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The
Turkic Speaking Peoples
2,000 Years of Art and Culture from Inner Asia to the Balkans
Ergun Çağatay
Concept and Photography
Do€an Kuban
Editor
Prestel
Munich · Berlin · London · New York
Prince Claus Fund Library
The Netherlands
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Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
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I
LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY
The Borders of Turcia: Connections and
Divisions in the Development of
the Turkic Peoples
Lars Johanson
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Present-Day Turkic Peoples and
Their Languages
Talat Tekin
30
Turkic Oral Epic Poetry from Central Asia
Karl Reichl
II
54
THE TURCO-EURASIAN SYMBIOSIS
THE NOMADIC SYMBIOSIS
The World of the Early Nomadic Horsemen
Hansgerd Göckenjan
68
The Turkic Nomads of the Pre-Islamic
Eurasian Steppes: Ethnogenesis and the
Shaping of the Steppe Imperial Tradition
Peter B. Golden
82
Turks and Mongols
Aleksandr Kadirbayev
104
Nomadic and Medieval Turkic Cuisines
Charles Perry
116
THE TURCO-CHINESE SYMBIOSIS
Chinese Historical Connections
With the Turkic Empires and Their Heirs
Ildiko Ecsedy
132
THE TURCO-CENTRAL ASIAN–PERSIAN
SYMBIOSIS
Greater Central Asia:
The Region from Turkey to Xinjiang
Richard N. Frye
The Turco-Persian Tradition
Robert L. Canfield
Azeri Turks in Iran: Symbiosis Under
the Sign of Siyavush
Tadeusz Swietochowski
144
148
160
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Persian Influence in Turkish Literature
Ali Alparslan
176
Flexibility in Political Culture: Turks and Islam 184
‹senbike Togan
THE TURCO-SLAVIC SYMBIOSIS
The Turkic Nomads of Southern Europe
Omeljan Pritsak
Tatar Art and Culture at the Crossroads
of Civilization
Güzel Valeeva Süleymanova
196
214
Tatar or Turk?
Competing Identities in the Muslim
Turkic World during the Late Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries
232
Uli Schamiloglu
Shamanism and the Turkic Peoples of
Siberia and Central Asia
Roberte Hamayon
310
The Interpretation of Islam by the Turks
Throughout the Historical Process
Ahmet Yaflar Ocak
318
Anatolian Aleviism
Necdet Subafl›
Popular Islam Among Turkic Tribes
from Central Asia to Anatolia
Irène Mélikoff
The Gagauz
Astrid Menz
The Karaims: The Smallest Group of
Turkic-Speaking People
Éva Csató Johanson
346
362
370
384
THE TURCO-ARAB SYMBIOSIS
Turkish-Arab Relations in early Islamic
History; Arabic Influences on Turkish
Ramazan Şeşen
IV ART AND ARCHITECTURE
244
THE FORMATION OF TURKISH CULTURE
IN ANATOLIA
Turks and Byzantines
(Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries)
Nevra Necipo€lu
Turkish Cuisine - From Nomadism to
Republicanism
Tu€rul fiavkay
The Kazakh Yurt and Kazakh Culture
Lezzet Tülbasiyeva
404
420
254
Central Asian Architecture:
The Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries
Galina A. Pugaçenkova
428
Symbiosis in Architecture:
Turkish Architecture in Anatolia
Do€an Kuban
442
266
THE FORMATION OF TURKISHEUROPEAN CULTURE
Turkey and Europe in History:
The Ottoman-Turkish Empire
Halil ‹nalc›k
The Arts and Crafts of the Central Asian
Turkic-Speaking Peoples
Akbar Hakimov
286
Another Bridge Between
Far and Near East:
Mehmed Siyah Kalem
Filiz Ça€man
V
458
THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE
III RELIGION
Manichaeism and Buddhism among
the Uighur Turks
Jens Peter Laut
Turkish Identity in Modern Turkey
Nuri Bilgin
474
302
Contemporary Turkish Communities Abroad 484
Çi€dem Bal›m Harding
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FOREWORD
The publication of this book could not have been better
timed. The challenges facing the Turkic-speaking world at the
beginning of the twenty-first century are great. These challenges have caused—and will continue to cause—such big
changes that a documentation of the Turkic peoples in their
present state is highly necessary. And it is impossible to predict what lies ahead.
In parts of the Turkic-speaking world, nomadism—the
original lifestyle for millions of Turkic people—has been practiced even up to the present day, although most groups became
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sedentary at least several generations ago. In the former Soviet
Union, the collapse of the Communist regime has brought a
greater amount of individual freedom to the Turkic peoples living there, but capitalism and new opportunities for private
enterprise have increased the contrast between rich and poor,
imposing negative effects on parts of society. The globalized
environment in the post-Communist era is likely to condemn
nomadism, once and for all, to being a curiosity practiced only
by very marginal groups. Therefore, documentation of these
groups is of the utmost importance.
At the same time, Turkey—the Turkic-speaking country
where Europeanization has been an essential part of state politics and policy for about two hundred years (with varying
intensity, reaching its peak under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk)—
may well take its final step towards becoming a member of the
European Union within the not-too-distant future. This will
imply a considerable transformation of Turkish society, and
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many traditional customs and attitudes—not to mention foodstuffs—will have to be sacrificed or undergo profound
changes. Accordingly, documentation of the traditional
lifestyle—especially in rural Turkey—is very important while it is
still possible.
These dramatic changes occurring in the new millennium, however, are by no means the first the Turkic world has
experienced. Thanks to the Turkic peoples’ nomadic origins,
they have lived in symbiotic relationships with other—often
sedentary—peoples they met as they spread out from their
‘Urheimat’ (homeland), and their languages have undergone
alterations as a result.
One of the most original aspects of this book is the treatment of the different Turkic peoples through their history of
interactions with other peoples. In the field of linguistics, the
study of language contacts has taken an important step forward, thanks to the recent works of the Turcologist Lars
Johanson (a contributor to this volume). He has studied and
emphasized the great linguistic importance of contact among
the Turkic languages internally and between the Turkic languages and other languages.
A similar approach in fields other than linguistics also
represents a new trend in the study of cultural history. This
approach is directly opposed to the traditional view that language is self-contained—that the source of changes in a language should be sought within that language itself. The notion
that the ”pure self” is impossible to find—that both Man and his
cultures are dynamic entities always borrowing from and influencing one another—is also relatively new within Turkish culture, where it has traditionally been believed (at least in some
circles) that ”pure Turkishness” was something to be sought
out, something to strive for, and something to emulate. In fact,
however, not only the Turkic languages, but also the different
cultures—including the art and material culture of the Turks—
are products of such symbioses, especially with the Mongols
and other East Asian tribes and the Iranian peoples.
In these symbioses, Turkic languages and culture of
course have been not only the recipients; they also have contributed immensely to the languages and cultures with which
they have been in contact. This thought is most aptly expressed
by famed Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who lets one of the protagonists in his novel My Name Is Red—speaking about miniature painting—pronounce the following:
”Nothing is pure,” said Enishte Effendi. ”In the realm of
book arts, whenever a masterpiece is made, whenever a
splendid picture makes my eyes water out of joy and
causes a chill to run down my spine, I can be certain of
the following: Two styles heretofore never brought
together have come together to create something new
and wondrous. We owe Bihzad and the splendor of
Persian painting to the meeting of an Arabic illustrating
sensibility and Mongol-Chinese painting. Shah
Tahmasp’s best paintings marry Persian style with
Turkmen subtleties. Today, if men cannot adequately
praise the book-arts workshops of Akbar Khan in
Hindustan, it’s because he urged his miniaturists to
adopt the styles of the Frankish masters. To God belongs
the East and the West. May He protect us from the will
of the pure and unadulterated.” (In E. Göknar’s translation, London 2001, p. 160.)
It is significant that the definition of the peoples under
scrutiny in this book is a linguistic one. Many problems have
been avoided by defining the subject as people who speak
Turkic languages (instead of a more diffuse ethnic definition).
For instance, the ”ethnogenesis” of the Turks remains unclear
because of the lack of adequate linguistic evidence, so, due to
the language shifts that most probably have occurred in several places and on several occasions throughout the history of the
Turkic peoples, it would be unwise to postulate an ethnically
Turkic origin of all those who speak a Turkic language today.
This book’s linguistic starting point also plunges the
reader straight into the world of Turcologists. In traditional
Turcology, different fields of study traditionally have constituted an interesting (if unwritten) hierarchy. At the top have been
the ”elite” or ”exclusive” studies of the Old Turkic inscriptions
and the Old Uighur Buddhist texts. On the next level have been
the studies of other extinct languages, such as Volga Bulgarian,
or languages still alive but spoken by extremely small numbers
of people. Research in living languages—especially from a modern linguistic point of view, not to speak of dialectology or the
study of substandard vernaculars—has traditionally been
regarded as a less noble, almost vulgar pursuit for Turcologists.
The scope of this book provides a sounder viewpoint of what
Turcology is or what it may comprise, thus breaking with this
traditional hierarchy.
The special character of Turkic nomadism and its symbioses with sedentary peoples has resulted not only in linguistic features but also—as we understand from the Pamuk citation above—in mutual borrowings from other fields of life, such
as religion, art, architecture, and material culture (including cuisine). All of these aspects are treated in this book by most eminent specialists in their different fields.
