Ahisha Turks
Ahiska Turks
Culture plays such a significant role in human life that no society can (function)exist without it. All norms, value systems, and ways of conducts are the products of culture. Culture determines how an individual should act, dress, talk, eat, be educated, interact, believe, etc. Scholars of human development believe that there is a strong relation between cultural practices and the development of how members of a particular society think, remember, reason, solve problems, act, and behave. In the following research, I attemp to understand the Ahiska Turks’ culture in the Wheaton, Illinois area of the United States and whether they had experienced any hardship in their new land, how they were coping with those difficulties, and whether they were concerned with preserving their ethnic identities.
The Ahiska Turks, living in south of Georgia Republic, are originally from the mountainous region of Meskhetia (Ahiska), near the Turkish border. Meskhetian Turks are predominantly Sunni Muslims within a Shiite Muslim minority. The Meskhetian Turks speak an Eastern Anatolian dialect of Turkish, which hails from the regions of Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin. The Meskhetian Turkish dialect has also borrowed from other languages (including Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and Russian), which the Meskhetian Turks have been in contact with during the Russian and Soviet rule. The term Meskhetian is preferred ,only by those who claim that the population was ethnic Georgians who converted to Islam under Ottoman rule (Aydingun et al., 2006).Thus preference for using this term comes from the underlying Georgian identity, which many Ahiska Turks refuse to use, as for them, it denies their Turkish origins
On 15 November 1944, then General Secretary of communist party in Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, ordered the deportation of over 115,000 Meskhetian Turks from their homeland, who were secretly driven from their homes and herded onto rail cars. As many as 30,000 to 50,000
Culture plays such a significant role in human life that no society can (function)exist without it. All norms, value systems, and ways of conducts are the products of culture. Culture determines how an individual should act, dress, talk, eat, be educated, interact, believe, etc. Scholars of human development believe that there is a strong relation between cultural practices and the development of how members of a particular society think, remember, reason, solve problems, act, and behave. In the following research, I attemp to understand the Ahiska Turks’ culture in the Wheaton, Illinois area of the United States and whether they had experienced any hardship in their new land, how they were coping with those difficulties, and whether they were concerned with preserving their ethnic identities.
The Ahiska Turks, living in south of Georgia Republic, are originally from the mountainous region of Meskhetia (Ahiska), near the Turkish border. Meskhetian Turks are predominantly Sunni Muslims within a Shiite Muslim minority. The Meskhetian Turks speak an Eastern Anatolian dialect of Turkish, which hails from the regions of Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin. The Meskhetian Turkish dialect has also borrowed from other languages (including Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and Russian), which the Meskhetian Turks have been in contact with during the Russian and Soviet rule. The term Meskhetian is preferred ,only by those who claim that the population was ethnic Georgians who converted to Islam under Ottoman rule (Aydingun et al., 2006).Thus preference for using this term comes from the underlying Georgian identity, which many Ahiska Turks refuse to use, as for them, it denies their Turkish origins
On 15 November 1944, then General Secretary of communist party in Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, ordered the deportation of over 115,000 Meskhetian Turks from their homeland, who were secretly driven from their homes and herded onto rail cars. As many as 30,000 to 50,000