moscow Prince Vasili II rejected the act of the Council of Florence brought to Moscow by Isidore in March 1441, Isidore was in the same year removed from his position as an apostate and expelled from Moscow. The Russian metropolitanate remained effectively vacant for the few years due largely to the dominance of Uniates in Constantinople then. In December 1448, Jonas, a Russian bishop, was installed by the Council of Russian bishops in Moscow as Metropolitan of Kiev and All Russia without the consent from Constantinople. Subsequently, there developed a theory in Moscow that saw Moscow as the Third Rome, the successor to Constantinople
6.
Volga Tatars
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The Volga Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group, native to the Volga-Ural region, Russia. They are in turn subdivided into various subgroups and they compose 53% of the population of Tatarstan. Volga Tatars are Russias second-largest ethnicity, Tatars inhabiting the Republic of Tatarstan, a federal subject of Russia, constitute one third of all Tatars, while the other two thirds reside outside Tatarstan. The formation of some of the communities residing outside Tatarstan took place before the Russian Revolution of 1917 due to Tatars being specialized in trading, the emergence of ethnonym Tatar is disputed, with two theses trying to explain its origins. Mongol thesis, according to which etymology can be traced back to the Chinese Ta-Tan or Da-Dan, is widely accepted than Turkic one. Ethnonym Tatar first emerged in the fifth century CE/AD, the 14th century saw the spread of Sunni Islam among the Tatars. Tatars became subjects of Russia after the Siege of Kazan in 1552, since Russians linked Tatars with the Mongol Golden Horde, they began to negatively stereotype the Tatar people. Up to the end of the 19th century, Volga Tatars mainly identified themselves as Muslims until the rehabilitation of the ethnonym Tatar occurred, Russian officials used literary Tatar language to interact with the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire before the end of the 19th century. Volga Tatar role in the Muslim national and cultural movements of the Russian Empire before the 1917 Revolution is significant, Tatar authorities attempted in the 1990s to reverse the Russification of Tatarstan that took place during the Soviet period. Bulgarism is a term for the position that the Volga Tatars are significantly descended from the Volga Bulgars. A more accepted position, however, is that the Volga Tatar ethnogenesis was completed upon the arrival of the Kipchaks, Cumans, the majority of Volga Tatars are Kazan Tatars. They form the bulk of the Tatar population of Tatarstan, traditionally, they inhabit the left bank of Volga river. Khazar invasions forced Bulgars, Turkic people, to migrate from the Azov steppes to the Middle Volga, in the period of 10th–13th centuries, Turkic peoples, including Kipchaks, migrated from southern Siberia to Europe. They played a significant role in the Mongol invasion of Rus in the 13th century, Tatar ethnogenesis took place after Turkic peoples, who were mixed with the Bulgars and other local inhabitants of the Volga River area, kept Kipchak dialect and became Muslims. Several new Tatar states had emerged by the 1500s after the Golden Horde fell and these states were Khanate of Kazan, Astrakhan Khanate, Khanate of Sibir and Crimean Khanate. Controversy surrounds the origin of the Tatar people, whether they are descended either from Bulgars or Golden Horde, mishars are an ethnographic group of Volga Tatars speaking Mishar dialect of the Tatar language. They comprise approximately one third of the Volga Tatar population and they are descendants of Cuman-Kipchak tribes who mixed with the Burtas in the Middle Oka River area and Meschiora. Nowadays, they live in Chelyabinsk, Ulyanovsk, Penza, Ryazan, Nizhegorodskaya oblasts of Russia and in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, the Qasím Tatars have their capital in the town of Qasím in Ryazan Oblast
7.
Bashkirs
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The Bashkirs are a Turkic people indigenous to Bashkortostan, extending on both sides of the Ural Mountains, in the area where Eastern Europe meets North Asia. Most Bashkirs speak the Bashkir language, which belongs to the Kypchak branch of the Turkic languages, in religion the Bashkirs are mainly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi madhhab. On the most popular and early hypothesis widespread in the Bashkir legends and according to the theory of 18th-century ethnographers V. N. Tatishchev, richkov, and Johann Gottlieb Georgi, the word Bashqort means main wolf, wolf leader. Also there are theories regarding the etymology of the name Bashqort. In 1847, historian V. S. Yumatov suggested the meaning as beekeeper, beemaster, in 1885, another Russian historian and ethnologist, A. E. Alektorov, suggested that Bashqort means distinct nation. Ethnologist R. G. Kuzeev defines the ethnonym as bash — main, head and qort — clan, according to Douglas Morton Dunlop the ethnonym Bashqort comes from beshgur, bashgur which means five tribes. Since SH in the modern language complies with L in Bulgar, the anthropologist and the ethnologist R. M. Other option of etymology of an ethnonym bashqort according to R. M. Yusupov is connected also with the Iranian phrase Bachagurd, and is translated as the descendant, in this case the bacha is translated just as the child, the descendant, and gurd — the hero. After an era of Huns the ethnonym could change to a current state as follows, the Bashkirs are also mentioned in Ashkharatsuyts. Starting in the 9th century, the first written information about Bashkirs appears from Arab, the first message of Arab written sources on Bashkirs belongs to the traveler Sallam an at-Tardzhuman. About 840 he visited the country the Bashkir and specified its approximate borders, abu Zayd al-Balkhi described Bashkirs as a people divided into two groups, one inhabiting the Southern Urals, the second group living on the Danube plain near the boundaries of Byzantium. The first ethnographic description the Bashkir is provided at Ahmad ibn Fadlan — the ambassador of the Baghdad Caliph Al-Muqtadir to the governor of Volga Bulgaria and he visited among the Bashkirs in 922. The Bashkirs, according to Ibn Fadlan, were a warlike and powerful and they were engaged in cattle breeding. Apparently, Islam had begun spreading among the Bashkirs as one of the members of the embassy was a Bashkir of the Muslim religion. According to the testimony of Ibn Fadlan, the Bashkirs are Turks, live on the slopes of the Urals. Their neighbours in the southeast were Pechenegs, in the west Bulgars, the first European sources to mention the Bashkirs are the works of Joannes de Plano Carpini and William of Rubruquis. By 1236, lands of Bashkortostan were incorporated into the empire of Genghis Khan, during the 13th and 14th centuries, all of Bashkortostan was part of the Golden Horde. The brother of Batu-Khan, Sheibani, received the Bashkir lands to the east of the Ural Mountains, after the breakup of the Mongol Empire, the Bashkirs were divided among the Nogai Horde, the Khanate of Kazan and the Khanate of Sibir, founded in the 15th century
8.
Chuvash people
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The Chuvash people are a Turkic ethnic group, native to an area stretching from the Volga Region to Siberia. Most of them live in Republic of Chuvashia and surrounding areas, the Tabghach An early medieval Xianbei clan and founders of the Northern Wei dynasty in China. The Old Turkic name Tabghach was used by some Inner Asian peoples to refer to China long after this dynasty, gerard Clauson has shown that through regular sound changes, the clan name Tabghach may have transformed to the ethnonym Chuvash. There are rival schools of thought on the origin of the Chuvash people, one is that they originated from a mixing between the Turkic Sabir tribes of Volga Bulgaria and also according to some researches with local Finno-Ugric populations. Another is that the Chuvash are a remainder of the pre-Volga Bulgar population of the Volga region and they are unusually susceptible to Osteopetrosis, with a prevalence of 1 of every 3, 500–4,000 newborns. The closest ancestors of the Chuvashes seem to be the Turkic Volga Bulgars and it cannot be absolutely proven that the Chuvashs are indeed direct descendants of the early Bulgars, but it is does seem very likely. Racially, the Chuvash seem to be a mixed Finnic and Turkic type, in the samples of the Chuvash DNA project haplogroups J2 and E are more common than the rest of the haplogroups among Chuvashes, followed by N and R1a. According to the data of Rootsi et al, Chuvash carriers of Haplogroup R1a belong to the Balto-Slavic Z282 subclade. A study sampling of unrealted 96 Chuvashes concluded, Earlier genetic research using autosomal DNA markers suggested a Finno-Ugric origin for the Chuvash and this study examines non-recombining DNA markers to better elucidate their origins. The majority of individuals in this sample exhibit haplogroups H, U, and K, all representative of western and northern Europeans, multidimensional scaling was used to examine distances between the Chuvash and 8 reference populations compiled from the literature. Mismatch analysis showed a unimodal distribution, along with neutrality tests, the mismatch distribution is suggestive of an expanding population. Their maternal markers appear to most closely resemble Finno-Ugric speakers rather than fellow Turkic speakers, later, the assertion H, U, and K are absent in Altaic or Mongolian populations turned into virtually absent in Altaic or Mongolian populations. MtDNA gene pool was found to be 89. 1% Caucasian,9. 1% Mongoloid, thus, present-day Chuvash who speak an Altaic-Turkic language are probably more closely related to ancient Mesopotamian-Hittites and northern European populations than to central Asia-Altaic people. Thus, the signal for Chuvashes is close to the supposed arrival time of Oghur speakers in the Volga region. The Chuvash have a central European and some Mediterranean genetic background, Chuvash and the fifth representing present day Bulgarians. From the data obtained in the present work, the backgrounds of both populations are clearly different. On the other hand, whether the Chuvash are a remnant of the Bulgar Hordes cannot be resolved with the data presented in this paper, and further studies are necessary. In the beginning of the first century AD, the Bulgars started moving west through Zhetysu, there they established several states (Old Bulgaria on the Black Sea coast and the Suar Duchy in modern-day Dagestan
9.
Tatarstan
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Tatarstan, officially the Republic of Tatarstan is a federal subject of the Russian Federation, located in the Volga Federal District. Its capital is the city of Kazan, the republic borders Kirov, Ulyanovsk, Samara, and Orenburg Oblasts, the Mari El, Udmurt, and Chuvash Republics, and the Republic of Bashkortostan. The area of the republic is 68,000 square kilometres, the unofficial Tatarstan motto is, Bez Buldırabız. As of the 2010 Census the population of Tatarstan was 3,786,488, the state has strong ties with its eastern neighbor the Republic of Bashkortostan. Tatarstan derives from the name of the ethnic group—the Tatars—and the Persian suffix -stan, another version of the Russian name is Тата́рия, which was official along with Tatar ASSR during the Soviet rule. The republic is located in the center of the East European Plain and it lies between the Volga River and the Kama River, and extends east to the Ural mountains. Borders, internal, Kirov Oblast, Udmurt Republic, Republic of Bashkortostan, Orenburg Oblast, Samara Oblast, Ulyanovsk Oblast, Chuvash Republic, bugulma-Belebey Upland Volga Upland Vyatskie Uvaly Major natural resources of Tatarstan include oil, natural gas, gypsum, and more. It is estimated that the Republic has over one billion tons of oil deposits, Islam was introduced by missionaries from Baghdad around the time of ibn Fadlans journey in 922. Volga Bulgaria finally fell to the armies of the Mongol prince Batu Khan in the late 1230s The inhabitants, mixing with the Golden Hordes Kipchak-speaking people, another theory postulates that there were no ethnic changes in that period, and Bulgars simply switched to the Kipchak-based Tatar language. In the 1430s, the region became independent as the base of the Khanate of Kazan. The Khanate of Kazan was conquered by the troops of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the 1550s, a large number of Tatars were killed and forcibly converted to Christianity and were culturally Russified. Cathedrals were built in Kazan, by 1593 all mosques in the area were destroyed, the Russian government forbade the construction of mosques, a prohibition that was not lifted until the 18th century by Catherine the Great. The first mosque to be rebuilt under Catherines auspices was constructed in 1766-1770, in the 19th century Tatarstan became a center of Jadidism, an Islamic movement that preached tolerance of other religions. Under the influence of local Jadidist theologians, the Tatars were renowned for their relations with other peoples of the Russian Empire. However, after the October Revolution religion was largely outlawed and all theologians were repressed, during the Civil War of 1918–1920 Tatar nationalists attempted to establish an independent republic. They were, however, put down by the Bolsheviks and the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was established on May 27,1920, the boundaries of the republic did not include a majority of the Volga Tatars. The Tatar Union of the Godless were persecuted in Stalins 1928 purges, there was a famine in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921 to 1922 as a result of war communist policy. The famine deaths of 2 million Tatars in Tatar ASSR and in Volga-Ural region in 1921-1922 was catastrophic as half of Volga Tatar population in USSR died and this famine is also known as terror-famine and famine-genocide in Tatarstan
10.