The creation of this book has taken quite a number of
years—partly due to coordination of the work of three dozen different authors in far-flung locales but also due to financial
uncertainties. At times, the prospects for completion of the
project were unclear. It is only thanks to the incessant and
untiring efforts of Ergun Ça€atay that this volume has been
completed and published. Not only did he come up with the
book’s concept and its innovative approach to the topic, he also
took the magnificent photographs you will find within this book.
Bernt Brendemoen
Professor, University of Oslo, Norway
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PREFACE
ERGUN ÇA⁄ATAY
I can attest personally to the fact that burns are among
the most painful injuries a human being can experience. For
several days in July 1983, I seesawed between life and death
at a military hospital in a Paris suburb. A homemade bomb detonated at the Turkish Airlines counter at Paris/Orly Airport had
burned thirty-five percent of my body. I owed my misfortune to
an organization called ASALA, an Armenian terrorist group.
Three of its militants, on a senseless vendetta, killed ten people and injured dozens more on that day in Paris. Although I
was badly injured and burned, at least I was lucky enough to
be alive. Then began a long and painful ordeal that absorbed
five years of my life. In the early days of my hospitalization, during painful, sleepless nights, I swung between dreams and hallucinations. My most recurring nightmare was that my damaged hands would never again be able to hold a camera and
thus that my career as a photographer had come to an abrupt
end.
As time went by, I tried to adjust to the idea that I would
need to do something else besides photography. During one of
those long, painful nights in the hospital, I came up with the
idea of creating this book. I thought that at least I could put
together the text of such a book, and then perhaps other photographers could provide enough images to illustrate it.
Fortunately, however, my nightmares did not become
reality. My hands were somewhat strange looking (because of
grafts from skin taken from my legs), and it took me five years
but I had no problem using them at the end. My face looked
rather like a Chinese miniature, with stretched skin, and I had
to avoid the sun for two years, but gradually the pains lessened
and became fading memories. The only thing that did not fade
was the idea of creating a book on Turkic-speaking peoples. It
remained vividly in my mind and on my agenda.
I started toying with the idea by engaging in friendly dialogue with an undercover KGB agent posing as a journalist. He
gave me some helpful advice, but it was very clear from the
beginning that my plan to travel to Central Asia with a Turkish
passport was next to impossible. This book would never have
come to fruition had the Soviet Union not collapsed. During my
twelve-plus-year effort to complete this book, I have explored
parts of Russia and Central Asia where, under the old
Communist regime, I would never have been able to dream of
setting foot. I have traveled from one end of Russia to the other,
visiting distant cities such as Abakan and Novosibirsk and sites
such as Akademi Gorodok in Novosibirsk and the nuclear-testing grounds in Kazakhstan. I have seen the stylish city of St.
Petersburg as well as the ecologically devastated biological
weapons-testing grounds in the middle of the shrinking Aral
Sea. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, all such experiences would have been unthinkable.
8
During such extensive trips, one develops a keen sense
of awareness for hundreds and hundreds of small details—
everything from art to human behavior to social standards—
which made me feel I was traveling in a time tunnel. I was able
to witness vast changes in each area I visited. I will refrain from
saying that it is all for the better, especially while the social
structures of these societies are still changing in an atmosphere of raw capitalism and greed, and new cadres of “go-getters” establish their own rules in these newly forming societies.
Nonetheless, despite the differences in geography and
economics and even politics in this vast region, I always found
a common denominator—people speaking Turkic languages.
This, of course, was the starting point for debate about this
book’s title—should it be Turkic-Speaking Peoples or TurkishSpeaking Peoples? Whether I was meeting a Kazak, a Tatar, an
Uzbek, a Kirghiz, or a Turk, I saw essentially no differences in
behavior: similar philosophies, similar body language, similar
food, and even similar vocabularies. I found that within two
months, I could easily speak any one of these relatives of my
own native Turkish. I observed that all of these peoples can easily blend into one another’s societies—as occurs today in Turkey,
which has been the melting pot for thousands of people from
throughout the Turkic world who at one time or another have
sought refuge in Anatolia.
In the end, my observations and experiences during my
ten years of traveling in Central Asia convinced me that “Turkic”
is a synthetic, divisive adjective. Part of this stems from the
shrewdness of Soviet politicians, who drew artificial boundaries
and cunningly created differences among the Turkic languages
and people. From the Soviet perspective, there were bitter historical reasons for creating new nationalities in West Turkistan,
so they regarded this as a necessary step.
In the early 1920s, with the Soviets in power in Central
Asia, the Jadidist movement sought to define the identities of
the peoples of Central Asia and the region’s position in the new
Soviet Union. After defeating the feudal establishments in
Bukhara, Kokand, and Khiva, the Bolsheviks brought the
Central Asians under a single administrative entity—Turkistan—
in an attempt to facilitate and centralize control. This prompted the Jadidist movement to defend and pursue the rights of
the region’s Muslims through education, enlightenment, and a
larger political representation within the Soviet Union.
Besides Jadids, there were also Basmachis, a more
Islamist-oriented Turkic group that revolted against the Czar in
1916 and kept their rebellion against Bolsheviks under the
leadership of Enver Pasha, one of the former leaders of the
Young Turks exiled from the Ottoman Empire. After nearly two
years of struggle, Enver Pasha was killed on 4 August 1922 near
Dushanbe, in present-day Tajikistan. So ended Lenin’s dreaded revolt of the Basmachis. The Soviets’ very real fear of PanTurkism and Pam Islamism forced the regime to follow Czarist
Russia’s policy of “divide and rule,” so the Soviet Socialist
Republic of Turkistan was divided into five republics.
Nowadays, farther east, China has usurped East
Turkistan by pursuing a different political philosophy, that of
population shifts. The Chinese government has strongly
encouraged Han Chinese to settle in the region where Uighur
Turks once dominated, thus creating a new demographic pic-
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ture in China’s West, formerly the land of the Turks. (This population-shift strategy, previously used in Tibet, continues there
today.)
Turkistan—meaning “Land of the Turks”—has lost all significance nowadays and has become almost a mythological
name for the territory of the Turks today, rather like Asena, the
mythological wolf-mother of Turks.
The most obvious fact about Central Asia today is that
independent statehood was neither coveted nor sought by the
region’s ruling Communist elites. It was thrust upon them when
the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Thus, the region’s rulers
were suddenly compelled to fabricate a new identity for their
five ethnically diverse states—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
(non-Turkic), Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—and to contend for
the first time with radically differing, alien ideologies.
Today the frontiers of Turkistan’s Turkic nations are
ringed with land mines; shackled with border closures, new
checkpoints, and border posts; wracked by intermittent border
skirmishes; and, most important, governed through trade
restrictions and the inability or the reluctance to enforce mutually signed treaties. The states of central Turkistan have repeatedly tried to solve their problems and resolve foreign-policy differences through a variety of organizations such as the Central
Asian Inter-State Council, the Central Asian Union, the Central
Asian Economic Community, and the Central Asian Cooperation
Organization (as well as summits of the CIS, the Economic
Cooperation Organization, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, and the Turkic-speaking state leaders), but none
of these efforts have had much success. It seems that history
is repeating itself considering the treacherous dealings the
three khanates (Khiva, Buhara, Kokand) of Central Asia had
before they were annexed one by one by Czarist Russia.
In the context of Turkic-speaking peoples—as in the rest
of the world—religion is a topic that warrants discussion
because of its influence on politics and life in general. From my
perspective, religion can be a knife that cuts two ways. When
religion dominates a society, it can be extremely difficult to
challenge rigid doctrines that mandate right and wrong. On the
other hand, devotion to religious doctrines in politically
oppressed societies (as in the case of Tatars, Uzbeks, Uighurs,
Turkmen, Azeris, and Kazakhs) can help the retention of cultural identity. (The survival of the Jews against incredible odds
can be seen in the same light.)
While Islam linked some of the communities that
remained within the boundaries of Czarist Russia and later
under Soviet rule, some other communities have almost completely lost their identities. For instance, the Chuvash in Central
Russia were forced to abandon their shamanist beliefs for
Orthodoxy, and the small Hakas (Chakas) community in southern Siberia was likewise converted into Orthodoxy. The
Tuvinians, another small community of Turkic people in Siberia,
resisted all pressure and tried to retain their Lamaist Buddhist
or shamanist beliefs. Another exception is the tiny Karaim
(Karaite) community in Lithuania, which follows a creed known
as Karaism, based on belief in the Old Testament and rejection
of the Talmud and other post-biblical writings.
It should not be surprising that Islam revived quickly after
the fall of Communism in most of the newly independent Turkic
states, since Islam had taken root early in Central Asia. Soon
after the Arab invasions of the eighth century, Central Asia
emerged as the most important stronghold of Islam after the
holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Central Asian Islam was
enhanced by the evolution of Islamic philosophy, ethics, legal
codes, and scientific research. Ahmet Yasavi, for example, was
a great Islamic thinker whose inspired disciples founded Sufism
or Islamic mysticism, which taught direct communion with God
and tolerance and moderation toward all other forms of worship and religion. Different branches of mystic Sufism today
extend from Morocco to Chinese Central Asia and include the
Indian subcontinent as well as parts of Africa, the Balkans,
Turkey, and Iran. One of the strongest sects in the Muslim world
brotherhood, the Nakshbandi (Naqshbandi) tarikat, was founded by Bahaettin Nakshbandi in Bukhara (in today’s Uzbekistan),
not far from the small city of Turkistan (now in Kazakhstan),
where the huge mausoleum of Ahmet Yasavi was built by Timur
three centuries after his death.
