Crimean Tatars


Crimean Tatars, or simply Crimeans, are an Eastern European Turkic ethnic group and nation indigenous to Crimea. Their ethnogenesis lasted thousands of years in Crimea and the northern regions along the coast of the Black Sea, uniting Mediterranean populations with those of the Eurasian Steppe.
Until the 20th century, Crimean Tatars were the most populous demographic cohort in Crimea, constituting the majority of the peninsula's population as a whole. Following the Russian Empire's annexation of the Crimean Khanate in 1783, they were subjected to attempts at driving them from the region through a combination of physical violence and harassment, forced resettlement, and legalized forms of discrimination. By 1800, between 100,000 and 300,000 Crimean Tatars had left Crimea.
While Crimean Tatar cultural elements were not completely eradicated under the Romanov dynasty, the populace was almost completely eradicated from the peninsula under the Soviet Union, especially during the Stalinist era. In May 1944, almost immediately after the Soviets retook German-occupied Crimea during World War II, the country's State Defense Committee ordered the deportation of all Crimean Tatars, including the families of Crimean Tatar soldiers in the Red Army. The deportees were transported in trains and boxcars to Central Asia, where they were primarily resettled in Uzbekistan. Anywhere from 18% to 46% of the Crimean Tatar population was lost due to the Soviet deportation campaigns. From 1967 onwards, only a few of the displaced Crimean Tatars were allowed to return, although de-Stalinization had led to the Soviet government's recognition of the deportations as ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. Later, in 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union adopted new policies for the full right of return of the Crimean Tatars, sparking a steady increase in the population.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Crimean Tatars have been members of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. The European Union and international indigenous groups do not dispute their status as an indigenous people and they have been officially recognized as an indigenous people of Ukraine since 2014. However, the Russian administration in occupied Crimea considers them a "national minority" instead of an indigenous people, and continues to deny that they are the peninsula's titular nation, in spite of the fact that the Soviet administration considered them indigenous before their deportation. Today, Crimean Tatars constitute approximately 15% of the Crimean population. Beyond the peninsula, significant populations of the Crimean Tatar diaspora exist in Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria, among other countries.

Language

The Crimean Tatar language is a member of Kipchak languages of the Turkic language family. It has three dialects and the standard language is written in the central dialect. Crimean Tatar has a unique position among the Turkic languages because its three "dialects" belong to three different groups of Turkic. This makes the classification of Crimean Tatar as a whole difficult.
UNESCO ranked Crimean Tatar as one of the most endangered languages that are under serious threat of extinction in 2010. However, according to the Institute of Oriental Studies, due to negative situations, the real degree of threat has elevated to critically endangered languages in recent years, which are highly likely to face extinction in the coming generations.
  • Noğay, : Noğay is spoken by the vast majority of diaspora Crimean Tatars in Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and others. It belongs to Bulgar subgrouping of the Kipchak family and Nogai, another Kipchak language, has influenced it. It is related to Kazakh, Karakalpak, and Nogai proper. This dialect was spoken by former nomadic inhabitants of the Crimean steppes. It has roots in Cumania and later the Golden Horde. It was influenced by the Middle Mongol spoken in the Golden Horde and notable Slavic influences occurred during the Imperial Russian invasion in 1783.
  • Bağçasaray : Standard Crimean Tatar is classified as a language of the Cuman subgroup of Kipchak and the closest relatives are Karachay-Balkar, Karaim, and Urum. Bağçasaray is spoken in Crimea by sedentary Tatars as the standard language because its speakers comprise a relative majority of Crimean Tatar speakers in Crimea. The middle dialect, although it is a Kipchak language, has strong Turkish, Ukrainian, Mariupol Greek elements.
  • Yalıboyu : The Yalıboyu, Tat-Tarter, or Coastal Tatar language is an Oghuz language descended from Ottoman Turkish. It arrived in Crimea through the Ottoman Empire's conquest of the Principality of Theodoro in 1475. Following the Turkish occupation, Southern Crimea came under direct Ottoman Turkish rule, while the Crimean Khanate in northern regions was vassalized. The language has possible Crimean Gothic and some Italian and Greek influences due to trade routes.