Udmurtia
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Udmurtia, or the Udmurt Republic, is a federal subject of Russia within the Volga Federal District. Its capital is the city of Izhevsk, on November 4,1920, Votsk Autonomous Oblast was formed. On January 1,1932, it was renamed Udmurt Autonomous Oblast, during World War II, many industrial factories were evacuated from Ukraine and western borderlands to Udmurtia. The republic is located in the portion of the Eastern European Plain. Major rivers include, Cheptsa River Izh River Kama River Kilmez River Siva River The republic has a continental climate, with warm summers. Average annual precipitation, 400–600 mm Population,1,521, 420 ,1,570, 316 ,1,609, although as of 2007 the population was declining, the decline was more pronounced in urban areas. Out of the 19,667 births reported in 2007,12,631 were in areas and 7,036 were in rural areas. Birth rates for rural areas are 25% higher than that of urban areas, of the total of 21,727 deaths,14,366 were reported in urban areas and 7,361 were in rural areas. Natural decline of population was measured at -0. 16% for urban areas, source TFR source According to the 2010 Census, Russians make up 62. 2% of the republics population, while the ethnic Udmurts only make up 28%. Other groups include Tatars, Ukrainians, Mari, and a host of smaller groups, over two thirds of the world population of Udmurts live in the republic. According to a 2012 official survey,33, in addition, 29% of the population declares to be spiritual but not religious, 19% is atheist, and 3. 9% follows other religions or did not give an answer to the question. The Ashkenazi Jews on the territory of the Udmurt Republic first appeared in the 1830s, one of the characteristic features of the Udmurt Idiom is a noticeable number of Udmurt and Tatar loan words. One of the oldest arms museums is located in Izhevsk, as well as the newer Kalashnikov Museum, Закона №62-РЗ от22 ноября2007 г. Изд-во «Известия Советов народных депутатов СССР»,1987, lost Cosmonaut, Observations of an Anti-tourist. The mass media and the question in Udmurtia in the 1990s. Media related to Udmurtia at Wikimedia Commons Official website of the Udmurt Republic
11.
Bashkortostan
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The Republic of Bashkortostan, also known as Bashkiria is a federal subject of Russia. It is located between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains and its capital is the city of Ufa. With the population of 4,072,292 as of the 2010 Census, Bashkurdistan, the first ethnic autonomy in Russia, was established on November 281917. On March 20,1919, it was transformed into the Bashkir ASSR, in accordance with the Constitution of Bashkortostan and Russian Federation Constitution, Bashkortostan is a state, but has no sovereignty. On 11 October 1990 Bashkortostan adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty,11 October is Republic Day in Bashkortostan. The name Bashkortostan derives from the name of the Bashkir ethnic group, while the root of the name is Turkic, the suffix -stan is Persian, common to many Eurasian country-names. They speak the Bashkir language, which belongs to the Kypchak branch of the Turkic languages, the first settlements in the territory of modern Bashkortostan date from the early Paleolithic period, but the Bronze Age spurred an upsurge in the population of this territory. When people of the Abashevo culture started settling here they possessed high skills in manufacturing bronze tools, weapons and they were the first to establish permanent settlements in the Southern Urals. Bashkortostan takes its name from its native people — the Bashkirs, the Russian name of the country — Bashkiriya — formed at the end of the 16th century. Originally it appeared in the forms Bashkir land, Bashkir’, Bashkirda, the ethnonym Bashkirs first became known in the 7th century. His contemporary Ibn-Ruste described the Bashkirs as an independent people, occupying territories on both sides of the Ural mountain ridge between Volga, Kama, Tobol and upstream of Yaik river. After the early-feudal Mongolian state had broken down in the 14th century, the tribes that lived there were headed by bi. After Kazan fell to Ivan the Terrible in 1554–1555, representatives of western and northwestern Bashkir tribes approached the Tsar with a request to voluntarily join Muscovy, starting from the second half of the 16th century, Bashkirias territory began taking shape as a part of the Russian state. Ufa Governorate, with a center in Ufa, was formed in 1865— another step towards territorial identification, after the Russian Revolution of 1917 are All-Bashkir Qoroltays on which a decision on the need to create a national federal republic within Russia. The congress was formed the government of Bashkurdistan, the Pre-parliament - Kese-Qoroltay and other bodies of power and administration, in March 1919, based on the agreements of the Russian Government with the Bashkir Government was formed Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. During the Soviet period, Bashkiria was granted broad autonomous rights— the first among other Russian regions, the administrative structure of the Bashkir ASSR was based on principles similar to those of other autonomous republics of Russia. On October 11,1990 the Supreme Soviet of the Republic adopted the Declaration on state sovereignty of the Bashkir ASSR, on February 25,1992, the Bashkir ASSR was renamed the Republic of Bashkortostan. Bashkortostan contains part of the southern Urals and the adjacent plains, many rivers are part of the deepwater transportation system of European Russia, they provide access to ports of the Baltic and Black seas
12.
Chelyabinsk Oblast
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Chelyabinsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia in the Ural Mountains region, on the border of Europe and Asia. Its administrative center is the city of Chelyabinsk, during the Middle Ages, the Southern Urals were populated by Bashkir tribes that were part of the Golden Horde, Nogai Horde, and smaller Bashkir unions. The area was incorporated into the Tsardom of Russia in the late 16th century, many cities of Chelyabinsk Oblast, including the city of Chelyabinsk itself, trace their history back to those forts. In 1743, the Chelyabinsk fortress became a center of the Iset Province, the 1750s-1770s saw the emergence of industrial enterprises in South Ural, when the first factory-centered towns like Miass, Kyshtym, and Zlatoust were founded. After South Ural recovered from the Pugachevs Rebellion, the territory of modern-day Chelyabinsk Oblast started to more people from the European part of Russia. In 1919, Chelyabinski became the capital of the newly formed Chelyabinsk Governorate. At this time, the population of the new region already exceeded one million people, in 1923, together with the Perm, Yekaterinburg and Tyumen governorates, it was merged into a single Ural Oblast that lasted less than ten years, until 1934. On January 17,1934, Chelyabinsk Oblast was finally established and its current boundaries were formed when Kurgan Oblast was detached from it in 1943. During the 1930s, the economy and industrial output grew as Chelyabinsk Oblast became a key focus of the first Five-Year Plans. The economy continued to grow with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, as industries were evacuated from the parts of the Soviet Union to Ural. During the war, Magnitogorsk alone produced one third of all Soviet steel, while the city of Chelyabinsk became the center of Soviet tank production. Chelyabinsk Oblast has been associated with nuclear research since the 1940s. While there are no power stations in Chelyabinsk, a number of production reactors were located there starting with the early Cold War. The province was closed to all foreigners until 1992, with the exception of allowing a British medical team following a two-train rail explosion in the mid-1980s. The documentary Chelyabinsk, The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet was made by Slawomir Grunberg about the dumping of radioactive waste in the Techa River. Chelyabinsk Oblast is on the slope of the Southern Urals. Only a small part of the territory to the west is on the slopes of the Southern Urals. Chelyabinsk Oblast is situated in the Southern Urals, near Kurgan, Most of the Oblast is located to the east of the Ural Mountains, which form the continental boundary between Europe and Asia
13.
Russian Census (2010)
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The Russian Census of 2010 is the first census of the Russian Federation population since 2002 and the second after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Preparations for the census began in 2007 and it took place between October 14 and October 25, the census was originally scheduled for October 2010, but was moved to 2013 allegedly for financial reasons, although it was also speculated that political motives were influential in the decision. However, in late 2009 Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that the Government of Russia allocated 10.5 billion rubles in order to conduct the census as originally scheduled, Results showed the population to stand at 142.9 million. Since the previous 2002 census, population has decreased by 2.3 million, according to the 2010 census, urban population is 105.3 million, rural population is 37.5 million. The urbanisation rate is currently 73. 7%, the median age is 38 years. The ethnic composition is dominated by Russians, demographics of Russia Russian Census 2010 final results Results of 2010 All-Russia population census Official website of the 2010 Census
14.
Kipchaks
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The Kipchak were a Turkic nomadic people. The Cuman-Kipchak confederation was a predecessor of the Kazakh Khanate and, later, the Kipchaks described their name as meaning hollow tree, as it was, according to them, inside a hollow tree that their original human ancestress gave birth to her son. They are called Polovtsy in Russian and Ukrainian and similar names in other Slavic languages, the Kipchaks were a tribal confederation that originally settled on the River Irtysh, possibly connected to the Kimäks. According to Ukrainian anthropologists, Kipchaks had racial characteristics of Caucasians and Mongoloids, namely a broad flat face, researcher E. P. Alekseeva drew attention to the fact that European Kipchak stone images have both Mongoloid and Caucasoid faces. However, in her opinion, Kipchaks, who settled in Georgia in the first half of the 12th century, were predominantly Caucasoid in appearance with some admixture of Mongoloid traits and they were already joined by Cumans. In the course of the Turkic expansion they migrated into Siberia, eventually they occupied a vast territory in the Eurasian steppe, stretching from north of the Aral Sea westward to the region north of the Black Sea, establishing a state known as Desht-i Qipchaq. Cumans expanded further westward, by the 11th century reaching Moldavia, Wallachia, in 1089, they were defeated by Ladislaus I of Hungary, and again by Knyaz Vladimir Monomakh of the Rus in the 12th century. They were finally crushed by the Mongols in 1241, after the fall of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde rulers continued to hold Saraj until 1502. The Cumans fled to Hungary, and some of their warriors became mercenaries for the Latin crusaders, members of the Bahri dynasty, the first dynasty of Mamluks in Egypt, were Kipchaks/Cumans, one of the most prominent examples was Sultan Baybars, born in Solhat, Crimea. Some Kipchaks served in the Yuan dynasty and became the Kharchins, the Kipchaks and Cumans spoke a Turkic language whose most important surviving record is the Codex Cumanicus, a late 13th-century dictionary of words in Kipchak, Cuman, and Latin. The presence in Egypt of Turkic-speaking Mamluks also stimulated the compilation of Kipchak/Cuman-Arabic dictionaries, some Kipchaks and Cumans are also known to have converted to Christianity, around the 11th century, at the suggestion of the Georgians as they allied in their conflicts against the Muslims. A great number were baptized at the request of the Georgian king David IV, from 1120, there was a Kipchak national Christian church and an important clergy. Following the Mongol conquest, Islam rose in popularity among the Kipchaks of the Golden Horde, during the 16th and 17th centuries the Turkic language among the Armenian communities of the Kipchak people was Armeno-Kipchak. They were settled in the Lviv and Kamianets-Podilskyi areas of what is now Ukraine, the modern Northwestern branch of the Turkic language is often referred to as the Kipchak branch. The languages in this branch are considered to be descendants of the Kipchak language. Some of the traditionally included are the Karachays, Siberian Tatars, Nogays, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Volga Tatars. There is also a village named Kipchak in Crimea, kypshak is one of the constituent tribes of the Middle Horde confederation of the Kazakh people. The name Kipchak also occurs as a surname in Kazakhstan, some of the descendants of the Kipchaks are the Bashkirian clan Qipsaq
15.