In their efforts to eliminate Islam and all other religions
in Central Asia, the Soviets launched harsh punitive campaigns.
Mosques and churches were shut down and turned into factories, and worship and religious ceremonies were banned. The
forced collectivization of both nomads and peasants led to
large-scale massacres and the flight of Muslim populations to
China and Afghanistan. Even in the harshest years of the
Communist oligarchy, however, the Politburo did not consider
banning visitors from the mausoleums of Ahmet Yasavi or
Bahaettin Nakshbandi. Both complexes were deprived of maintenance over the years—in hopes that they would succumb to
the elements—but Ahmet Yasavi’s mausoleum remained one of
the three top holy Muslim sites within the Soviet Union. The
Communists never completely succeeded in eradicating Islam,
which remained the glue that held together Central Asian communities.
Central Asian Muslims are predominantly Sunnis,
belonging to the Hannifi sect, giving them a uniformity of belief
rare in the Muslim world. Shiites are only a small minority to
be found living in some of the great trading cities of
Uzbekistan, such as Bukhara and Samarkand, and in Tajikistan,
where the Gorno Badakhshan region is populated by Ismailis,
followers of a branch of Shiite Islam whose spiritual leader is
the Aga Khan.
Today Islam has a different appearance in the region. Cut
off for seventy-four years, Central Asian Muslims were first
reintroduced to the wider Umma, or Muslim world, during and
after the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Tens of thousands of
Central Asian conscripts in the Soviet army fought in
Afghanistan, and many were affected by the Islamic zeal of the
Afghan Mujahadin. During this period, hundreds of Central
Asian Muslims clandestinely traveled to Pakistan to train and
fight alongside the Mujahadin. After the collapse of the Soviet
Union, great sums of money were poured into the region as
social donations and scholarships that eventually bore fruit in
the form of radical Islam, which became the nightmare of the
newly formed republics. If one cutting edge of the knife was
Islam (the link that kept communities from disintegrating under
Soviet rule), today the radical Islam that haunts leaders of the
new states is the same knife’s other cutting edge.
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During my frequent travels in Central Asia and other
Turkic outposts, I have never felt foreign; I have always felt at
home. It was always extremely comfortable to be able to touch
the elements of a fellow Turk’s soul—to understand the mentality and the body language as well as the sincerity of expression. These Turks had developed instinctive defense mechanisms during the centuries under Russian (and then Soviet)
control, but I learned to see through them. Perhaps they were
not so defensive toward me or other Turks from Anatolia
because we are their cousins, half-brothers, or whatever name
one wants to assign to the relationship.
Speaking broadly, we Turks tend to be reserved, harboring suspicion about others’ motives. Perhaps that stems from a
history of rejection combined with the rebellious nomadic heritage embedded in our chromosomes. Our Turkic character
includes impatience, a quick temper, and a resilience that has
facilitated adaptability to changing conditions.
As I traveled throughout Central Asia, I felt I had discovered explanations for some of the behavioral traits that have
been described—often pejoratively—by Western writers, but I
think their prejudices often have prevented them from making
accurate judgments.
I think the roots of our militaristic nature stretch back
centuries to the days of our nomadic ancestors‘ struggle for
survival on the windswept and merciless steppes. (For more on
their lifestyle, see Hansgerd Göckenjan’s chapter The World of
the Early Nomadic Horsemen.) Deprived of most of the security institutions typical of a sedentary life, the nomads had to be
resilient in order to survive. Thus, in the earliest historic times,
ten or so families would move together to ensure solidarity and
security. This situation continued for centuries, all the while
instilling in the nomad a warrior’s spirit. It was, after all, a matter of life and death. As families moved about, looking for new
pastures, inevitably their paths crossed. When two groups
claimed the same pasture, clashes and hostile raids often
ensued. Today, nomads still seek group security living on the
steppes, although the typical grouping has diminished to about
four families. When I visited nomadic groups in Mongolia and
Tuva, the lifestyle was so steeped in tradition that I felt I had
landed in a time warp.
Nomadic life also develops shortsightedness, because
people are accustomed to living from day to day, as the following anecdote will illustrate. On a region of the Mongolian
steppes, I was invited to eat with a family in their yurt (esgiy ger,
which means “felt home” in Mongolian). I asked them if they
ate meat on a regular basis. The answer was yes. Then I asked
them if they included onions to improve the taste when they
boiled meat. (Boiling big chunks of meat in large pans is the
only way they cook.) I had an unexpected answer: yes, they
included onions (meaning wild onions) wherever they could
find them. Sometimes they found them on hillsides, but in this
place where they had established themselves temporarily, there
were no wild onions. I suddenly realized that I had asked them
a very silly question.
I could add many more examples of connections to
nomadic roots—from Turkish hospitality to driving in traffic to a
strange sense of insouciance summed up in the Turkish saying, Merak etme bir şey olmaz, which roughly means, “Don’t
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worry, nothing will happen.” There is no rational explanation, for
example, for why I went to photograph Vozrozhdeniya
(“Renaissance”) Island in the middle of the shrinking Aral Sea
wearing only sandals, Bermuda shorts, and a T-shirt. I knew
well that biological weapons had been developed and tested
there during the Soviet era. Plus I had been told that the island
was home to two types of extremely poisonous snakes. A year
later, when American military people went to the same place to
clean up any still-existing anthrax or other deadly viruses, I
heard that they wore something like “moon suits.” I can offer
no other explanation for my behavior than curiosity and our
devil-may-care nomadic roots (Merak etme bir fley olmaz).
Those early nomadic armies spearheaded the formation
of new empires and destroyed whatever state stood in their
way. As nomads, they lacked the cultural skills of some of the
sedentary peoples whose lands they invaded—such as China,
India, and, for that matter, Byzantium. But, in their great capacity as a constantly moving force, Turks became great cultural
conveyors. In some cases, they blended into the culture of the
people they conquered, as in China. In other instances, they
synthesized cultures, combining their own imported culture
with the local one, as with Babur in India or the Ottomans in
the early years of their empire. Despite the fact that Babur and
his dynasty are insistently called Moghuls by Western scholars,
they were of Turkic descent. The Persian word Moghul for
Mongol, used as a synonymous expression for “barbarian,”
could hardly describe the highly cultured courts of Timur and
his descendants in today’s Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and India.
Creators of numerous works of art, and some of the finest edifices in the world—the Taj Mahal being perhaps the foremost
example—do not deserve this prejudiced approach. To complicate matters more, I think it is futile to separate the Mongols
from the Turks, since both groups were so intermixed and come
from the same area.
The Russians were very clever in slowly and very effectively imposing their culture on those under their domination.
They believed that culture is the key element in controlling the
masses (a point that, in my opinion, is undisputable). A society without its cultural heritage is like a giant amoeba that has
no brain and only expands and multiplies. Russians almost succeeded in converting the Central Asian Turkic states into one
of their choice amoebas, with deeply buried Islamic roots.
Whenever I talked with an Uzbek about aspects of daily life or
other similar subjects, our conversation would flow smoothly.
Then, if we strayed into such other subjects as politics, art, philosophy, and science, where one needs to use more abstract
words and expressions, the Uzbek would run out of vocabulary
and immediately switch into Russian. I assumed that, on average, an Uzbek, Kazakh, or Turkmen would be confined to a
vocabulary range of perhaps a thousand words in his own language. Yet these people, with all their schools and universities,
have had a long cultural history that they were slowly forced to
forget.
This brings us to another point: How well was the cultural heritage preserved? Unfortunately, not very well—especially when it came to matters of religion. Attempts were made
to preserve folkloric art/painting, sculpture, and archaeological
artifacts by building museums (containing objects that escaped
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being taken to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg). In
daily life, however, one had to scrape bottom to find any traces
of the cultural heritage. Eighty years of Communism wiped out
almost everything that had existed.
Another question to ponder is: What traditions and how
many in fact had existed? When examining old photographs of
Central Asia and of my own country of Turkey, I have come to
the conclusion that we Turks in general have very short memories, and that we have had an almost indifferent attitude to our
heritage until the last sixty or seventy years. How else can one
explain why Ottoman sultans donated so many irreplaceable
archaeological specimens to various European museums?
The Turks’ nomadic cultural heritage also has affected
the role of women in Turkic societies (including Turkey itself)
today. These women occupy different positions than in the rest
(or most) of the Islamic world because of traditions going all
the way back to our mythological motherland, somewhere
around northern Mongolia and southern Siberia. Women were
always equal to men in those Turkic societies. How could we
ever forget that we are the children of Asena, the mythological
wolf-mother?