    Sub-ethnic groups

The Crimean Tatars are most often subdivided into three core sub-ethnic groups:
  • The Mountain Tats who used to inhabit the mountainous Crimea before 1944 predominantly are Cumans, Greeks, Goths and other people, as Tats in Crimea also were called Hellenic Urum people who were deported by the Imperial Russia to the area around Mariupol; The term Tat appears already in the 8th century Orkhon inscriptions denoting "a subjected foreign people". In the 17th century Crimean context, it probably denoted various peoples of foreign origin living under the khan's rule, especially the Greeks, Italians, and the remnants of Goths and Alans inhabiting the mountainous southern section of Crimea.
  • The Yaliboylu Tats composed of Tatarized descendants of peoples who lived on the Southern Coast of the peninsula before 1944 and practiced Christianity until the 14th century;
  • The Noğay Tatars — former inhabitants of the Crimean steppe.
There are also three other groups that are closely related to Crimean Tatars and sometimes are considered as sub-ethnic groups:
  • The Tajfa who are Roma Muslims assimilated into the Crimean Tatar people, speak a Crimean Tatar dialect, and typically consider themselves to be Crimean Tatar first and Roma as a secondary identity.
  • The Urum. Some researchers consider the Urums to be a Turkic people—Christian Crimean Tatars who historically practiced Orthodoxy, as they share identical customs and traditions and speak Crimean Tatar, while genetic studies show them to be significantly closer to Southern Coastal and Mountain Crimean Tatars than to Greeks or even the neighboring Rumey Greeks, with even Steppe Crimean Tatars being genetically nearer to them than mainland Greeks; however, culturally, both Urums and Rumai identify more strongly with Greece, evidenced by institutions like Mariupol University's Modern Greek department, though scholars generally classify them as a Greek sub-ethnic group and diaspora, a categorization challenged by Ukrainian historian V. I. Ivatsky, who argues the Rumey-Urum distinction is political rather than ethnic, positing that Rumey could denote any Orthodox Crimean resident while Urums specifically descend from non-Greek Turkic-speaking Crimeans, with the prevailing "Tatarized Greeks" narrative being perpetuated through Greek and Cypriot consulate-sponsored initiatives in Mariupol, all while the community underwent progressive Russification since the mid-19th century, losing traditional markers like language and dress and adopting a Hellenic identity shaped by Russian education and imperial perceptions, wherein Russified Azov Greeks internalized the external image imposed upon them.
  • The Lipka Tatars. Part of the Lipka Tatars, who came from the Crimean Khanate, are considered part of the Crimean Tatars. They played a significant role in the Crimean Tatar national movement during the First and Second World Wars. Famous scientists and writers with a world name come from Lipka Tatars. Most of them do not know the Crimean Tatar language due to assimilation and speak Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Historians suggest that inhabitants of the mountainous parts of Crimea lying to the central and southern parts, and those of the Southern coast of Crimea were the direct descendants of the Pontic Greeks, Scythians, Ostrogoths, and Kipchaks along with the Cumans while the latest inhabitants of the northern steppe represent the descendants of the Nogai Horde of the Black Sea, nominally subjects of the Crimean Khan. It is largely assumed that the Tatarization process that mostly took place in the 16th century brought a sense of cultural unity through the blending of the Greeks, Italians, Ottoman Turks of the southern coast, Goths of the central mountains and Turkic-speaking Kipchaks and Cumans of the steppe and forming of the Crimean Tatar ethnic group. However, the Cuman language is considered the direct ancestor of the current language of the Crimean Tatars with possible incorporations of the other languages, like Crimean Gothic. The fact that Crimean Tatars' ethnogenesis took place in Crimea and consisted of several stages lasting thousands of years is proved by genetic research showing that the gene pool of the Crimean Tatars preserved both the initial components for thousands of years, and later in the northern steppe regions of the Crimea.
The Mongol conquest of the Kipchaks led to a merged society with a Mongol ruling class over a Kipchak speaking population which came to be dubbed Tatar and which eventually absorbed other ethnicities on the Crimean peninsula like Italians, Greeks, and Goths to form the modern day Crimean Tatar people; up to the Soviet deportation, the Crimean Tatars could still differentiate among themselves between Tatar, Kipchak, Nogays, and the "Tat" descendants of Tatarized Goths and other Turkified peoples.