Wayback Machine
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The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in October 2001. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet, the service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a three dimensional index. Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been archiving cached pages of websites onto its large cluster of Linux nodes and it revisits sites every few weeks or months and archives a new version. Sites can also be captured on the fly by visitors who enter the sites URL into a search box, the intent is to capture and archive content that otherwise would be lost whenever a site is changed or closed down. The overall vision of the machines creators is to archive the entire Internet, the name Wayback Machine was chosen as a reference to the WABAC machine, a time-traveling device used by the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, an animated cartoon. These crawlers also respect the robots exclusion standard for websites whose owners opt for them not to appear in search results or be cached, to overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It. Information had been kept on digital tape for five years, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers, when the archive reached its fifth anniversary, it was unveiled and opened to the public in a ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley. Snapshots usually become more than six months after they are archived or, in some cases, even later. The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all tracked website updates are recorded, Sometimes there are intervals of several weeks or years between snapshots. After August 2008 sites had to be listed on the Open Directory in order to be included. As of 2009, the Wayback Machine contained approximately three petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes each month, the growth rate reported in 2003 was 12 terabytes/month, the data is stored on PetaBox rack systems manufactured by Capricorn Technologies. In 2009, the Internet Archive migrated its customized storage architecture to Sun Open Storage, in 2011 a new, improved version of the Wayback Machine, with an updated interface and fresher index of archived content, was made available for public testing. The index driving the classic Wayback Machine only has a bit of material past 2008. In January 2013, the company announced a ground-breaking milestone of 240 billion URLs, in October 2013, the company announced the Save a Page feature which allows any Internet user to archive the contents of a URL. This became a threat of abuse by the service for hosting malicious binaries, as of December 2014, the Wayback Machine contained almost nine petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of about 20 terabytes each week. Between October 2013 and March 2015 the websites global Alexa rank changed from 162 to 208, in a 2009 case, Netbula, LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc. defendant Chordiant filed a motion to compel Netbula to disable the robots. Netbula objected to the motion on the ground that defendants were asking to alter Netbulas website, in an October 2004 case, Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite, No.02 C3293,65 Fed. 673, a litigant attempted to use the Wayback Machine archives as a source of admissible evidence, Telewizja Polska is the provider of TVP Polonia and EchoStar operates the Dish Network
16.
Turkic peoples
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The Turkic peoples are a collection of ethnic groups that live in central, eastern, northern, and western Asia as well as parts of eastern Europe. They speak languages belonging to the Turkic language family and they share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds. The first known mention of the term Turk applied to a Turkic group was in reference to the Göktürks in the 6th century, a letter by Ishbara Qaghan to Emperor Wen of Sui in 585 described him as the Great Turk Khan. The Orhun inscriptions use the terms Turk and Turuk and this includes Chinese records Spring and Autumn Annals referring to a neighbouring people as Beidi. During the first century CE, Pomponius Mela refers to the Turcae in the north of the Sea of Azov. There are references to certain groups in antiquity whose names could be the form of Türk/Türük such as Togarma, Turukha/Turuška, Turukku. But the information gap is so substantial that we cannot firmly connect these ancient people to the modern Turks, turkologist András Róna-Tas posits that the term Turk could be rooted in the East Iranian Saka language or in Turkic. This etymological concept is related to Old Turkic word stems tür, türi-, törü. The earliest Turkic-speaking peoples identifiable in Chinese sources are the Dingling, Gekun, the Chinese Book of Zhou presents an etymology of the name Turk as derived from helmet, explaining that taken this name refers to the shape of the Altai Mountains. During the Middle Ages, various Turkic peoples of the Eurasian steppe were subsumed under the identity of the Scythians, between 400 CE and the 16th century, Byzantine sources use the name Σκύθαι in reference to twelve different Turkic peoples. However, the usage of the term is based on the linguistic classification in order to avoid any political sense. In short, the term Türki can be used for Türk or vice versa and it is generally agreed that the first Turkic people lived in a region extending from Central Asia to Siberia, with the majority of them living in China historically. Historically they were established after the 6th century BCE, the earliest separate Turkic peoples appeared on the peripheries of the late Xiongnu confederation about 200 BCE. Turkic people may be related to the Xiongnu, Dingling and Tiele people, according to the Book of Wei, the Tiele people were the remnants of the Chidi, the red Di people competing with the Jin in the Spring and Autumn period. Turkic tribes such as the Khazars and Pechenegs probably lived as nomads for many years before establishing the Turkic Khaganate or Göktürk Empire in the 6th century and these were herdsmen and nobles who were searching for new pastures and wealth. The first mention of Turks was in a Chinese text that mentioned trade between Turk tribes and the Sogdians along the Silk Road, the first recorded use of Turk as a political name appears as a 6th-century reference to the word pronounced in Modern Chinese as Tujue. The Ashina clan migrated from Li-jien to the Juan Juan seeking inclusion in their confederacy, the tribe were famed metalsmiths and were granted land near a mountain quarry which looked like a helmet, from which they were said to have gotten their name 突厥. A century later their power had increased such that they conquered the Juan Juan, Turkic peoples originally used their own alphabets, like Orkhon and Yenisey runiforms, and later the Uyghur alphabet
17.
Altai people
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The Altay or Altai are a Turkic people living in the Siberian Altai Republic and Altai Krai. For alternative ethnonyms see also Teleut, Tele, Telengit, Mountain Kalmuck, White Kalmuck, Black Tatar, the Altaians are represented as a totality of small Turkic peoples like the Altai-Kizhi, the Teleut, the Kumandin, the Chelkans, the Shors, etc. Turkic people The Altaians were annexed by the Four Oirat of Western Mongols in the 16th century, the Mongols called them Telengid or Telengid aimag in period of the Northern Yuan dynasty. After the fall of the Zunghar Khanate in the 18th century and that court referred to them as Altan Nuur Uriyangkhai. But Altaians are not genetically related to the Uriyangkhai, which is a distinct neighbouring Oirat-Mongol ethnic group in Mongolia and their skills in metalworking have been seen in artifacts dating to the 2nd millennium BC. The Altay came into contact with Russians in the 18th century, in the tsarist period, the Altay were known as oirot or oyrot. The Altay report that many of them became addicted to the Russians vodka, the Altay were originally nomadic, with a lifestyle based on hunting / trapping and pastoralism. As a result of the Soviet Union and Russian influence, many were settled into sedentary communities, in regard to religion, some of the Altay remain Tengriists or Shamanists, while others have converted to the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1904, a movement called Ak Jang or Burkhanism arose. Prior to 1917 the Altai were considered to be made up of different ethnic groups. With the rise of the 1917 revolution, the Altay attempted to make their region a separate Burkhanist republic called Oyrot and their support for the Mensheviks during the Civil War led to the ventures collapse after the Bolshevik victory and the later rise of Joseph Stalin. In the 1940s, during World War II and when he was directing numerous purges, the word oyrot was declared to be counterrevolutionary. In the early 21st century, ethnic Altaians make up about 31% of the Altai Republics population, according to the 2010 Russian census, there was a total of 69,963 Altaians who resided within the Altai Republic. This represented 34. 5% of the population of the republic, compared with 56. 6% ethnic Russians
18.
Afshar people
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The Afshar, also spelled Awshar or Afşar, are one of the Oghuz Turkic peoples. These originally nomadic Oghuz tribes moved from Central Asia and initially settled in what is now Iranian Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan Republic, later some of them relocated by the Safavids to Khurasan, Kerman and Mazandaran. Today, they are grouped as a branch of the Azerbaijanis. Afshars in Iran remain a largely nomadic group, with tribes in central Anatolia, northern Iran and they were the source of the Afsharid, Karamanid dynasties, Baku Khanate, Zanjan Khanate and Urmia Khanate. Nader Shah, who became Shah of Iran in 1736, was from the Qerekhlu tribe of Afshar, Afshars in Turkey mostly live in Sarız, Tomarza and Pınarbaşı districts of Kayseri province, as well as in several villages in Adana, Kahramanmaraş and Gaziantep provinces. Most of Afshars in Turkey are descendants of those who migrated from Iran after the fall of Nader Shah, a resistance against Ottomans under spiritual leadership of the bard Dadaloğlu and local Afshar lord Kozanoğlu was proven futile. Afshar language Afsharid dynasty Javanshir clan Iranian Turks Afshar rugs AFŠĀR, P. Oberling, Encyclopædia Iranica, AFŠĀR, one of the twenty-four original Ḡuz Turkic tribes
19.
Azerbaijanis
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Azerbaijanis or Azeris, also known as Azerbaijani Turks, are a Turkic ethnic group in the Caucasus living mainly in Iranian Azerbaijan and the independent Republic of Azerbaijan. They are the second-most numerous ethnic group among the Turkic peoples after Anatolian Turks and they are predominantly Shii Muslims, and have a mixed cultural heritage, including Turkic, Iranian, and Caucasian elements. They comprise the largest ethnic group in Republic of Azerbaijan and by far the second-largest ethnic group in neighboring Iran, the worlds largest number of ethnic Azerbaijanis live in Iran, followed by Azerbaijan. The formation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918 established the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan, despite living on two sides of an international border, the Azeris form a single ethnic group. However, northerners and southerners due to nearly two centuries of separate social evolution of Iranian Azerbaijanis and Azerbaijanis in Russian/Soviet-influenced Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is believed to be named after Atropates, a Persian satrap who ruled in Atropatene circa 321 B. C. The name Atropates is the Hellenistic form of Aturpat which means guardian of fire, itself a compound of ātūr fire + -pat suffix for -guardian, -lord, present-day name Azerbaijan is the Arabicized form of Azarbaigān. The latter is derived from Ādurbādagān, itself ultimately from Āturpātakān meaning the land associated with Aturpat, the Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, written in the 1890s, also referred to Tatars in Azerbaijan as Aderbeijans, but noted that the term had not been adopted widely. In Azerbaijani language publications, the expression Azerbaijani nation referring to those who were known as Tatars of the Caucasus first appeared in the newspaper Kashkul in 1880, Ancient residents of the area spoke the Old Azeri, which belonged to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. In the 11th century AD with Seljukid conquests, Oghuz Turkic tribes started moving across the Iranian plateau into the Caucasus, the influx of the Oghuz and other Turkmen tribes was further accentuated by the Mongol invasion. Today, this Turkic-speaking population is known as Azerbaijani, caucasian-speaking Albanian tribes are believed to be the earliest inhabitants of the region where the modern-day Republic of Azerbaijan is located. Early Iranian settlements included the Scythians in the ninth century BC, following the Scythians, the Medes came to dominate the area to the south of the Aras River. Ancient Iranian people of the Medes forged a vast empire between 900 and 700 BC, which the Achaemenids integrated into their own empire around 550 BC, during this period, Zoroastrianism spread in the Caucasus and in Atropatene. Alexander the Great defeated the Achaemenids in 330 BC, but allowed the Median satrap Atropates to remain in power, following the decline of the Seleucids in Persia in 247 BC, an Armenian Kingdom exercised control over parts of Caucasian Albania. Caucasian Albanians established a kingdom in the first century BC and largely remained independent until the Persian Sassanids made their kingdom a vassal state in 252 AD, sassanid control ended with their defeat by Muslim Arabs in 642 AD, through the Muslim conquest of Persia. Muslim Arabs defeated the Sassanids and Byzantines as they marched into the Caucasus region, the Arabs made Caucasian Albania a vassal state after the Christian resistance, led by Prince Javanshir, surrendered in 667. Between the ninth and tenth centuries, Arab authors began to refer to the region between the Kura and Aras rivers as Arran, during this time, Arabs from Basra and Kufa came to Azerbaijan and seized lands that indigenous peoples had abandoned, the Arabs became a land-owning elite. Conversion to Islam was slow as local resistance persisted for centuries and resentment grew as small groups of Arabs began migrating to cities such as Tabriz and this influx sparked a major rebellion in Iranian Azerbaijan from 816–837, led by a local Zoroastrian commoner named Bābak
20.
