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Updated: June 4, 2025
The Circassians seem to be the great bugbear in Asiatic Turkey. I am told that once I get beyond the country that these people range over who are regarded as a sort of natural and half-privileged freebooters I shall be reasonably safe from molestation.
"I will now go on to the Cyprus convention, and say a few words on the bag-and-baggage policy. Turkey and Egypt are governed by a ring of Pashas, most of them Circassians, and who are perfect foreigners in Turkey.
In the Caucasus the Russians continually attack great and dense forests; they fire in them several round shots, then grape, and then storm them with the bayonet; and the Circassians are no worse soldiers than are the Southrons. European papers talk much of mediation, of a peaceful arrangement, of compromise.
“My poor, innocent Padischa, you do not understand at all. That was the opera, which makes all the difference. The husbands of those women pay enormous prices, expressly that their wives may exhibit themselves in public, decked in jewels and suggestive toilets. You could buy a whole harem of fair Circassians for what one of those little square boxes costs.
Since the capture of Shamyl and the pacification of the Caucasus, this Cossack population of the Kuban and the Terek, extending in an unbroken line from the Sea of Azof to the Caspian, have been able to turn their attention to peaceful pursuits, and now raise large quantities of wheat for exportation; but they still retain their martial bearing, and some of them regret the good old times when a brush with the Circassians was an ordinary occurrence and the work of tilling the soil was often diversified with a more exciting kind of occupation.
But though the Circassians call themselves Mahomedans, they keep many of their old customs, and these customs show that they once heard about Christ. It is their custom to dedicate every boy to God: but not really to God, for in truth they dedicate him to the cross. Let me give you an account of one of the feasts of dedication. The place of meeting was a green, shaded by spreading oak-trees.
Piercing shrieks interrupted their story, and a man, whom the Circassians saw to be the old dervish, rushed round the corner of the terrace with the three Jews behind him. When the fugitive beheld so many people collected together, he turned down another path, but the slaves captured all four and brought them before their master.
On the whole, the Circassians are remarkably temperate in both meats and drinks; in this simplicity of living, as in so many other respects, still preserving a striking resemblance to the manners and customs of the Greeks of the earliest ages.
Several small tribes in this latter division which are of Tartar origin are indeed governed by khans; but even among them where the form of government is despotic, as well as west of the Terek where it is aristocratic, there prevails such a spirit of personal independence together with such an equality of civil rights and social conditions, that the Circassians in general may best be characterized as associations of free brothers, not unlike the Germans as described by Tacitus.
They ripped open his body with a dagger, and after pushing the iron spoon into the wound, went off quietly, leaving him to his fate on the steppes. He was found by some Cossacks at the point of death. He told them this story, and died on the way to their village. The Cossacks had more than once warned us against the Circassians, relating many other edifying tales of the same sort.
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