Several traditions provide an illustration of women’s
equality among the pre-Islamic Turkic tribes. The following
example, I think, best illustrates this. Whenever a procession
took place in the early Turkic communities, no macho horseman
or tribal elder took the lead: The most beautiful girl in the community or tribe or village always would lead the procession on
horseback. Also, it is interesting to note that even after Turks
were converted to Islam, Haci Bektash Veli, founder of the
Bektashi Sufi order, stipulated as long ago as 1300 AD that his
sect’s second overriding principle was “educate the women”—
certainly a remarkable statement in that era. Veiling of women—
which is still hotly disputed among Islamic scholars—came to
the Turks as part of the Arab influence in the second half of the
Ottoman Empire. Today, women in the Turkic-speaking world
are better off in matters of equality than in almost all of the
Islamic countries—despite strong attempts by Saudis to promote Wahhabism (a rigidly conservative Islamic sect) in Turkey
and other Turkic countries.
I have tried here to draw a brief and necessarily sketchy
picture of the Turkic world, based on my own observations during long explorations over the dozen or so years I spent creating this book. My journeys in themselves could make a separate volume—perhaps not as dramatic as the exploits of early
twentieth century Swedish traveler Sven Hedin, but it would be
full of funny and bitter anecdotes about initial observations and
contacts inside the former Soviet republics.
Some of the buildings that appear in photographs that I
took during my first trips in the early and mid-1990s have now
vanished, so the photos have become historical documents in a
very short time. As a photographer, I found that one of the most
boring aspects of life in those newly liberated republics was the
striking absence of color. City after city, regardless of its location, had the same dull, uninspiring architecture, the same
shabby-looking concrete façades—monochromatic scenes that
I had no interest in photographing. I had a similar reaction to
the villages and the former collective farms that I passed along
the roads. Except for the varied scenery, they all looked alike.
Happily, I cannot make the same observation today. The
old Soviet-style architecture no longer dominates the scene.
Most of the government structures, museums, university buildings, and other prestigious façades of the former Soviet regime
remain with few changes; strangely enough, however, they
seem to blend in easily amid the bold new glass-and-steel newcomers.
The cities have indeed begun to look different; it seems
that each former satellite state has made ambitious plans to
erase the image of being a second-class Soviet republic.
Perhaps the most radical step was Kazakhstan’s transfer of its
capital from Almaty to Astana—somewhat reminiscent of
Mustafa Kemal’s transfer of the Republic of Turkey’s capital
from Istanbul to a small town named Ankara in 1923. Before
1997, when it was named the capital, Astana was a small, backward city (like Ankara in the early days of the young republic);
it is unrecognizable as such today. During the Soviet era, there
existed a certain sluggishness, sloppy craftsmanship, and lack
of productivity, which seemed to be encouraged by the system.
Ironically the system became its own enemy. Toward the end,
very little seemed to function and nobody seemed to care.
People had no opportunity for choice—they had to take what
was offered to them, so no one bothered to improve whatever
they were doing or making, whether it was a doorknob or a car.
When I first went to Tashkent (Uzbekistan), I was astonished to
find that I could not have a duplicate made for a door key. There
were no small shops where they could do such a simple task,
yet they were building airplanes in the same city.
Mountains of problems still must be overcome in the former Soviet Union’s Turkic republics. There is a great need for
trained professionals in many fields; for clampdowns on corruption and misuse of natural resources; for adequate capital
investment; for upgrading of outmoded industries; and much
more. It is my firm hope that somehow, someday, these
republics will be able to put aside personal squabbles and
antipathies and work together for the good of all.
I finally feel that I have fulfilled my dream that started in
a French hospital.
Over the last dozen or so years, while chasing that
dream, I have learned more about my people than I ever
expected to know. I have also come to the disappointing conclusion that Turks in general know very little about themselves
and their long history. It is in an effort to improve that situation
that we have created this book on the symbiosis of Turkic culture from southern Mongolia to Central Asia, Anatolia, the
Balkans, and Central Europe. This is only part of a great cultural adventure, and there are so many more topics that could
have been included in this book which we delibrately avoided
otherwise the present book would have required far more
pages than this volume could possibly hold.
Ergun Ça€atay
June 2006, ‹stanbul
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The path to the publication of this book has been long
and circuitous, requiring a number of years. During that time, I
received help of various kinds and in varying degrees from
more people than I could possibly list here.
Financial assistance was crucial—as might be imagined
with a mega-project like The Turkic-Speaking Peoples. Even
though I still had to exert considerable energy seeking financial support, I am especially grateful to those who helped jumpstart the fund-raising process and who provided infusions of
capital along the way. At one of the lowest points, two people
12
appeared to provide an exceptionally generous boost: Guy
Pagy, a friend from my youthful days in Izmir, his cousin Lucien
Arkas and George Williams, my former housemaster and
teacher at Robert College. The latter—whose father was a noted
photographer for National Geographic decades ago—introduced me to Kenan fiahin, a Robert College and MIT graduate
who has become a prominent businessman in the United
States. I gratefully salute his contribution, which came at a critical moment.
In the beginning, when The Turkic-Speaking Peoples was
only a rough idea on paper, Deputy Prime Minister Erdal ‹nönü
had the foresight to encourage me and helped me start the
project. Minister of Culture Fikri Sa€lar provided further
momentum for getting started. Others in the political kaleidoscope have come and gone, and to each one I owe thanks—but
most especially to Hikmet Çetin, Aylin and Emre Gönensay.
When the project began, a corporation had to be estab-
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lished. I and my good friends Osman Uslu, Mehmet Ural, and
Ahmet Somuncuo€lu (all from the advertising world) set up
Tetragon AS. My friends bore the financial burden of Tetragon
for several years before saying, “No more.” Their contributions
were so invaluable that even after their departure, the project
had a sound basis for continuing. I owe them much more than
a simple “thank you.”
Also in those days, when Turkey was about to spin into
one of her periodic economic crises, Suna Kıraç and Nihat
Gökyi€it were brave enough to provide us with financial breathing space.
I could never have accomplished my wanderings had it
not been for Vera and Bülent Bulgurlu, who convinced Rahmi
Koç and the late Erdo€an Gönül to provide me with two Land
Rovers, which carried me more than 60,000 miles in Central
Asia and Siberia.
Others helped with the traveling logistics. My cousin
Serdar Görgüç, now head of Otokar, as well as fiuayip and
Bayram Ümit, provided Land Rover support. Without Bayram’s
efforts at keeping the vehicles running, we would never have
been able to navigate those unbelievably rough roads.
As we made trip after trip, we were coming across fascinating documents and artifacts—often in the most unexpected rural locales. Tunç Ulu€, an erudite businessman, asked me
to produce a book about my discoveries. With only a fraction of
what was in our files, we produced a fine book called Once
Upon a Time in Central Asia. This book—which became a
springboard for The Turkic-Speaking Peoples—would not have
been finished without the help of Ali Tafldelen and Akbar
Khakimov from Tashkent, and Galina Vatzlavna Dlujneskaja in
St. Petersburg, Dimitriy D. Vasilyev in Moscow.
But at this point, fate intervened. The terrible earthquake
of August 1999 presented a major setback for Turkey as well
as this project. During that difficult time, there still were people who provided a burst of energy and support. Haluk and Gül
Kaya were one such couple. I will always be grateful to them.
The next phase began when Norwegian Statoil signed on
as a sponsor. Kjetil Tungland and Geir Løken, my initial contacts, were helpful and understanding. And, speaking of
Scandinavians, I must mention Ingmar Karlsson, the Swedish
consul in Istanbul and a soft-spoken intellectual with several
books to his name. I had the impression that he did not enjoy
long conversations; our contacts were very brief, but during one
of these, he introduced me to Telia Sonera, to Michael
Kongstad, and eventually to Erdal Durukan. I had already been
introduced to the communications world through my friend
Faruk Sarç, whom I kept encountering on midnight flights to
Central Asia. Eventually, I also met Serdar Cano€ulları in Baku.
I would like to express my appreciation to all of them—without
their contributions, I could never have reached the finish line.
Needless to say, there were many others who helped
with this project in a variety of ways. I cannot begin to measure their assistance and support. Among these are Jar
Mohammed (virtually my Kazakh stepson), Affan Sözalan, Enver
Asanov, Nabi Utarbekov in Tashkent, Paul McMillen in Istanbul,
and Altınbekov Krim and Col. Gürsel Tokmako€lu then in
Almaty. Thanks also to Gündüz Aktan, Çi€dem Tüzün, Emin
Bilgiç, and U€ur Ekflio€lu. Many thanks, too, to Marushka
Lopes and to Philippe Leboulanger in Paris. Philippe is not only
my lawyer but also a close friend who has helped put everything in order.
The number of people who became involved with this
project over the years is so vast that it is virtually impossible to
list them all. Among them were advisers and translators and
people who opened their homes and provided food to strangers
they most likely would never see or hear from again. The list
would surely include the policeman named ‹kbal in Uzbekistan,
whom I met at 3 a.m. after my passport was stolen. Not only did
he retrieve the passport and other stolen items, he also filled
our car with diesel fuel, a very precious liquid at the time. After
being ‹kbal’s guest for two days, my son and I were fortunate
to enjoy the hospitality of an Uzbek family who housed us (total
strangers to them) in Celalabat, Kyrgyzstan. Those are only a
few incidents in the remarkable saga that led up to this finished
book.