Balkars
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The Balkars are a Turkic people of the Caucasus region, one of the titular populations of Kabardino-Balkaria. Their Karachay-Balkar language is of the Ponto-Caspian subgroup of the Northwestern group of Turkic languages, the modern Balkars identify as a Turkic people, who share their language with the Karachays from Karachay-Cherkessia and Kumyks from Dagestan. The ethnogenesis of the Balkars resulted, in part, from an invasion of Alania during the 11th century, by Kipchak Turks, during the 14th century, Alania was destroyed by Timur. Many of the Alans, Cumans, and Kipchaks migrated westward into Europe, timurs incursion into the North Caucasus introduced the remainder to Islam. In the 19th century, Russia annexed the area during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, on October 20,1828 the Battle of Khasauka took place, in which the Russian troops were under the command of General Georgy Emanuel. In 1944, the Soviet government forcibly deported almost the entire Balkar population to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, starting on 8 March 1944 and finishing the following day, the NKVD loaded 37,713 Balkars onto 14 train echelons bound for Central Asia and Siberia. The Stalin regime placed the exiled Balkars under special settlement restrictions identical to those that it had imposed upon the deported Russian-Germans, Kalmyks, Karachais, Chechens, by October 1946 the Balkar population had been reduced to 32,817 due to deaths from malnutrition and disease. The Balkars remained confined by the special settlement restrictions until 28 April 1956, only in 1957, however, could they return to their mountainous homeland in the Caucasus. During 1957 and 1958,34,749 Balkars returned home In the Cyrillic alphabet as used by the Balkars there are eight vowels, in the past the official written languages were Arabic for religious services and Turkish for business matters. From 1920 on Balkar has been the language of instruction in primary schools, until 1928 Arabic letters were used to write the Balkar language, after 1937 Cyrillic was used. Ninety-six percent of the population is bilingual in Balkar and Russian, organs of mass culture, secondary school texts, newspapers, and magazines in both Balkar and Russian continue to increase in number. Children are more likely to be taught in Russian, an example of a Balkar author is Kaisyn Kuliev who is emphasising the love towards the Balkarya land and Balkar traditions
21.
Bulgars
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The Bulgars were semi-nomadic warrior Turkic tribes who flourished in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and the Volga region during the 7th century. Emerging as nomadic equestrians in the Volga-Ural region, according to some researchers their roots can be traced to Central Asia, during their westward migration across the Eurasian steppe the Bulgars absorbed other ethnic groups and cultural influences, including Hunnic, Iranian and Indo-European people. Modern genetic research on Central Asian Turkic people and ethnic groups related to the Bulgars points to an affiliation with western Eurasian and European populations, the Bulgars spoke a Turkic language, i. e. Bulgar language of Oghuric branch. They preserved military titles, organization and customs of Eurasian steppes, as well as pagan shamanism, the Bulgars became semi-sedentary during the 7th century in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, establishing the polity of Old Great Bulgaria c. 635, which was absorbed by the Khazar Empire in 668 AD,679, Khan Asparukh conquered Scythia Minor, opening access to Moesia, and established the First Bulgarian Empire. In the Balkans, the Bulgars became a political and military elite, and merged with previous populations, such as the Thracians and Vlachs, and were Slavicized, thus forming modern Bulgarians. The remaining Pontic Bulgars migrated in the 7th century to the Volga River, the Volga Tatars and Chuvash people claim to be originated from the Volga Bulgars. The etymology of the ethnonym Bulgar is not completely understood and difficult to trace back earlier than the 4th century AD. Since the work of Wilhelm Tomaschek, it is said to be derived from the Common Turkic bulğha, bulga- or bulya. Other scholars have added that bulğha might also imply stir, disturb, confuse. Peter A. Boodberg noted that the Buluoji in the Chinese sources were recorded as remnants of the Xiongnu confederation, and had strong Caucasian elements. Another theory linking the Bulgars to a Turkic people of Inner Asia has been put forward by Boris Simeonov, who identified them with the Pugu, a Tiele and/or Toquz Oguz tribe. The Pugu were mentioned in Chinese sources from 103 BC up to the 8th century AD, the names Onoğur and Bulgar were linked by later Byzantine sources for reasons that are unclear. Karatay interpreted gur/gor as country, and noted the Tekin derivation of gur from the Altaic suffix -gir, generally, modern scholars consider the terms oğuz or oğur, as generic terms for Turkic tribal confederations, to be derived from Turkic *og/uq, meaning kinship or being akin to. The terms initially were not the same, as oq/ogsiz meant arrow, while oğul meant offspring, child, son, oğuš/uğuš was tribe, clan, and the verb oğša-/oqša meant to be like, resemble. There also appears to be an association between the Bulgars and the preceding Kutrigur and Utigur – as Oğur tribes, with the ethnonym Bulgar as a spreading adjective. Golden considered the origin of the Kutrigurs and Utigurs to be obscure and he noted, however, an implication that the Kutrigurs and Utigurs were related to the Šarağur, and that according to Procopius these were Hunnish tribal unions, of partly Cimmerian descent. Karatay considered the Kutrigurs and Utigurs to be two related, ancestral people, and prominent tribes in the later Bulgar union, but different from the Bulgars, among many other theories regarding the etymology of Bulgar, the following have also had limited support. An Eastern Germanic root meaning combative, according to D, the origin of the early Bulgars is still unclear
22.
Crimean Karaites
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Karaim is a Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Polish name for the community. Turkic-speaking Karaites have lived in Crimea for centuries and their origin is a matter of great controversy. Some regard them as descendants of Karaite Jews who settled in Crimea, others view them as descendants of Khazar or Cuman, Kipchak converts to Karaite Judaism. Today many Karaim deny ethnic Semitic origins and identify as descendants of the Khazars, the tradition of Karaite Judaism ranks only the Tanakh as a holy book and does not recognize the Talmud, and Khazars disappeared in the 11th century. But, the first written mention of the Crimean Karaites was in the 14th century, some modern Karaim resist being identified as Jews, emphasizing their Turkic heritage and claiming they are Turkic practitioners of a Mosaic religion separate and distinct from Judaism. From the time of the Golden Horde onward, Karaites were present in towns and villages throughout Crimea. During the period of the Crimean Khanate, they had major communities in the towns of Çufut Qale, Sudak, Kefe, According to most opinions, the upper stratum of the Khazar society converted to Judaism in the 8th–9th centuries CE. The extent of conversion and its scope is not known. An archeological relic of this Khazar settlement was discovered in Transylvania in the 20th century, known as the Alsószentmihály Rovas inscription, it was transcribed by the archaeologist-historian Gábor Vékony. According to the transcription, the inscription means the following. Jüedi Kür Karaite. or Jüedi Kür the Karaite, scholars take this as evidence that at least a part of the Khazars were Karaites. According to Karaite tradition, Grand Duke Vytautas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania relocated one branch of the Crimean Karaites to Lithuania, there they continued to speak their own language. But the Lithuanian dialect of the Karaim language differs significantly from the Crimean one, the Lithuanian Karaites settled primarily in Vilnius and Trakai, as well as in Biržai, Pasvalys, Naujamiestis and Upytė – smaller settlements throughout Lithuania proper. The Lithuanian Karaites also settled in lands of modern Belarus and Ukraine, the Karaite communities emerged in Halicz and Kokizow in Galicia, as well as in Łuck and Derazhne in Volhynia. Jews in Lithuanian territory were granted a measure of autonomy under Michel Ezofovich Seniors management, the Trakai Karaim refused to comply, citing differences in faith. Later all Jews, including Karaites, were submitted to Rabbinite Council of Four Lands, the Yiddish-speaking Rabbinites considered the Turkic-speaking Karaites to be apostates, and kept them in a subordinate and depressed position. In 1646 the Karaites gained expulsion of the Rabbinites from Trakai, despite such tensions, in 1680 Rabbinite community leaders defended the Karaites of Shaty against blood accusation. Representatives of both groups signed an agreement in 1714 to respect the privileges and resolve disputes without involving the Gentile administration
23.
Crimean Tatars
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Crimean Tatars constituted the majority of Crimeas population from the time of its ethnogenesis until mid-19th century, and the relative largest ethnic population until the end of 19th century. Starting in 1967, some were allowed to return to Crimea, today, Crimean Tatars constitute approximately 12% of the population of Crimea. There remains a large diaspora of Crimean Tatars in Turkey and Uzbekistan, in the latest Ukrainian census,248,200 Ukrainian citizens identified themselves as Crimean Tatars with 98% of them living in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. An additional 1,800 citizens live in the city of Sevastopol, also on the Crimean peninsula, about 150,000 remain in exile in Central Asia, mainly in Uzbekistan. The official number of Crimean Tatars in Turkey is 150,000 with some Crimean Tatar activists estimating a figure as high as 6 million. The activists reached this number by taking one million Tatar immigrants to Turkey as a starting point, Crimean Tatars in Turkey mostly live in Eskişehir Province, descendants of those who emigrated in the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Dobruja region straddling Romania and Bulgaria, there are more than 27,000 Crimean Tatars,24,000 on the Romanian side, and 3,000 on the Bulgarian side. However, the Cuman language is considered the ancestor of the current language of the Crimean Tatars with possible incorporations of the other languages like Crimean Gothic. Another theory suggests Crimean Tatars trace their origins to the waves of ancient people Scythians, Greeks, Goths, Italians and Armenians. Goths, Gypsies, and Greeks were assumed to be some of the ancestors of the Tatars on the coast of Crimea, while there were mixed hill Tatars, Italians and Greeks mixed with the coastal Crimean Tatars. The Crimean Tatars emerged as a nation at the time of the Crimean Khanate, the Turkic-speaking population of the Crimea had mostly adopted Islam already in the 14th century, following the conversion of Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde. Until the beginning of the 18th century, Crimean Tatars were known for frequent, at some periods almost annual, devastating raids into Ukraine and Russia. For a long time, until the late 18th century, the Crimean Khanate maintained a massive trade with the Ottoman Empire. One of the most important trading ports and slave markets was Kefe, slaves and freedmen formed approximately 75% of the Crimean population. Some researchers estimate that altogether up to 3 million people were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate, the Don Cossacks and Kalmyk Mongols also managed to raid Crimean Tatars land. The last recorded major Crimean raid, before those in the Russo-Turkish War took place during the reign of Peter the Great, however, Cossack raids continued after that time, Ottoman Grand Vizier complained to the Russian consul about raids to Crimea and Özi in 1761. In 1769 one last major Tatar raid, which took place during the Russo-Turkish War, after a period of political unrest in Crimea, Russia violated the treaty and annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783. After the annexation, the wealthier Tatars, who had exported wheat, meat, fish and wine to other parts of the Black Sea, began to be expelled, further expulsions followed in 1812 for fear of the reliability of the Tatars in the face of Napoleons advance
24.