Genetics

The genetic composition of the Crimean Tatars is distinguished by the presence of two predominant patterns: the so-called "sea pattern" and the "steppe pattern". The former is believed to have originated from Mediterranean populations, while the latter is attributed to the nomadic tribes of the Great Eurasian steppe. The primary contributor to the "sea pattern" of the Crimean Tatars is not the later migrations of Greeks from the Byzantine Empire, but rather the ancient populations from the city-states of the Eastern Mediterranean dating back to the 7th to 5th centuries BC. This assertion is further substantiated by the analysis of the Crimean Tatar gene pool as revealed by the Human Origins full-genome panel data. Geneticists have concluded that the Crimean Tatars, as a distinct ethnic group, were formed directly within Crimea, rather than migrating to the region, thereby affirming their status as the indigenous inhabitants of Crimea.
Contrary to hypotheses suggesting that the gene pool of the Crimean Tatars was significantly influenced by Central Asian populations or Mongolic groups, genetic research indicates a considerable divergence from both, with the Balkars, a highland ethnic group from the Caucasus, being most genetically akin to the Crimean Tatars. Furthermore, the hypothesis positing a substantial impact of Slavic populations on the genetic makeup of the Crimean Tatars is also refuted by genetic studies, which reveal no significant influx of "Slavic" genetic material into the Crimean Tatar gene pool despite prolonged proximity.
The preliminary phase of the comprehensive analysis of complete Y-chromosomes, undertaken at the Laboratory of Genomic Geography of the N. I. Vavilov Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, focused on three specific haplogroups — G1, N3, and R1b — unveiled connections between the Crimean Tatars and the genomes of individuals from the Bronze Age steppes of Eurasia, specifically those associated with the Yamnaya archaeological culture, and the "European" and "Asian" Neolithic variants of haplogroup N3 in Northern Eurasia. These findings may reflect not only the genetic legacy of the Scythians and Sarmatians but also more ancient affiliations between the populations of mainland Eastern Europe and the Crimean Peninsula.
The genetic composition of the Crimean Tatars is primarily constituted by five predominant Y-DNA haplogroups: R1a, R1b, J2, G2a3b1 and E1b1b1, which together account for 67% of the genetic diversity, whereas other haplogroups are classified as minor, each contributing between 1% and 5% to the overall genetic makeup of the Crimean Tatars.
The structure of the mitochondrial gene pool of Crimean Tatars varies depending on the region: the Southern Coastal Crimean Tatars — yalıboylu — show similarities to the populations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe, with a predominance of haplogroups H, V, U5a, K, and T2b, as well as the presence of Near Eastern lineages. The Mountain Crimean Tatars — tats and dağlı— share these traits but have a slight shift toward the steppe Crimeans, which is manifested by the presence of East Asian haplogroups. Steppe Crimean Tatars — noğays and çöllü — are distinguished by a relatively high proportion of East Asian lineages, which make up about a quarter of their mitochondrial gene pool, bringing them closer to the populations of Central Asia and the North Caucasus. A unique feature of the Steppe Crimean Tatars is the increased proportion of haplogroup H, which is rare for populations with a similar set of haplogroups. Multivariate analysis confirms that, along maternal lines, the Southern Coastal and Mountain Crimean Tatars are included in the Mediterranean cluster together with the Greeks, Italians, the peoples of Sicily and Sardinia, Cyprus and Crete, Turks, Bulgarians, and Romanians. They also approach the cluster of the Caucasus population, reflecting the significant proximity of all European populations to each other precisely in maternal haplogroups. The Steppe Crimean Tatars, however, are included in the Central Asian cluster.