Here I have to make a distinction between those who
contributed to this book voluntarily and those who contributed
involuntarily or who provided professional services. In every
case, they are all very special people. To begin with, I should
name my mother, who exhausted her life without seeing the
results of her contributions for her son’s unbelievable adventures. For the last ten years of her life, she never understood
what I was doing and why. Then comes my wife, Kari, who
accompanied me on a veritable roller-coaster ride. For the sake
of this project, she put up with myriad unexpected ups and
downs. She graciously met and entertained many strangers
from many countries, and with patience she pitched in whenever the situation required. Then there is Yüksel Çetin, who not
only designed this book but also for years produced dummy
after dummy for my endless presentations.
Tight budgets meant that many people came and went
in our office, but Seval Karabulut remained and persevered—
wearing as many as a dozen different hats to keep the office
going. Although Sibel Yıldız joined the project staff near its end,
she proved invaluable at fitting together the final pieces of the
puzzle.
And, finally, there are three important contributors to this
project. Without them, this book could never have attained the
world standard of which I am proud. They are Adair Mill, who
meticulously translated almost all the articles in the book;
Kathleen Brandes, the English-language editor; and Do€an
Kuban, the intellectual force and the editor of this book. It was
more than a pleasure working with Do€an Kuban, with whom
I was able to exchange many valuable ideas.
Just as all the pieces of the book were falling into place,
Peter Stepan of Prestel Verlag and Els van der Plas of the Prince
Claus Fund in the Netherlands came into the picture to add the
crucial finishing touches. I am extremely grateful for their vision,
their cooperation, and their efforts.
Finally, to anyone whose name I may have overlooked
within past ten years, I apologize and extend my greatest appreciation.
Ergun Ça€atay
June 2006, ‹stanbul
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INTRODUCTION
Do¤an Kuban
The history of the Turkic-speaking peoples covers almost
two millennia in Eurasia, and the geographical extension of this
history stretches from the borders of China to Central Europe
and the Mediterranean. In these vast domains today are a large
number of modern states with their own national histories. The
reconstruction of the Turkic past from existing fragments has
been attempted by many scholars, especially J.-P. Roux,
Histoire des Turcs: Deux mille ans du Pacifique à la
Méditerranée (Paris: Fayard, 1984), and Peter B. Golden, An
Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1992). The articles in this book do not
endeavor to be a synthesis of this lengthy period. Rather, they
are individual interpretations of certain aspects of the symbiotic history of the Turkic-speaking peoples and their neighbors.
As the name of this volume indicates, it is the language that
provides the framework for linking together the many historical fragments.
In the history of Eurasia, a Turk can be a Pecheneg, a
Cuman, an Oghuz or Guz, a Yakut, a Turcoman, a Kalmuk (or
Kalmyk), a Seljuk, a Karakhanid, a Ghaznevid, a Kazakh, a
Karakoyunlu, an Akkoyunlu, an Özbek, a Kirghiz, a Uighur, an
Ottoman, a Kashgai, a Mamluk—or even something else in the
vast nomenclature of tribal or dynastic appellations. He can also
be Baburshah, the founder of the so-called Mughal Dynasty,
with his autobiography written in Turkic, or, more distantly a Wei
emperor, or a Hsiung-nu chieftain within the confines of the
Great Wall, a Hunnic warrior (perhaps with the name of Attila),
a pagan Bulgarian king besieging Constantinople . . . even a
member of the first royal family of Arpads of Hungary.
Each appellation corresponds to a special time, space,
and historical context, but in each case the language spoken
is a Turkic dialect. The actors belong to a linguistically definable group of nomads—the names applied to them by historians do not always indicate their relationships. In some
instances, this becomes a daunting case of incoherence. The
members of the same tribal group may go by the name Oghuz,
Seljuk, or Turcoman. All of these Turkic-speaking peoples originated in the Altai region and are related closely or loosely in
the geographical space where they live. There is probably no
historian who could ever clearly differentiate a Bulgar, a
Pecheneg, a Khazar, or an Oghuz by language, by culture, or
even by a definite geographical location. Was the Turkic-speaking Ghaznevid Sultan Mahmud conscious of his Turkishness, or
Persianized, or simply not concerned with such a discussion?
Why did a great artistic renaissance take place under the
Seljuks? How did the Ottomans rule the western Islamic lands
for five centuries? These were not nomadic endeavors.
Only a symbiotic history can aid the understanding of
these complex developments. The Arabs, Persians, Greeks,
14
Armenians, and Slavs do not like to recall those centuries of
their history—but this is not the history of a nation or a race. It
is a supranational history developed as a symbiotic process of
great complexity. Speaking a Turkic language has nothing to do
with racial purity; the steppe life and the exogamy of wandering nomads was a natural hindrance to racial purity.
Throughout this history in which the lives of nomads and
settled peoples were interwoven, the concepts of race, nation,
and language become irrevelant. One of the most famous
Chinese poets of the Tang period, Li Po, was said to be of
Central Asian origin, even of Turkic descent. Evidently, this origin has no great significance in the categorization of Li Po’s art;
it only shows that a nomadic Turk could become a Chinese
poet. Another example is Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi, who lived
under the Seljuks in Konya. A Persian, he wrote his famous
works in Persian (Farsi). The Turks claim his spiritual leadership
and accept him as one of their own, yet they cannot read his
original language.
In the symbiotic history of the Turks, Iran and Anatolia are
of primary importance for their sedentarization and the development of their culture. After the early Islamic conquests, there
was—as aptly labeled by Robert Canfield—a history of TurcoPersia, because after the Samanids, Turkic dynasties who ruled
Iran identified themselves with Iranian Muslim culture. The
Seljuks, whether in Iran or Anatolia, had an administration composed of Iranians, and the official language was Persian. The
neologism of Turco-Persia may seem preposterous to some
nationalists, but it is highly constructive. If one considers parallel cases—such as medieval Sicily under the Arabs and
Normans, or the Muslim presence in Spain between the eighth
and fourteenth centuries, or eleventh-century England—the
mixture of political dominance and race and language presents
similar situations. The founder of the Safavids, Shah Ismail,
wrote his poetry in Turkish because he was a Turcoman, but the
Safavids were the patrons of Iranian art and culture.
In the complex history of the Turkic-speaking peoples,
the only proof of identity is the language. The Italian merchants
of Middle Ages referred to Seljuk Anatolia as “Turchia.” This
was the name not of rulers or tribes but rather of the language
of the Turcomans. Yet the language has not necessarily been a
symbol of unified culture. Neither the Turkish sultans of Delhi,
nor the Seljuk rulers of Anatolia, nor the Mamluks of Egypt, nor
the Kipchaks of the southern Russian steppes represent a unified cultural realm, although they are all interrelated in various
ways. In fact, Turkic-speaking nomads and the settled peoples
of Eurasia lived in close, continuous interaction.
As the Turkic-speaking nomads intermingled with
numerous races and creeds, they founded great empires that
extended into the modern period. Probably the most dynamic
agents of world history, they established a considerable series
of dynasties and states: a number of empires in the steppes,
the Chinese Wei dynasty, the Uighurs, the Turkish dynasties of
India, Khazars, Volga Bulgars, Tatars of Russia, Ghaznavids,
Karakhanids, Seljuks, Timurids, Mamluks, Ottomans, and many
others. Mixed with many ethnic groups, they flourished in every
cultural niche: pagan, Chinese, Buddhist, Indian, Persian,
Islamic, Christian, Jewish, European, and Mediterranean. This
occurred not because they were a superior race but because
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they had an adequate numerical superiority at the right times.
The Turkic-speaking peoples have maintained a linguistic continuity in these historical and geographical spaces.
According to J. P. Mallory: ”We know from the historical
record that the Turkic language, confined in the 6th century AD
to a region no larger than we would normally posit for ProtoIndo-European, virtually exploded over an area in excess of
2,500,000 square kilometers by the 9th century AD. Here, of
course, the highly mobile character of Turkish society provided
them with an advantage in their expansions and their ability to
establish an exceptional linguistic uniformity over a gigantic
region” (In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language,
Archaeology and Myth [London: Thames and Hudson, 1989], p.
147).
The Turkic-language expansion corresponds to a history
of migrations, conquests, assimilation, and coexistence with
other peoples. This is a significant historical phenomenon
because it attests to a nomadic society that, through all the
vicissitudes of history, kept its linguistic continuity. A simple
comparative example is sufficient to show the nature of this
continuity. The word “one” (bir in Turkish) is the same in Turfan
as it is in Istanbul, but “one” is ein/eine in German and un/une
in French. The internal coherence of Turkic dialects, when compared with European languages, is impressive. The difference
between Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon is greater than the difference between the Turkish dialects of the steppes. The formation of Middle English began with the Norman conquest in
1066; the Turks of Central Asia produced, in the same period,
the Kutadgu Bilig and the Divan-› Lügat it-Türk. Chaucer used
English vernacular in the fifteenth century; Yunus Emre created his poetry in colloquial Turkish in thirteenth-century
Anatolia.
The states founded by the Turks, however, were multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious. The palace language was
frequently Turkish, but the administrative language in many
Turkic states was Persian; in Egypt, it was Arabic. The religious
language was Arabic. The military organization was usually of
Turkic origin. In the complicated process of nomads becoming
sedentary, the survival of the language can only be explained
by the linguistic conscience of the ordinary people.