Cumans
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The Cumans were a Turkic nomadic people comprising the western branch of the Cuman-Kipchak confederation. After the Mongol invasion, many sought asylum in Hungary, as many Cumans had settled in Hungary, Bulgaria, the Cumans were fierce and formidable nomadic warriors of the Eurasian steppe who exerted an enduring impact on the medieval Balkans. They were numerous, culturally sophisticated and militarily powerful, the Cumans also had a pre-eminent role in the Fourth Crusade and in the creation of the Second Bulgarian Empire. Cuman and Kipchak tribes joined politically to create the Cuman-Kipchak confederation, the Cuman language is attested in some medieval documents and is the best-known of the early Turkic languages. The Codex Cumanicus was a manual that was written to help Catholic missionaries communicate with the Cuman people. The basic instrument of Cuman political success was military force, which dominated each of the warring Balkan factions. It is also unclear whether a particular name refers to the Cumans alone. However, in Turkic languages qu, qun, qūn, quman or qoman means pale, sallow, cream coloured, pale yellow, in East Slavic languages and Polish, they are known as the Polovtsy, derived from the Slavic root *polvъ pale, light yellow, blonde. Polovtsy or Polovec is often said to be derived from the Old East Slavic polovŭ yellow, the old Ukrainian word polovtsy, derived from polovo straw – means blond, pale yellow. The western Cumans, or Polovtsy, were also called Sorochinetses by the Rus, a similar etymology may have been at work in the name of the Sary people, who also migrated westward ahead of the Qun. An alternative etymology of Polovtsy is also possible, the Slavic root *pȍlje field, in Germanic languages, the Cumans were called Folban, Vallani or Valwe – all derivations of old Germanic words for pale. In the German account by Adam of Bremen, and in Matthaios of Edessa, the Hungarian term for the Cumans is Kun, which in Old Hungarian meant nomad, but was later applied solely to the Cumans. This confederation and their living together may have made it difficult for historians to write exclusively about either nation, the latter seven clans eventually settled in Hungary. The ethnic origins of the Cumanians are uncertain, Robert Wolff states that it is conjectured that ethnically the Cumans may not originally have been Turkic. The Greek philosopher Strabo refers to the Darial Gorge as Porta Caucasica, the writings of al Marwazi state that the Qun people came from the northern Chinese borders – the land of Qitay. After leaving the lands of the Khitans, they entered the territory of the Shari/Sari people, Marwazi wrote that the Qun were Nestorian Christians. It cannot be established whether the Cumans conquered the Kipchaks or whether they represent the western mass of largely Kipchak-Turkic speaking tribes. A victim of the Cuman migration to the west was the Kimek Khanate, due to this, Kimek tribal elements were represented amongst the Cuman-Kipchaks
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Dolgans
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Dolgans are a Turkic people, who mostly inhabit Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. The 2010 Census counted 7,885 Dolgans and this number includes 5,517 in former Taymyr Autonomous Okrug. There are 26 Dolgans in Ukraine, four of whom speak Dolgan, some believe that it is a dialect of Yakut language. Originally, the Dolgans were nomadic hunters and reindeer herders, in 1983, the anthropologist Shirin Akiner claimed, Dolgans enjoy full Soviet citizenship. They are found in all occupations, though the majority are peasants and their standard of housing is comparable to that of other national groups in the Soviet Union. Most Dolgans practice old shamanistic beliefs, however, some are influenced with Orthodox Christianity, ogdo Yegorovna Aksenov - poet, founder of Dolgan literature Dolgan language
26.
Gagauz people
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The Gagauz people are a Turkic-speaking group living mostly in southern Moldova, southwestern Ukraine, northeastern Bulgaria, Greece, Brazil, the United States and Canada. There is an ethnic group also called Gagavuz living in the European part of northwestern Turkey. The Gagauzes, although speaking a Turkic language, belong genetically to the Balkan populations, Gagauz belong to Y-DNA haplogroups I2a, R1a, G, R1b, E1b1b1a1. Haplogroups J2 and Haplogroup N are represented among Gagauzes at a frequency for many European and Balkan peoples. There are nearly 20,000 descendants of Gagauzians living in the Balkan country of Bulgaria, as well as upwards of 3,000 living in the United States of America, Brazil, the Encyclopedia of World Cultures lists the ethnonym of the Gagauz as Turkish speaking Bulgars. The Gagauz themselves did not use this self-designation, indeed, they considered it offensive, both Pees and Jireček mention that the Gagauz in Bulgaria tended to register either as Greek because of their religion or as Bulgarian because of the newly emerging concept of nationalism. According to Pees informants from Moldova, the Gagauz there called themselves Hıristiyan-Bulgar, the etymology of the ethnonym Gagauz is as unclear as their history. As noted above, they are not mentioned—at least not under that name—in any historical sources before their immigration into Bessarabia, therefore, we have no older versions of this ethnonym. This, combined with the report that the Gagauz felt offended when called by this name, the Gagauz language belongs to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages, which also includes the Azerbaijani, Turkish, and Turkmen languages. The Gagauz language is close to the Balkan Turkish dialects spoken in Greece, northeastern Bulgaria. The modern Gagauz language has two dialects, central and southern, the vast majority of Gagauz are Orthodox Christians. The traditional economy centered on animal husbandry and agriculture that combined grain, the staple food is grain, in many varieties. A series of holidays and rituals was connected with the baking of wheat bread. The favorite dish was a layered pie stuffed with sheeps milk cheese, other delicacies were pies with crumbled pumpkin and sweet pies made with the first milk of a cow that had just calved. Peppered meat sauces are especially important, one combines onion and finely granulated porridge, a red house wine is served with dinner and supper. Head cheese is a component of holiday meals. Toward the end of the 19th century, in weather, a Gagauz womans costume consisted of a canvas shirt, a sleeveless dress, a smock. In winter, they donned a dress with sleeves, a jacket
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Iraqi Turkmens
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The Iraqi Turkmens, Iraqi Turks, or Turks of Iraq are a Turkic ethnic group who mostly adhere to a Turkish heritage and identity. They form the third largest ethnic group in Iraq, after Arabs, Iraqi Turkmen mainly reside in northern Iraq and share close cultural ties with Turkey, particularly the Anatolian region. The term Turkmen seems to be a political terminology because it was first used by the British to isolate the Iraqi Turks from Turkey during the Mosul Question during the 1930s. The Iraqi Turkmens are the descendants of various waves of Turkic migration to Mesopotamia beginning from the 7th century until Ottoman rule. With the conquest of Iraq by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1534, followed by Sultan Murad IVs capture of Baghdad in 1638, a large influx of Turks settled down in the region. Most of todays Iraqi Turkmen are the descendants of the Ottoman soldiers, traders, following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Iraqi Turkmen wanted Turkey to annex the Mosul Vilayet and for them to become part of an expanded Turkish state. Although they were recognized as an entity of Iraq in the constitution of 1925. Claims of their population have ranged between 500,000 and 3 million, Iraqi Turkmens are considered to be the third largest ethnic group in Iraq. According to data from the Iraqi Ministry of Planning there was 3 million Iraqi Turkmen living in the country in 2013, the Iraqi Turkmens predominantly live in the north of Iraq, especially in Tal Afar, Mosul, Arbil, Altunkupri, Kirkuk, and Baghdad. Turkmen primarily inhabit a region stretching from northwestern Iraq to the Iraq–Iran border on the southeast, which is rich in resources. The presence of Turkic peoples in what is today Iraq first began in the 7th century when approximately 2 and they arrived in 674 with the Umayyud conquest of Basra. More Turkic troops settled during the 8th century, from Bukhara to Basra, however, it was the wider migration of the Oghuz Turks towards Anatolia which took place at the end of the ninth century that established a substantial Iraqi Turkmen presence. Successive waves of immigration continued under the rule of the Seljuk Turks who assumed positions of military, the second wave of Turkmen to descend on Iraq were the Turks of the Great Seljuq Empire. Large scale migration of the Turkmen in Iraq occurred in 1055 with the invasion of Sultan Tuğrul Bey, the ruler of the Seljuk dynasty. The third wave, and largest, arose during the Ottoman Empire, by the first half of the sixteenth century the Ottomans had begun their expansion into Iraq, waging wars against their arch rival, the Persian Safavids. The Ottomans encouraged migration from Anatolia and the settlement of immigrant Turkmen along northern Iraq, with loyal Turkmen inhabiting the area, the Ottomans were able to maintain a safe route through to the southern provinces of Mesopotamia. Once the new governor was appointed, the town was to be composed of 1,000 foot soldiers, however, war broke out after 89 years of peace and the city was besieged and finally conquered by Abbas the Great in 1624. The Persians ruled the city until 1638 when a massive Ottoman force, led by Sultan Murad IV, in 1639, the Treaty of Zuhab was signed that gave the Ottomans control over Iraq and ended the military conflict between the two empires
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Karachays
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The Karachays are a Turkic people of the North Caucasus, mostly situated in the Russian Karachay–Cherkess Republic. The Karachays are a Turkic people descended from the Kipchaks, in Turkic, Karachay means Black River. The Kipchaks came to the Caucasus in the 11th century CE, in the 14th century, Alania was destroyed by Timur and the decimated population dispersed into the mountains. Timurs incursion into the North Caucasus introduced the nations to Islam. In the nineteenth century Russia took over the area during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, on October 20,1828 the Battle of Khasauka took place, in which the Russian troops were under the command of General Georgy Emanuel. After the annexation, the self-government of Karachay was left intact, including its officials, interactions with neighboring Muslim peoples continued to take place based on both folk customs and Sharia law. In Karachay, soldiers were taken from Karachai Amanat, pledged an oath of loyalty, from 1831 to 1860, the Karachays joined the anti-Russian struggles carried out by the Caucasian peoples. Between 1861 and 1880, to escape reprisals by the Russian army and this relationship with Nazi Germany resulted, when the Russians regained control of the region in November 1943, with the Karachays being charged with collaboration with Nazi Germany and deported. The majority of the population of about 80,000 were forcibly deported and resettled in Central Asia, mostly in Kazakhstan. In the first two years of the deportations, disease and famine caused the death of 35% of the population, of 28,000 children, 78%, many Karachays migrated to Turkey after the Russian annexation of the Karachay nation in the early 19th century. Karachays were also forcibly displaced to the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, since the Nikita Khrushchev era in the Soviet Union, many Karachays have been repatriated to their homeland from Central Asia. Today, there are sizable Karachay communities in Turkey, Uzbekistan, the United States, the Karachays are very proud of the symbol of their nation, Mount Elbrus, the highest twin-peaked mountain in Europe with an altitude 5,642 meters. Karachay people live in communities that are divided into families and clans, a tukum is based on a familys lineage and there are roughly thirty-two Karachay tukums. Prominent tukums include, Aci, Batcha, Baychora, Bayrimuk, Bostan, Catto, Cosar, Duda, Hubey, Karabash, Laypan, Lepshoq, Ozden, Silpagar, Tebu, Teke, and Toturkul. Karachay people are very independent, and have strong traditions and customs which dominate many aspects of their lives, e. g. weddings, funerals and they are fiercely loyal to both their immediate family and their tukum. They will never offend a guest, cowardice is the most serious shame for a male. The Karachay dialect of the Karachay-Balkar language comes from the branch of Turkic languages. The Kumyks, who live in northeast Dagestan, speak a related language
