Circassians Remember the Past But Mobilize for the Future
May 21 memorial ceremony, Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria (Source: circassianworld.com)
This year as every year for more than a century, the nearly 500,000 Circassians in their North Caucasus homeland and the more than five million Circassians in the diaspora paused, on May 21, to remember the losses they suffered during their 101-year-long resistance to Russian imperial expansion and their forcible expulsion from their homeland in 1864. Indeed, according to Zaurbek Kozhev of the Kabardino-Balkar Institute of Humanitarian Research, this memorial day is “an inalienable part of contemporary Circassian identity” and thus the basis for the mobilization of the community to pursue its collective goals, a point other speakers at memorial meetings made as well (Kavkazsky Uzel, May 23). Read more