Descendants of Turks and Turkic-speaking enclaves still survive
in Asia and Europe like archaeological fragments of earlier
political dominance. The Christian Gagauz in Moldova and the
small community of Karaim Jews in Ukraine and Lithuania, as
well as the much-assimilated people of Chuvash in Russia, are
prime examples; most interestingly, they have managed to keep
their linguistic identity for centuries. (Although the Orkhon
inscriptions date back to the eighth century, historical records
of earlier Turkic periods are scarce.)
As emphasized by some historians of global geopolitics,
the history of Northern and Western Asia and Eastern and
Central Europe has been shaped through a continuous struggle between the Central Asian nomads and their settled neighbors. After the migration of the Indo-European tribes under the
pressure of nomads of Altaic origin, the latter remained as the
most dynamic element of Eurasian history. There are also other
important nomadic groups, such as Tibetans and Magyars.
Tibetans have an Inner Asian relevance, and Magyar migration
may be seen as an extension of Turkic migration, because they
intermingled from the beginning with the Turkic-speaking
Bulgars, Pechenegs, and Cumans (A. Paloczi-Horvath,
Pechenegs, Cumans, Iasians: Steppe People in Medieval
Hungary [Budapest: Corvina/Kultura, 1989]). The Huns—their
predecessors in invading Europe—were more likely to speak a
Turkic dialect than any other language (Otto J. MaenchenHelfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and
Culture [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973]; Denis
Sinor, “The Hun Period,” pp. 177-205, in Sinor, ed., The
Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia [Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). Tabari (d. 923), the
great Persian chronicler, speaks of Khazars and Huns as Turks;
he considered all the steppe people to be Turks. There is no
stronger evidence for a foreigner to identify a stranger than by
his language.
Turkic-speaking nomads (or Turks themselves) are mentioned as being very active prior to the rise of Genghis Khan.
They dominated the steppes from the fifth to the seventeenth
centuries, except during the Mongolian outburst. Parallel to
their nomadic realm on the steppes, Turkic-speaking dynasties
and their Turcoman followers were establishing empires in the
Islamic and Byzantine domains and in India. The timespan of
these events and their geographic distribution over Asia and
Europe covers a great portion of world history. With their sheer
bulk, temporally and spatially, these events form an inherent
part of the structure of world history, but their image in world
historiography has ridiculously atrophied.
The linguistically identifiable Altaic nomads moved on an
east-west axis—a unique and continuous thrust of peoples
moving from Asia toward the West. Since they have been
assigned various names, European historical minds do not consider them elements of the same structural pattern. Modern
historians still discuss whether the Tatars of the Volga who
speak a Turkic dialect were originally related to Mongols, to
Bulgars, or to other Turkic-speaking nomads (Azade-Ayfle
Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience
[Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986]). The domination
of Turkic-speaking peoples is an unmistakable indication of
their numerical superiority. They became conscripts for Muslim
caliphs—serving as slave soldiers or mercenaries—because they
were the most available groups outside the confines of the various Islamic empires. Until the Mongol interlude, they were the
Muslim conquerors in Central Asia, India, and Anatolia. Their
conquests, however, did not make them colonizers; they had
symbiotic relationships with those whom they conquered. After
the conversion of the Ilkhanid dynasty to Islam, the Mongols of
Western Asia were mostly absorbed by the Turkic-speaking
tribes.
On the other hand, in China and India and later in Arab
areas, the Turkic-speaking population was assimilated. In
Central Asia, Iran, and Anatolia, they totally or partly absorbed
the local indigeneous populations. Volga Bulgars and Golden
Horde nomads carried Islam to the steppes and the Ottomans
took it to the Balkans.
The French historian E. Lavisse noted that Clovis, the
Merovingian chief, “founded not a nation, but a historical force”
(cited by Norman Davies in Europe: A History [Oxford and New
15
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York: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 234), so nomadic history was the unfolding of a historical force on a global scale. The
westward migration of the Turkic-speaking nomads was both
continuous and in quantum leaps. The largest migrations were
those of the Huns, the Gök Turks, the Seljuks, and, later, the
Ottomans. Although the best known of these nomadic outbursts was that of the Mongolians, the Mongolians subsequently vanished, whereas the infiltration by the Turks would
remain and develop.
Following the attacks by the Huns, the migrations of
Magyars, Bulgars, Pechenegs, and Cumans carved out two
domains in Eastern Europe in which the nomads settled and
entered into the realm of Christianity. The Slavicized Bulgars
adopted Eastern Orthodoxy; the Hungarians, Roman
Catholicism. What remained of the nomadic Turkic religion was
only a superficial and symbolic veneer. Once firmly settled,
almost all Turkic-speaking peoples abandoned their ethnic
identity and adopted whatever religion they found in their new
homelands—Uighurs became Manichaean and Buddhist; all
Turks, including the Volga Bulgars and the Golden Horde,
became Muslim; and the Bulgars became Orthodox Christian.
One idiosyncratic development, however, must be noted.
During the period of transition from nomadism to a sedentary
lifestyle, and from paganism to Islam, from the eleventh to the
fourteenth centuries, nomadic Turks developed their own interpretation of Islam—e.g., the Sufi and Alevi traditions. Although
Sufism was not their creation, its practice on the popular level
showed that the Turks interpreted religious dogma to fit their
pagan spirituality.
In analyzing the symbiosis of Turks and sedentary peoples, the traces of cultural interaction in the details of daily life
have never been the subject of serious study. Culinary traditions; clothing; handicrafts and minor arts and architecture;
behavioral attitudes; marriage rituals; the education of young
children—all of these still need to be studied in the reconstruction of the history of the Turkic-speaking peoples. What is
required is a total overhaul of many established historical prejudices. For fifteen hundred years, Turks and Slavs lived as immediate neighbors, yet the nature of such a close relationship has
been buried under the warmongering pages of traditional history. In earlier centuries, the Georgian aristocracy frequently
took brides from the Turkic-speaking nomads (A. Altstadt, The
Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule
[Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1992]); viewed from a
modern perspective, a Buddhist, Turkic-speaking bride in
Georgia in the fourth century is certainly an important event,
and its cultural implications should be of considerable scholarly interest.
In an enlightening passage in his study of the Golden
Horde, Charles J. Halperin speaks about the Russian intellectual response to Mongols in the Kievan period:
From the time of the East Slavs’ conversion to
Christianity, their chroniclers had omitted from the
records all mentions of cooperation with nomads like
Pechenegs and Polovtsy, of respect for them, and even
of knowledge of their ways; instead they recorded only
the military history, the battles and raids, and presented
them as religious rather than political conflicts. (Russia
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and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval
Russian History [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985], pp. 61-62)
Another characteristic example of such religious interpretations of historical events relates to the sea battle of
Lepanto. In European history, “the battle of Lepanto remains as
a great victory on an unprecedented scale and it sparked an
astonishing outpouring of celebration in the form of church
services, commemorative paintings and medals, and popular
literature; between October and the end of December 1571
alone, at least 190 separate items were printed in relation to it”
(Norman Housley, The Later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar,
1274-1580 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]). In most
of the European histories, the victory of the Turkish fleet over
the one commanded by Andrea Doria at Preveza is omitted; that
the Turks captured Cyprus the year before remains an even
lesser event in the works of European historians. Where Turks
are concerned, omission, indeed, is a characteristic of most
European historiography.
The Turks who were the rulers in the most important
Muslim lands became recognized as the champions of Islam.
Since the Middle Ages—beginning with the Seljuks and followed by the Ottomans—their status in the historiography of
Europe has been that of an enemy of Christendom, and consequently of Europe and even civilization. European consciousness of Turks did not start with the Huns, Bulgars, and Magyars
but rather with the Crusaders. The first surviving European
poem from the Crusades speaks of the Turks. Before the first
Crusade, Aleppo, Damascus, Antioch, Homs, and Jerusalem
had all been conquered for a period by the Seljuk Atabeg Ats›z.
The Crusaders fought with Turkish sultans and commanders,
with Saladin, the Mamluks, and, much later, with the Ottoman
Turks. The Turk became the quintessence of “the other.” They
presented, for example, an Italian image of fear, as in the popular saying, “Mamma, i Turchi!” or the expression of stark
hatred, as in Shakespeare’s Othello:
In Aleppo once, where a malignant and turban’d Turk
beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state, I took by the
throat the circumcised dog, and smote him thus. (Act V,
Scene 2)
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan
Fyodorovich tells his brother about the Turks in Bulgaria:
They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children,
they nail prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them
so till morning, and in the morning they hang them. (Part
2, Book 5, Chapter 4)
Although Europeans in their turn were no less “barbaric,” these and similar negative images about Turks have been
whispered in European ears since medieval times, and they will
last as long as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky are read.