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Karakalpaks
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The Karakalpaks or Qaraqalpaqs are a Turkic people who primarily live in Uzbekistan. During the 18th century, they settled in the reaches of the Amu Darya. The name Karakalpak comes from two words, qara meaning black, and qalpaq meaning hat, the Karakalpaks number nearly 620,000 worldwide, out of which about 500,000 live in the Uzbek Republic of Karakalpakstan. The Karakalpak population is confined to the central part of Karakalpakstan that is irrigated by the Amu Darya. The largest communities live in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, and the large towns, such as Khodzheli, Shimbay, Takhtaitash. Rural Karakalpaks mainly live on former collective or state farms, most of which have been recently privatised, although their homeland bears their name, the Karakalpaks are not the largest ethnic group living in Karakalpakstan. They are increasingly being outnumbered by Uzbeks, many of whom are being encouraged to move into the agricultural region around Turtkul. The Karakalpak language belongs to the Kipchak-Nogai group of Turkic languages, spoken Karakalpak has two dialects, Northeastern and Southwestern. Before the Soviet Union, Karakalpak was rarely written, but when it was it used a form of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Due to the geography and history of the Karakalpak people, Karakalpak has been influenced by Uzbek, Tajik, a Karakalpak-Uzbek pidgin language is often spoken by those bilingual in both languages. The word Karakalpak is derived from the Russian Cyrillic spelling of their name and has become the name for these people in the West. The Karakalpaks actually refer to themselves as Qaraqalpaqs, whilst the Uzbeks call them Qoraqalpogs, the word means black hat and has caused much confusion in the past, since historians linked them with other earlier peoples, who have borne the appellation black hat in Slavic vernacular. Many accounts continue to link the present day Karakalpaks with the Slavic Cherniye Klobuki of the 11th century, Cherniye Klobuki were mercenary military troops of the Kievan Rus. Apart from the fact that their names have the same meaning, the Qaraqul hat is made from the fur of the Qaraqul breed of sheep which originated in Central Asia with archaeological evidence pointing to the breed being raised there continuously since 1400 BCE. The breed is named after Qorako‘l which is a city in Bukhara Province in Uzbekistan and this would explain why their language, customs and material culture are so similar to that of the Kazakhs. Karakalpaks are primarily followers of the Hanafi School of Sunni Islam and it is probable they adopted Islam between the 10th and 13th centuries, a period when they first appeared as a distinct ethnic group. Dervish orders such as the Naqshbandi, Kubrawiya, Yasawi and Qalandari are fairly common in this region, the religious order that established the strongest relation with the people of the region is the Kubrawiya, which has Shii adherents. Although there were 553 mosques in the year of 1914, there are not so many mosques left today, the mosques that are present are located in Nukus, Törtkül, Hocaeli and Çimbay
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Karluks
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The Karluks were a prominent nomadic Turkic tribal confederacy residing in the regions of Kara-Irtysh and the Tarbagatai Mountains west of the Altay Mountains in Central Asia. They were also known as the Gelolu and they were closely related to the Uyghurs. Karluks gave their name to the distinct Karluk group of the Turkic languages, which includes the Uyghur, Uzbek. The most ancient reference to the etymology of the Karluk name is recorded in the Chinese dynastic history Old Book of Tang, Kar means snow, as in the name of the Kar Sea. N. Aristov noted the river Kerlyk, a tributary of the Charysh River, the reverse is equally possible, the toponyms were named after an ethnonym of the native people. Another version cites the homonym of the Karluk valley in Altai, the derivation of Karluk from Kara is considered to be philologically impossible, and incompatible with the well-documented Arabic form of the ethnonym Halluh. The first Chinese reference to the Karluks labels them with a Manichaean attribute, the lion Karluks persisted up to the time of the Mongols. In the Early Middle Age, organized as the Uch-Karluks union, composed of Karluks, Chigils, in 630, the Aru-Kagan of the Eastern Turkic Kaganate was captured by the Chinese. His heir apparent, the lesser Khan Khubo, escaped to Altai with a part of the people and 30,000 soldiers. He conquered the Karluks in the west, the Kyrgyz in the north, the Karluks allied with the Tiele and their leaders the Uyghurs against the Turkic Kaganate, and participated in enthroning the victorious head of the Uyghur. After that, a part of the Karluks joined the Uyghurs and settled in the Bogdo-Ola mountains in Mongolia. In 650, at the time of their submission to the Chinese, on paper, the Karluk divisions received Chinese names as Chinese provinces, and their leaders received Chinese state titles. Later, the Karluks spread from the valley of the river Kerlyk along the Irtysh River in the part of the Altay to beyond the Black Irtysh, Tarbagatai. By the year 665 The Karluk union was led by a former Uch-Karluk bey with the title Kül-Erkin, now titled Yabgu, the Karluk vanguard left the Altay region and at the beginning of the 8th century reached the banks of the Amu Darya. Famed for their carpets in the pre-Muslim era, they were considered a vassal state by the Tang Dynasty after the final conquest of the Transoxania regions by the Chinese in 739. The Karluk rose in rebellion against the Göktürk, then the dominant tribal confederation in the region, in about 745, and established a new tribal confederation with the Uygur and Basmyl tribes. They remained in the Chinese sphere of influence and a participant in fighting the Muslim expansion into the area. Chinese intervention in the affairs of Western Turkestan ceased after their defeat at the Battle of Talas in 751 by the Arab general Ziyad ibn Salih, the Arabs dislodged the Karluks from Fergana
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Kazakhs
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The Kazakhs are a Turkic people who mainly inhabit the southern part of Eastern Europe Ural mountains and northern parts of Central Asia, the region also known as Eurasian sub-continent. Kazakhs were one of the nations most severely affected by the Soviet famine of 1932–33, the Kazakhs probably began using this name during either the 15th or 16th centuries. There are many theories on the origin of the word Kazakh or Qazaq, some speculate that it comes from the Turkish verb qaz, because the Kazakhs were wandering steppemen, or that it derives from the Proto-Turkic word khasaq. Another theory on the origin of the word Kazakh is that it comes from the ancient Turkic word qazğaq, according to the notable Turkic linguist Vasily Radlov and the orientalist Veniamin Yudin, the noun qazğaq derives from the same root as the verb qazğan. Therefore, qazğaq defines a type of person who seeks profit, Kazakh was a common term throughout medieval Central Asia, generally with regard to individuals or groups who had taken or achieved independence from a figure of authority. Timur described his own youth without directory authority as his Qazaqliq, at the time of the Uzbek nomads Conquest of Central Asia, the Uzbek Abul-Khayr Khan had differences with the Chinggisid chiefs Giray/Kirey and Janibeg/Janibek, descendants of Urus Khan. These differences probably resulted from the defeat of Abul-Khayr Khan at the hands of the Qalmaqs. It is not explicitly explained that this is why the later Kazakhs took the name permanently, the group under Kirey and Janibek are called in various sources Qazaqs and Uzbek-Qazaqs. Later Russian language sources incorrectly termed them Kirghiz and Kirghiz-Kaisak, in the 17th century, Russian convention seeking to distinguish the Qazaqs of the steppes from the Cossacks of the Russian Imperial military transforms the ending of the word to kh instead of q or k. Kazakh – Казах Cossack – Казак The Russian term Cossack probably comes from the same Kypchak etymological root, wanderer, brigand, due to their nomadic pastoral lifestyle, Kazakhs kept an epic tradition of oral history. The nation, which amalgamated nomadic tribes of various Kazakh origins and it was important for a Kazakh to know his or her genealogical tree for no less than seven generations back. In modern Kazakhstan, tribalism is fading away in business and government life, still it is common for a Kazakh man or woman to ask another one which tribe he or she belongs to when getting acquainted with each other. Nowadays, it is more of a tradition than necessity, there is no hostility between tribes. Kazakhs, regardless of their origin, consider themselves one nation. Their age is unknown so far in extant historical texts, with the earliest mentions in the 17th century, Kazakh belongs to the Kipchak group of the Turkic language family. Kazakh, like most of the Turkic language family lacks phonemic vowel length, Kazakh was written with the Arabic script during the 19th century, when a number of poets, educated in Islamic schools, incited revolt against Russia. Russias response was to set up schools and devise a way of writing Kazakh with the Cyrillic alphabet. By 1917, the Arabic script was reintroduced, even in schools, in 1927, a Kazakh nationalist movement sprang up but was soon suppressed
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Khakas people
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The Khakas, or Khakass, are a Turkic people, who live in Russia, in the republic of Khakassia in southern Siberia. The origin of the Khakas people is disputed, some scholars see them as descendants of the Yenisei Kirghiz, while others believe that, at the behest of the medieval Mongol Khans, the Yenisei Kirghiz migrated to Central Asia. The Yenisei Kirghiz were made to pay tribute in a treaty concluded between the Dzungars and Russians in 1635, the Dzungar Oirat Kalmyks coerced the Yenisei Kirghiz into submission. Sibe Bannermen were stationed in Dzungaria while Northeastern China was where some of the remaining Öelet Oirats were deported to, the Nonni basin was where Oirat Öelet deportees were settled. The Yenisei Kirghiz were deported along with the Öelet, chinese and Oirat replaced Oirat and Kirghiz during Manchukuo as the dual languages of the Nonni-based Yenisei Kirghiz. In the 17th century, the Khakas formed Khakassia in the middle of the lands of Yenisei Kirghiz, the Russians arrived shortly after the Kirghiz left, and an inflow of Russian agragian settlers began. In the 1820s, gold mines started to be developed around Minusinsk, the names Khongorai and Khoorai were applied to the Khakas before they became known as the Khakas. The Russian use of the name Tatar to call all its Turkic peoples during the Tsarist era is what led to the modern Khakas people refer to themselves as Tadar, Khoorai has also been in use to refer to them. Now the Khakas call themselves Tadar and do not use Khakas to call themselves in their own language and they are also called Abaka Tatars. During the 19th century, many Khakas accepted the Russian ways of life, Shamanism with Buddhist influences, however, is still common, and many Christians practice Shamanism with Christianity. In Imperial Russia, the Khakas used to be known under other names, used mostly in contexts, Minusinsk Tatars, Abakan Tatars. During the Revolution of 1905, a movement towards autonomy developed, when Soviets came to power in 1923, the Khakas National District was established, and various ethnic groups were artificially combined into one—the Khakas. The National District was reorganized into Khakas Autonomous Oblast, a part of Krasnoyarsk Krai, the Republic of Khakassia in its present form was established in 1992. The Khakas people account for only about 12% of the population of the republic. The Khakas people traditionally practiced nomadic herding, agriculture, hunting, the Beltir people specialized in handicraft as well. Herding sheep and cattle is still common, although the republic became more industrialized over time
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Khalaj people
