The Circassian National Anthem Entitled “Homeland of the Adyges”
The words of the anthem were written by the righteous son of the Adygha people, Aytek Namitok, who was a Professor at the Sorbonne University at the beginning of the twentieth century. Aytek Namitok was born in Circassia in 1892 and died in Turkey in 1963.
Circassian children were taught this anthem in the 1930s in the Circassian mixed-gender school in Quneitra, the Syrian Golan Heights.
The anthem was composed at the time by the leader of the Circassian nationalist movement and the founder of the Circassian school in the Golan Heights, the late Amin Samkough, in the early 1940s. It is the only national anthem that has been chosen and published by Circassians in their wider diaspora since the war of genocide and deportation.
Amin Samkough inspired the anthem from the Polish national anthem, in appreciation of the Polish freedom fighters who provided aid and assistance to the Circassians in their defensive war against the Tsarist Russian Empire in the nineteenth century.
