thisiscaucasian:Reflection | FlickrThough no caption accompanies these startling photographs, their

thisiscaucasian:Reflection | FlickrThough no caption accompanies these startling photographs, their location—Circassia—and their subject—a woman clad in the traditional clothing of the Circassian people—tell a wordless, mournful story, one of deportation and genocide, of exile and diaspora, and of incalculable loss.In the mid-nineteenth century, the Circassian people of the Northern Caucasus, a region then controlled by the Russian Empire, were deported en masse from their ethnic homeland. Many died; those who survived largely settled in the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed the Muslim refugees, but could not adequately provide for them. Circassian communities still exist across the Middle East in Turkey, Israel, and elsewhere.In the months and years leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, once Circassian land and the site of their ethnic cleansing, Circassian activists around the world protested the exploitation of their land and erasure of their history by Russia, the perpetrator of their genocide. The land that was once Circassia has new inhabitants and a modern legacy, but its people want it back. -- source link

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