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The Khalaj people are a Turkic people that speak the Khalaj language, which is thought to be one of the closest languages to Old Turkic. According to Mahmud al-Kashgari, they were mentioned at Divânu Lügatit-Türk, oguzs and Kipchaks translate x to k. They are a group of Xalacs and they say xızım, whereas Turks say kızım. And again other Turks say kande erdinğ, whereas they say xanda erdinğ, according to Zemarcos Syriac chronicle, Khalajes would be remnants of Hephthalites, were separate Turkic people. He was ambassador of Byzantine Empire to Western Gokturk Khanate in 568, according to Al Khwarizmi, was Samanid officer, they were considered as descendants of Hepthtalithes along with Kanjina Turks. Ibn Khordadbeh mentioned Khalajes lived beyond Syr Darya of the Talas region in his book Kitāb al-Masālik w’al- Mamālik with Karluks, but the information comes into contradictions that make it unreliable. The similarity between Khalaj and Karluk is difficult to determine the truth and they ruled Zabulistan as vassals of Tahirids with title of Zunbil. They were subjugated by Yaqub-i Laith Saffari, was founder of Saffarids in 879, according to Saffarid sources they were inhabitants of Zabulistan, this meant they lived in present Afghanistan and among Ghazni and Zamindawar. Later, they were ruled by Samanids and Ghaznavids. In 1040, they revolted against Masud I of Ghazni, was sultan of Ghaznavids and he sent a punitive expedition but he was defeated and later dethroned and executed by Mohammad Ghaznavi. During the Ghaznavid and Ghurid rules, some of Khalaj gradually become Ghilzai tribe of Afghan, Ghurid Ghiyath al-Din Mahmud came to power at Firuzkuh with support of them. Later they were subjected by Khwarezmshahs in the 1210s, during the Mongol invasion of 1221, many Khalajes joined the Mongols but others continued to Sayf al-Din Ighrak, who formed an ephemeral independent state in the valley of Kabul. An Uzbek tribe identified by the Russians in the 19th century with the name of Galachi, other groups are indicated in Kerman and Fars as well as in Azerbaijan and Anatolia. Khalajes give their name to Halaç District at Lebap Province of Turkmenistan and their inhabitants are Ersari tribe of Turkmens, who originated from Seljuk Turks. The origin of the Khalaj is an obscure subject and still remain controversial. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, The origin of the Khalaj is controversial, Arab geographers mentioned them already in the 9th and 10th centuries, and the Khalaj were listed among the Turkic people of the steppes of Central Asia. It is difficult to identify whether the Khalaj mentioned in accounts are identical with the present people of the same name. Sometimes they were considered as descendants of the Hephthalites, or as those of turkisized Iranians
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Khazars
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The Khazars were a semi-nomadic Turkic people, who created what for its duration was the most powerful polity to emerge from the break-up of the Western Turkic Kaganate. For some three centuries the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea, the alliance was dropped around 900. Between 965 and 969, the Kievan Rus ruler Sviatoslav I of Kiev conquered the capital Atil, the native religion of the Khazars is thought to have been Tengrism, like that of the North Caucasian Huns and other Turkic peoples. The polyethnic populace of the Khazar Khaganate appears to have been a multiconfessional mosaic of pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and this theory still finds occasional support, but most scholars view it with scepticism. The theory is associated with antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Gyula Németh, following Zoltán Gombocz, derived Xazar from a hypothetical *Qasar reflecting a Turkic root qaz- being an hypothetical velar variant of Common Turkic kez-, louis Bazin derived it from Turkic qas- on the basis of its phonetic similarity to the Uyğur tribal name, Qasar. András Róna-Tas connects it with Kesar, the Pahlavi transcription of the Roman title Caesar, D. M. Dunlop tried to link the Chinese term for Khazars to one of the tribal names of the Uyğur Toquz Oğuz, namely the Gésà. One method for tracing their origins consists in analysis of the possible etymologies behind the ethnonym Khazar itself. The tribes that were to comprise the Khazar empire were not a union, but a congeries of steppe nomads and peoples who came to be subordinated. They appear to stem from Mongolia and South Siberia in the aftermath of the fall of the Hunnic/Xiōngnú nomadic polities, moving west, the confederation reached the land of the Akatziroi, who had been important allies of Byzantium in fighting off Attilas army. An embryonic state of Khazaria began to form sometime after 630, Göktürk armies had penetrated the Volga by 549, ejecting the Avars, who were then forced to flee to the sanctuary of the Hungarian plain. The Āshǐnà clan whose tribal name was Türk appear on the scene by 552, by 568, these Göktürks were probing for an alliance with Byzantium to attack Persia. Both briefly challenged Tang hegemony in eastern Turkestan, to the West, two new nomadic states arose in the meantime, Old Great Bulgaria under Kubrat, the Duōlù clan leader, and the Nǔshībì subconfederation, also consisting of five tribes. The Duōlù challenged the Avars in the Kuban River-Sea of Azov area while the Khazar Qağanate consolidated further westwards, led apparently by an Āshǐnà dynasty. The Qağanate of the Khazars thus took out of the ruins of this nomadic empire as it broke up under pressure from the Tang dynasty armies to the east sometime between 630–650. According to Omeljan Pritsak, the language of the Onoğur-Bulğar federation was to become the lingua franca of Khazaria as it developed into what Lev Gumilev called a steppe Atlantis, Khazaria developed a Dual kingship governance structure, typical among Turkic nomads, consisting of a shad/bäk and a qağan. The emergence of this system may be deeply entwined with the conversion to Judaism, particularly elaborate rituals accompanied a royal burial. At one period, travellers had to dismount, bow before the rulers tomb, such a royal burial ground is typical of inner Asian peoples
35.
Khorasani Turks
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Imarli, Bukanli, Cuyanli, Pehlivanli, Boranli and Kilicanli Lives mainly in Bojnord. Timurtash and Nardin Lives in Gorgan city center, afshar Lives in most areas of Greater Khorasan. Khorasani Turkic language Qarai Turks فصلنامه تحقیقات جغرافیایی، سال سوم شماره ۲، پاییز ۱۳۷۶، دکتر محمد حسین پاپلی یزدی The Khorasani Turks of Iran Turks of Iran kalafat_horasan
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Krymchaks
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The Krymchaks are Jewish ethno-religious communities of Crimea derived from Turkic-speaking adherents of Orthodox Judaism. They have historically lived in proximity to the Crimean Karaites, also Turkic. Before this their self-designation was Срель балалары - literally Children of Israel, the Crimean Tatars referred to them as zuluflı çufutlar to distinguish them from the Karaites, who were called zulufsız çufutlar. The Krymchaks speak a form of the Crimean Tatar language. It is the Jewish patois, or ethnolect of Crimean Tatar, Krimchak is not a distinct language, but only one constituent of Crimean Tatar. The Krimchaks adhered to their Turkic patois up to World War II, now they are making efforts to revive their language. Many of the characteristics of the Krimchak language could be find in the Crimean Tatar language. In addition, it contains numerous Hebrew and Aramaic loan-words and was written in Hebrew characters. Krymchaks are probably descended from Jewish refugees who settled along the Black Sea in ancient times. Jewish communities existed in many of the Greek colonies in the region during the classic period. Recently excavated inscriptions in Crimea have revealed a Jewish presence at least as early as the 1st century BCE, in some Crimean towns, monotheistic pagan cults called sebomenoi theon hypsiston existed. These quasi-proselytes kept the Jewish commandments but remained uncircumcised and retained certain pagan customs, eventually, these sects disappeared as their members adopted either Christianity or normative Judaism. Another version is that after suppression of Bar Kokhbas revolt by the emperor Hadrian, the late classical era saw great upheaval in the region as Crimea was occupied by Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars, and other peoples. Jewish merchants such as the Radhanites began to develop extensive contacts in the Pontic region during this period, Khazar dominance of Crimea during the Early Middle Ages is considered to have at least a partial impact on Krymchak demographics. In the late 7th century most of Crimea fell to the Khazars, the extent to which the Krymchaks influenced the ultimate conversion of the Khazars and the development of Khazar Judaism is unknown. It is known that Kipchak converts to Judaism existed, and it is possible that from these converts the Krymchaks adopted their distinctive language. The Mongol conquerors of the Pontic–Caspian steppe were promoters of religious freedom, the Jewish community was divided among those who prayed according to the Sephardi, Ashkenazi and Romaniote rites. In 1515 the different traditions were united into a distinctive Krymchak prayer book, which represented the Romaniote rite by Rabbi Moshe Ha-Golah, a Chief Rabbi of Kiev, who had settled in Crimea
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Kumyks
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Kumyks are a Turkic people living in the Kumyk plateau in north Dagestan and south Terek, and the lands bordering the Caspian Sea. They comprise 14% of the population of the Russian republic of Dagestan, during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries CE the Kumyks had an independent kingdom, based at Tarki, and ruled by a leader called a Shamkhal. The Russians built forts in their territory in 1559 and under Peter I, the upper terraces of the Kumyk plateau, which the Kumyks occupy are very fertile. In recent years Kumyk nationalists such as Salau Aliev have agitated for Kumyk dominance within Daghestan and this article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh, ed. article name needed. Kumyks at Regnal Chronologies Kumyks site Holy Scriptures in Kumyk Kumyks News Agency Kumyks video and music
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Kyrgyz people
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The Kyrgyz people are a Turkic ethnic group native to Central Asia, primarily Kyrgyzstan. There are several theories on the origin of ethnonym Kyrgyz and it is often said to be derived from the Turkic word kyrk, with -iz being an old plural suffix, so Kyrgyz literally means a collection of forty tribes. A rival myth, recorded in 1370 in the Yuán Shǐ, the original root of the ethnonym appears to have been the word kirkün, probably meaning field people. This and the Chinese transcription Tse-gu suggest that the ethnonym was Kirkut and/or Kirkur. By the time of the Mongol Empire, the meaning of the word kirkun had apparently been forgotten – as was shown by variations in readings of it across different reductions of the Yuán Shǐ and this may have led to the adoption of Kyrgyz and its mythical explanation. When distinction had to be made, more specific terms were used, the Kyrgyz proper were known as the Kara-Kirghiz, and the Kazakhs were named the Kaisaks. or Kirghiz-Kazaks. They were described in Tang Dynasty texts as having red hair and green eyes, while those with dark hair, in Chinese sources, these Kyrgyz tribes were described as fair-skinned, green- or blue-eyed and red-haired people with a mixture of European and Mongol features. According to recent historical findings, Kyrgyz history dates back to 201 BC, the Yenisei Kyrgyz lived in the upper Yenisey River valley, central Siberia. In Late Antiquity the Yenisei Kyrgyz were a part of the Tiele people, later, in the Early Middle Ages, the Yenisei Kyrgyz were a part of the confederations of the Göktürk and Uyghur Khaganates. In 840 a revolt led by the Yenisei Kyrgyz brought down the Uyghur Khaganate, by the 16th century the carriers of the ethnonym Kirgiz lived in South Siberia, Xinjiang, Tian Shan, Pamir-Alay, Middle Asia, Urals, in Kazakhstan. Though it is impossible to directly identify the Yenisei and Tien Shan Kyrgyz. Also, there follow from the oldest notes about the Kyrgyz that the mention of Kyrgyz ethnonym originates from the 6th century. The Kyrgyz as ethnic group are mentioned quite unambiguously in the time of Genghis Khan rule, the genetic makeup of the Kyrgyz is consistent with their origin as a mix of tribes. For instance, 63% of modern Kyrgyz men of Jumgal District share Haplogroup R1a1 with Ishkashimis, Tajiks of Panjikent, Pashtuns, low diversity of Kyrgyz R1a1 indicates a founder effect within the historical period. Other groups of Kyrgyz show considerably lower haplogroup R frequencies and almost lack haplogroup N, west Eurasian mtDNA ranges from 27% to 42. 6% in the Kyrgyz with Haplogroup mtDNA H being the most predominant marker at 21. 3% among the Kyrgyz. They are considered to be a people that were created by a combination of Mongol, Khitan and they generally have an East Asian appearance like their neighbours the Kazakhs, in contrast to the mostly Caucasoid Tajiks and the mixed-looking Uzbeks. The Kyrgyz state reached its greatest extent after defeating the Uyghur Khaganate in 840 AD, the Kirghiz qaghan assisted the Tang dynasty in destroying the Uyghur Khaganate and rescuing the Princess Taihe from the Uyghurs. They also killed a Uyghur khagan in the process, then Kyrgyz quickly moved as far as the Tian Shan range and maintained their dominance over this territory for about 200 years