Since modern historiography was founded by the
Europeans and written essentially by them, its models, structure, and terminology can only be the natural extension of their
culture and experience, and it still carries the impact of the socalled civilizing efforts of the Age of Imperialism. Europeans
often represent themselves as the final flourishing of a unique,
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one-directional universal history. The naïveté of this belief is
becoming more obvious every day. Perhaps the greatest fallacy
has been the so-called geographical concept of Europe. (For
recent discussions, see Martin W. Lewis and Karen Wigen, The
Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997]; and Andre G. Frank,
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998].) In the Cosmographia
Universalis, a map produced by Sebastian Münster and published in Basel, Switzerland, in 1550-54, Europe, dubbed
“Regina Europa,” was bordered on the east by Graecia,
Bulgaria, Scythia, and Tartaria; above them was a small
Moscovia. When Münster prepared this map, there was Turkish
hegemony from the Hungarian plains to the Ural Mountains. As
Marc Bloch stated, “Il n’y a pas d’histoire de l’Europe, il y a une
histoire du monde” (Frank, ReOrient, p. vii). “Regina Europa”
was not a geographic image but a symbolic one. In fact, it was
a Christian image, although Europa herself was a Phoenician
princess abducted by Zeus.
The fiction of the “continent” of Europe remains to this
day. But if one admits such a concept, the Crimea and
Tatarstan—until today, abodes of people of Altaic origin—dissolve into Europe without becoming part of the concept of a
European history. They are part of a different history. Likewise,
the Khazar kingdom, Magna Bulgaria on the Middle Volga, and
the Golden Horde, while in this “Europe,” should form not only
part of European history but also part of a much larger history.
Historical methodology based on the structure of the Roman
Empire cannot explain the Hunnic Empire; the history of settled
societies is partial, exclusive, and biased. Until we find tools to
integrate the history of nomads into the general history of the
world, the latter remains ideological. Because of the scarcity of
written documents, chronicling the history of nomads requires
piecing together a puzzle, but the dynamism of nomadic history is evident in its migrations, conquests, and empires.
The Crusades were crucial in the development of attitudes toward Islam. The Holy Land (Jerusalem, in particular)
was the geographical core of Christian mythology; the Muslims
who held sway in this sacred land were the object of continuous hatred. It is important to remember that one of the immediate reasons for the First Crusade was to help defend the
Byzantine Emperor Alexius I against the invasion of Anatolia by
the Turks. Byzantines and Europeans, however, had actually
fought with Turkic-speaking rulers for more than a millennium
prior to the First Crusade. But only after the Crusades did the
image of the Muslim realm earn a Turkish mask. This image
transfer was historically correct; with their conversion to Islam,
Turkic-speaking nomads brought the hinterlands of Central
Asia into the Muslim world. Vast tracts of South Asia and the
Eastern European steppes entered into the Islamic realm
through conquests by Volga Bulgars, Golden Horde Tatars, and
others. Turkish rulers conquered India; today, one-third of all
Muslims live in the Indian subcontinent. They conquered
Anatolia, terminated the Byzantine Empire, and lived in Eastern
Europe and the Mediterranean regions as representatives of
Islam. This image cost the Turks very dearly. They remained in
the focus of the East-West conflict as warriors of Islam. Since
they were active on all fronts from China to India and to the
borders of Christendom, they were enemies par excellence of
historians and European public opinion.
In the history of Islam’s heartland, there are three major
ethnic and linguistic groups: the Arabs, the Persians, and the
Turks. The world of the Old Testament made Arabs somewhat
acceptable to Europeans; the Persians’ Indo-European linguistic background made them sympathetic.
But the Turks were regarded as aliens by the Europeans
on every count. A major handicap for the Turkic-speaking peoples was their nomadism. While the Arabs and Iranians could
be identified by their geographical location, the Turks were
nowhere or everywhere—in China, Central Asia, India, Iran,
Egypt, Russia, and the Balkans. It may be remarked that geography makes sedentary historians comfortable, because they
can shelve historical information chronologically in geographical files. Since written history is the creation of settled people,
the annals of mobile masses of humanity—the nomads—cannot
be framed easily by historians. Without its geographical infrastructure and written documents, more than half of human
existence cannot be written in traditional ways. Thus, the history of the Turkic-speaking peoples—some of them settled,
some of them nomadic or seminomadic, embedded in all levels of Asian and European history—remains fragmentary. And
within the tradition of Eurocentric historiography and its obsolete geographical idiosyncrasies, it will remain fragmentary. If
we see the Altaic nomads as the exterior agents of change in
Asian and European history, especially Muslim history, then
their symbiotic existence with all the peoples of the Asian and
European continents will present a challenge for those who
want to reconstruct history with different styles of interpretation and from different perspectives.
The articles in this anthology, and the photographs illustrating the widespread existence of Turkic-speaking peoples,
indeed aim to open up new vistas for reconstructing an important part of the history of Eurasia.
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LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY
The Borders of Turcia
Connections and Divisions in the Development of the Turkic Peoples
LARS JOHANSON
Several groups of Turkic
people still remain in the
heart of Russia from the
days of the Golden Horde.
Once followers of pagan
Turcia is not a state, a country, or a contiguous territory.
But Turcia, representing the Turkic-speaking peoples of the
world, of course has borders on the political map: linked outlines, remarkably extensive, often capriciously drawn, but at
least relatively well defined.
This linguistic area ranges from Bosnia to the Great Wall
of China, from central Persia to the Arctic Ocean. Its core is a
long middle strip, between the 35th and 55th parallels, which
can be divided into three main sections: (1) a narrow section in
the west containing Asia Minor, northern Persia, Transcaucasia;
(2) to the east of the Caspian Sea, the wider, but more sparsely settled area of West Turkestan; and, finally, (3) across the
T’ien Shan Mountains, East Turkestan.
traditions, they were forced
by the Russians to convert
to Orthodoxy around the
sixteenth century. About
two million Chuvash Turks
still live in the Chuvash
Republic. This photo was
taken during Easter
celebrations in the main
church of Cheboksary
(also Chebokarskoye),
the republic’s capital.
The Turkic Languages
The languages found in the western section include
Turkish and Azerbaijani. In West Turkestan, we find Turkmen (in
the southwest), Uzbek (central), Kirghiz (on the eastern edge),
Kazakh and Karakalpak (in the northern steppe zone)—and
finally, in East Turkestan, Modern Uighur. These are the eight
major Turkic languages of the geographic middle strip. The
Turkestani steppes gradually descend into the Siberian lowlands. Here we find, parallel to the middle strip, a ring of Tatar
and Bashkir dialects; then to the east, north of the Altai, the
South Siberian Turkic languages; and finally, in North Siberia,
on the northeastern periphery of Turcia, Yakut and Dolgan.
Yet Turcia is not limited to these dozen languages.
Another half-dozen languages are spoken and written in the
former Soviet Union alone, such as Chuvash, Nogay, and Kumuk
in the west. In addition, migrations were conquest-related.
Many of the historic Turkic peoples lived as nomads—for example, the ancient Turks, Khazars, and Seljuks—but this is not a
unifying characteristic. Also, the remarkably broad and sudden
expansions of Turkic territories occurred in many different ways.
The Turkic Empires
To this day, the role of Turkic-speaking groups among the
Huns remains unknown. Let us consider, however, the ancient
Turkic Empire, which originated in present-day Mongolia and
had almost reached Europe by the 6th century. Though at times
divided and weakened, this empire existed until the middle of
the 8th century, when the Uighurs (who were Turks as well)
seized power. After they had been ousted a century later by the
Kirghiz (another Turkic-speaking people), the Uighurs established two states in the south. One of these states, in Sinkiang,
the so-called new borderland of the Chinese, lasted until the
Mongol period.
Let us also consider the groups in the northwest: the
early Oghuz-Turkic groups, such as the Khazars, who, at the end
of the 7th century, organized an enormous empire commencing at the estuary of the Volga and ruled the Ponto-Caspian
passage for three hundred years. Or the Bulgars, who crossed
the Danube early on and whose subsequent empire on the
Volga lasted from the 9th to the 13th centuries. Or the
Pechenegs, whose empire stretched from southern Russia to
the eastern Carpathians, until they were pushed to the Balkans
and annihilated at the end of the 11th century. And finally the
Cumans, who subsequently ruled the Pontic steppes until the
Mongol invasion. Equally well known are the Turkic dynasties
of the Islamic south: the Karakhanids, who conquered
Transoxiana around the turn of the first millennium; the
Ghaznavids, who expanded their state to Iran and into India;
and the Seljuks, who seized hold of Iran, Iraq, and the western
Islamic heartlands, including the Caliphate, thereby laying the
foundations for the later incomparable reign of the Ottomans.
But let us also consider the Mongol super-empire (created by Mongols and Turks together) and the subsequent western dynasties ruled by Turkic princes: in the southwest, that of
the Ilkhans; in the west, the Golden Horde; and in the center,
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the Chagatay dynasty, from where, around 1400, Timur
(Tamerlane) conquered the entire realm of the Ilkhans and
northwest India. Let us remember, finally, the Turkic Mamluk
dynasty in Egypt from the middle of the 13th century; the Indian
Moghul dynasty, founded by Timur’s descendant Babur in the
16th century; and the Safavid dynasty, which ruled in Persia
until the early 18th century.
The Linguistic Area
Territory, however, is not identical with linguistic area. All
of these well-known, often gigantic expansions of Turkic territory did not extend correspondingly the borders of Turcia.
The early Turkic nomads levied tributes but for the most
part left conditions unchanged in the conquered areas.