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Lipka Tatars
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The Lipka Tatars are a group of Tatars who originally settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of the 14th century. The first settlers tried to preserve their religion and sought asylum amongst the non-Christian Lithuanians. Towards the end of the 14th century, another wave of Tatars – this time and these Tatars first settled in Lithuania proper around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas and later spread to other parts of the Grand Duchy that later became part of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. These areas comprise present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Poland, from the very beginning of their settlement in Lithuania they were known as the Lipka Tatars. While maintaining their religion, they united their fate with that of the mainly Christian Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, from the Battle of Grunwald onwards the Lipka Tatar light cavalry regiments participated in every significant military campaign of Lithuania and Poland. The Lipka Tatar origins can be traced back to the descendant states of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan – the White Horde, the Golden Horde and they initially served as a noble military caste but later they became urban-dwellers known for their crafts, horses and gardening skills. Throughout centuries they resisted assimilation and kept their traditional lifestyle, there are still small groups of Lipka Tatars living in todays Belarus, Lithuania and Poland, as well as their communities in United States. The name Lipka is derived from the old Crimean Tatar name of Lithuania, a less frequent Polish form, Łubka, is corroborated in Łubka/Łupka, the Crimean Tatar name of the Lipkas up to the end of the 19th century. The Crimean Tatar term Lipka Tatarłar meaning Lithuanian Tatars, later started to be used by the Polish–Lithuanian Tatars to describe themselves, co-education of male and female children was the norm, and Lipka women did not wear the veil – except at the marriage ceremony. Over time, the lower and middle Lipka Tatar nobles adopted the Ruthenian language then later the Belarusian language as their native language, however, they used the Arabic alphabet to write in Belarusian until the 1930s. The upper nobility of Lipka Tatars spoke Polish, diplomatic correspondence between the Crimean Khanate and Poland from the early 16th century refers to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as the land of the Poles and the Lipkas. By the 17th century the term Lipka Tatar began to appear in the documents of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The migration of some Tartars into the lands of Lithuania and Poland began during the 14th century, there was a subsequent wave of Tatar immigrants from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, although these consisted mostly of political and national activists. According to some estimates, by 1590–1591 there were about 200,000 Lipka Tatars living in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, according to the Risāle-yi Tatar-i Leh there were 100 Lipka Tatar settlements with mosques in Poland. The largest communities existed in the cities of Lida, Navahradak, there was a Lipka Tatar settlement in Minsk, todays capital of Belarus, known as Tatarskaya Slabada. In the year 1672, the Tatar subjects rose up in rebellion against the Commonwealth. This was the widely remembered Lipka Rebellion, beginning in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century the Lipkas became successively more and more Polonized. The upper and middle classes in particular adopted Polish language and customs,1226, The Khanate of the White Horde was established as one of the successor states to the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan
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Meskhetian Turks
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Meskhetian Turks also known as Meskheti Turks are an ethnic subgroup of Turks formerly inhabiting the Meskheti region of Georgia, along the border with Turkey. The Turkish presence in Meskheti began with the Turkish military expedition of 1578, today, the Meskhetian Turks are widely dispersed throughout the former Soviet Union due to forced deportations during World War II. In 1944, the Meskhetian Turks were accused of smuggling, banditry, expelled by Joseph Stalin from Georgia in 1944, they faced discrimination and human rights abuses before and after deportation. Approximately 115,000 Meskhetian Turks were deported to Central Asia and those who migrated to Ukraine in 1990 settled in shanty towns inhabited by seasonal workers. The origin of the Meskhetian is still unexplored and highly controversial, but now it seems to emerge two main directions, The pro-Turkish direction, The Meskhetians were ethnic Turks, in which some Georgian were ethnic parts. Contrary to this, the culture of Meshetian Turks, though it contained some Georgian elements, was similar to the Turkish one. Furthermore, according to Ronald Wixman, the term Meskhetian only came into use in the late 1950s, indeed, majority of the Meskhetians call themselves simply as Turks or Ahiskan Turks referring to the region, meaning Turks of Ahiska Region. The Meskhetians claim sometimes that the medieval Cumans-Kipchaks of Georgia may have one of their possible ancestors. As many as 30,000 to 50,000 deportees died of hunger, thirst and cold and as a result of the deportations. As opposed to the nationalities who had been deported during World War II, no reason was given for the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks. It was only in 1968 that the Soviet government finally recognised that the Meskhetian Turks had been deported, the reason for the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks was because in 1944 the Soviet Union was preparing to launch a pressure campaign against Turkey. In June 1945 Vyacheslav Molotov, who was then Minister of Foreign Affairs, unlike the other deported Muslim groups, the Meskhetians have not been rehabilitated nor permitted to return to their homeland. However, the response of the Soviet government was to arrest the Meskhetian leaders, in 1989, riots broke out between the Meskhetian Turks who had settled in Uzbekistan and the native Uzbeks. Nationalist resentments against the Meskhetians who had competed with Uzbeks for resources in the overpopulated Fergana valley boiled over, hundreds of Meskhetian Turks were dead or injured, nearly 1,000 properties were destroyed and thousands of Meskhetian Turks fled into exile. The majority of Meskhetian Turks, about 70,000, went to Azerbaijan, whilst the remainder went to various regions of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. Around 2,000 Meskhetian Turks have been forced to flee from their homes in Ukraine since May amid fighting between government forces and pro-Russian separatists, according to the 1989 Soviet Census, there were 207,502 Turks living in the Soviet Union. However, Soviet authorities recorded many Meskhetian Turks as belonging to other such as Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz. More recently, some Meskhetian Turks in Russia, especially those in Krasnodar, have faced hostility from the local population, the Krasnodar Meskhetian Turks have suffered significant human rights violations, including the deprivation of their citizenship
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Finnish Tatars
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The Tatars of Finland are ethnic Volga Tatar diaspora in Finland, who espouse the Muslim faith. They number approximately 1,000 and form a well-established and homogeneous religious, cultural, the Tatars are the oldest Muslim minority in Finland and in the Nordic countries, and operate the Finnish Islamic Congregation, the oldest state-recognised Muslim congregation in the Western world. Finnish Tatars have their origins in Eastern Europe and their language belongs to the Turkic language family. Most of those returned to Russia, for the ones who did not, an Islamic cemetery in Bomarsund bears witness to their presence in Finland. Most of them had been farmers but they settled in Finland as merchants trading in furs and textiles and chose initially to reside in Helsinki and its surrounding area. Tatars living in the city of Vyborg on the Karelian Isthmus resettled in Tampere, most Finnish Tatars continue to live in Helsinki and its surroundings. In 1925, the first Islamic congregation was founded, Finland was thus the first Western European country to officially recognise an Islamic congregation. The Finnish Freedom of Religion Act had been adopted in 1922, today, the congregation has mosques in Helsinki and Järvenpää. A second congregation of Tatars was established in Tampere in 1943, non-Tatar Muslims cannot become members of the Finnish Islamic Congregation. There are Tatar Islamic cemeteries in Helsinki, Turku and Tampere, the Tatars are fully integrated into Finnish society and they are actively engaged in Finnish economic and cultural life in a wide array of professions. At the same time, they have succeeded in maintaining a distinct identity and in keeping the Tatar language alive by using it in family and private circles and also in their cultural organisations. Since 1935, the Tatar Cultural Society has organised principally Tatar-language cultural events in the form of plays, folk music, folk dancing, the pride of the sports club, Yolduz, established in 1945, is its football team. Both the cultural society and the club operate with the support of the Islamic Congregation. One notable Finnish Tatar is the soccer player Atik Ismail. From 1948 to 1969 there was a Tatar primary school in Helsinki, about half of the teaching was in Finnish and half in Tatar. Reform of the Finnish school system in the 1970s made the school due to the small number of pupils. A Tatar kindergarten has existed since the 1950s, summer courses in Tatar are now held at the Tatar Training Centre in Kirkkonummi, near Helsinki. It is remarkable that the group of Finnish Tatars has managed to preserve proficiency in the Tatar language for as long as five generations
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Naimans
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The Naiman is the name of a tribe originating in Mongolia. In The Secret History of the Mongols, the Naiman subtribe the Güchügüd are mentioned, according to Russian Turkologist Nikolai Aristovs view, the Naiman Khanates western border reached the Irtysh River and its eastern border reached the Mongolian Tamir River. The Altai Mountains and southern Altai Republic were part of the Naiman Khanate and they had diplomatic relations with the Kara-Khitans, and were subservient to them until 1177. Some scholars classified them as a Turkic people from Sekiz Oghuz, like the Khitans and the Uyghurs, many of them were Nestorian Christians or Buddhists. When the last tayang Khan was killed after a battle with Genghis Khan in 1203, Kuchlug was well received there and the Khitan Khan gave him his daughter in marriage. Kuchlug soon began plotting against his new father-in-law, and after he usurped the throne, but his action was opposed by local people and he was later defeated by the Mongols under Jebe. Although the Naiman Khanlig was crushed by the Mongols, they were seen in part of the Mongol Empire. Ogedeis great khatun Töregene might have been from this tribe, hulegu had a Naiman general, Ketbuqa, who died in the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. The modern Naiman tribe is a Mongol ethnic group in Naiman Banner, Inner Mongolia of China, the clan Naiman changed the clan name and mixed with other tribes in Mongolia. There is a population of Naimans in Afghanistan. They belong to the Hazara tribe and reside in the Sheikh Ali valley, modern Kazakh historians claim that more than 2 millions of the Kazakh population are Naimans. Some Naimans dissimilated with the Kyrgyz and Uzbek ethnicities and are found among them. Naimans are also one of the tribe among Kazakhs in the Uzbekistan, they also exist among Kazakhs in Kyrgyzstan. See Naimans introduction in Kazakh language, Kazakh shezhire, the Naimans might have been Christians in the early 13th century. However, there is no evidence to support this claim. They remained so after the Mongol conquest and were among the wave of Christians to enter China with Kublai Khan. The Naimans who settled in the western khanates of the Mongol Empire all eventually converted to Islam, there was a tradition that the Naimans and their Christian relatives, the Keraites, descended from the Biblical Magi. However, Kitbuqa was slain and his army defeated at the Battle of Ain Jalut
Russia
Kazakhstan