Sometimes Turks constituted only a portion of larger tribal confederations. Neither tribal names nor titles—which were often
adopted from earlier political systems—allow for the linguistic
identification of the members of such alliances. In the case of
the Islamic Turks, we are dealing with dynasties, often with a
small ruling class who demonstrated virtually no national consciousness, but who used the Persian language and exerted
their power by means of a Persian bureaucracy. Sometimes
Turkish was only the language of the court and the military,
such as with Kipchak under the Mamluks or Azerbaijani under
the Safavids. Despite the gigantic expanse of the Ottoman
Empire, their language was able to establish itself only in those
areas that were occupied first.
Nevertheless, Turkic, as we have seen, conquered what
is altogether a giant territory. Its greatest breakthrough, however, occurred when Turkestan and Tatarstan were Turkicized
by the Turkic-speaking majority in the Mongolian army. Of the
Iranian languages in this area, only Tadjik has been able to survive, but this language is so heavily influenced by Turkish that
it has even been characterized as a “Turkic language in the
making.”
Defensive Border Shifts
As mentioned, relatively few of Turcia’s border shifts
were aggressive or even offensive. In connection with the
Uighur emigration into the Chinese border area, where mostly
Iranian speakers were living at the time, there is no mention of
force. Nor was the Turkic penetration of Siberia characterized
by military invasion. The forests behind the high mountains
offered the only refuge for groups that, especially during the
Mongol incursion, were driven out of the central steppe zones.
There they were able to live almost untouched by political
events until the Russian invasion. The Yakuts still resided in the
southern portion of their present area of settlement until the
17th century, when they migrated farther north under Russian
pressure. In the 16th century, the violent attempt to Russianize
and Christianize the Kazan-Turks triggered their emigration to
western Siberia. The mountains in the south of West Turkestan
offered the Kirghiz a similar kind of refuge in times of persecution.
Recent history is rife with defensive border shifts created by displacement, flight, deportation, and other provocations.
Russian expansionism drove Turkic nomads deeper and deeper into the wastelands of the steppes and the Karakum Desert.
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LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY
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The revolutions in China, Russia, and, more recently,
Afghanistan caused departures especially of Uzbeks, Kazakhs,
Turkmen, and Kirghiz. In accordance with the Turkish-Greek
population exchange in the 1920s, Muslim Turks went from
Greece to Turkey and (together with the Greeks) Turkish-speaking Christians went from Anatolia to Greece. During World War
II, the Soviets forcibly displaced the Karachay, the Balkar, and
the Crimean Tatars; the first two groups were later returned to
their homeland in the Caucasus Mountains. Today an unprecedented kind of border shift is taking place: Economic reasons
have caused the only remaining self-ruled Turkic state to export
laborers to the highly industrialized Western European countries.
A “Turkic Type”?
What else unifies Turcia besides its linguistic outer
boundaries? Does a “Turkic people” exist in an ethnic or cultural sense?
Turcia is not distinguished by common anthropological
characteristics, although its core is represented by the High
Asiatic type. In the first historical mention of a Turkic people,
the Chinese describe them as blue-eyed and red-haired (i.e.,
blonde)—these were the Kirghiz, whose 9th-century or earlier
inscriptions indisputably prove them at least Turkophone. In
West and East Turkestan, Turks soon mixed with the indigenous
peoples; but even today, the High Asiatic element is still predominant east of the Oxus River. This is more apparent in the
case of Slavicized Bulgaria than in Turkicized Asia Minor.
Whereas, for instance, the Kazakhs make a relatively homogeneous impression, there are many other groups, such as the
Uzbeks and Uighurs, who clearly have mixed populations.
Anthropological studies of the Bashkirs have even revealed four
distinct main types. There is no such thing as an absolute
“Turkic type.”
Religions
Cultural patterns are to a great extent determined by religion. What connects or separates Turcia in this sense?
In the case of the ancient Turks, we encounter a tripotency doctrine that presumably was inspired by the Chinese.
The Uighurs designated as their state religion Manichaeism—
whose followers in the West were persecuted—and also
became familiar with Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity. The
present-day Yellow Uighurs, at the southeastern edge of Turcia,
are the only group that has adhered to Buddhism until this day.
In the 8th century, the Khazars adopted Judaism as their state
religion, probably to emphasize their independence vis-à-vis
the two great powers—the Christian Byzantine and the Muslim
Arab empires. In this way, they served as a barrier against Arab
expansion northward for 300 years. There are attempts to link
the Khazars with the Turkic-speaking Karaims, who belong to
the Karaite-Jewish sect.
Within the World of Islam
The rest of Turcia—the entire central region and
Tatarstan—has been connected since the Mongol period at the
latest by Islam. The political rise of the Turks in the whole area
is closely linked with this religion. Two groups originated here
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Timur built the necropolis
of Shah-i Zindah
(“The Living King”) for his
family, royalty, and top
generals. It encircles the
tomb of Qutham ibn-Abbas,
believed to have been a
cousin of the Prophet
Muhammad. The tomb of
Qutham ibn-Abbas, who
came to Central Asia to
spread Islam, attracts a
steady stream of devotees
to Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
Following pages:
Women shopping at the
market, Ashgabat,
Turkmenistan. At the
southern edge of the KaraKum (“Black Sands”)
Desert, the bazaar operates
every Wednesday and
Sunday. In summer, it
starts at 6:30 a.m. to avoid
the blazing midday heat.
in the late 10th century: the Karakhanids and then the Seljuks,
who pushed to the west in order to make a career for themselves in the established world of Islam. Turks soon dominated
not only the regular armies but also the popular movement of
the religious warriors—heterogeneous groups that, in their holy
war against infidels and heretics, expanded the boundaries of
Islam.
The conquest of Asia Minor after 1071, and the expansion of the young Ottoman state, were effected by such groups,
which gradually moved into constantly shifting border territories, largely absorbing the indigenous elements. Their advance
also constituted an advance of the boundaries of Turcia. This
Ottoman state was in essence different from the relatively
ephemeral nomadic empires and the earlier states of the Turkic
dynasties within the old world of Islam. Its heartland was
Islamized and Turkicized. On this basis—though soon without
the corresponding expansion of linguistic Turcia—the dominant
Muslim power of the modern era was established: a giant
empire on three continents that lasted until World War I.
Even in the Islamic portion of Turcia, the unifying influence of religion applies only with significant restrictions. Firstly,
the rift between Sunnis and Shi’ites constitutes a border that,
for example, has divided culturally for centuries the very closely related Turks of Turkey and Azerbaijan. Secondly, among the
nomads Islam never became very firmly rooted but instead
often appears as a relatively transparent gloss over shamanism.
In the entire area, popular Islam has obvious shamanistic features. The Turkologist Vámbéry remarked a century ago that
nowhere would one encounter Islam practiced as superficially
as by the Kazakhs; a Kazakh would invariably become a good
Muslim only after he had ceased to be a “real” Kazakh. Thirdly,
during most of the 20th century, virtually all Turks lived in officially either atheistic or secular states where the influence of
religion has been limited. Fourthly, the professing of Islam often
symbolizes commonalities of a nonreligious type.
The Symbolic Function of Islam
The nonreligious commonalities, for example, are particularly significant for the self-awareness of the Turks of Russia
and the former Soviet Union. European influence via the
Russians was often seen as alienating cultural chauvinism and
thus was met with opposition. In Turkestan, the Kazakhstan
region was colonized early and experienced the heaviest influx
of Europeans, as opposed to Turkmenistan, the last area to be
annexed, where the least amount of European immigration
occurred. Resistance to assimilation is strong everywhere. For
example, even today, Turkestani men seldom marry European
women, and Turkestani women almost never marry European
men. Disregarding Turkic or Iranian ancestry and language, this
community has regarded itself for centuries as culturally distinct from Europe.
The use of Islam as a symbol not only of cultural identity but also of separatism and pan-Turkism led to a ruthless battle against this religion during the Stalin era. As late as 1917,
the inviolability of the faith was guaranteed for, as it read, “the
Muslims of Russia, Tatars of the Volga and the Crimea, Kirghiz
and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and Tatars of
Transcaucasia.” Not until the resistance movements in the
name of Islam—which in the beginning were even led by Enver
Pasha, son-in-law of the Ottoman caliph, “God’s shadow on
earth”—did the relentless war against Islam begin. It eased off
again at the beginning of the 1940s.
Over the course of time, economically prosperous
Turkestan ceased to be a trouble spot. Nevertheless, Islam’s
culturally symbolic function remained. In spite of secularization,
most Islamic traditions persevered. Whether or not the socalled Islamic renaissance will prove “contagious” to the nearly 50 million predominantly Turkic-speaking Muslims of the former Soviet Union is one of the burning issues of the day. The
People’s Republic of China is struggling with similar problems,
although the situation is less volatile due to the nation’s much
smaller proportion of Muslims.
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BORDERS OF TURCIA
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UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE
Dogan Kuban, Tetragon Iletisim Hizmetleri A. S. z.h.
Ergun Cagatay
The Turkic Speaking Peoples
1500 Years of Art and Culture from Western China to the
Balkans
Gebundenes Buch mit Schutzumschlag, 504 Seiten, 24,0x30,0
ISBN: 978-3-7913-3515-5
Prestel
Erscheinungstermin: Oktober 2006