| Total population | |
|---|---|
| >192,700[1] | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Greece,Russia,Georgia,Ukraine | |
| Languages | |
| Urum,Tsalka | |
| Religion | |
| Eastern Orthodoxy | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| OtherUkrainian Greeks,Pontics,Caucasian Greeks,Crimean Tatars,Crimean Karaites,Krymchaks,Meskhetian Turks |
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| History of Greece (Ancient ·Byzantine ·Ottoman) |
Urums (/ʊəˈruːm/,/ʊˈruːm/;Greek:Ουρούμ,Urúm;Turkish andCrimean Tatar:Urum,IPA:[uˈɾum]) are several groups ofTurkic-speakingGreek Orthodox people native toCrimea. The emergence and development of the Urum identity took place from 13th to the 17th centuries. Bringing together theCrimean Greeks along with Greek-speakingCrimean Goths, with other indigenous groups that had long inhabited the region, resulting in a gradual transformation of their collective identity.[2]
There are two main theories covering how the Urums may have originated. One hypothesis is that the Urums arose as a result of someCrimean Greeks converting to using theCrimean Tatar language. Another theory is that the Urums arose as a result of the adoption ofChristianity by a group ofCrimean Tatars.[3] Some also speculate that the Urums from Crimea/Ukraine and Georgia have the same origins fromAnatolia, with some even going as far to say that the two Urum groups speak the same language; however, the latter is not supported with the available linguistic data.[4]
The termUrum is derived from theArabic wordروم (rūm), meaningRoman and subsequentlyByzantine andGreek, with aprotheticu in some Turkic languages. InOttoman Turkish under theOttoman Empire,Rum denotedOrthodox Christians living in the Empire; inmodern Turkish,Rum denotesGreeks living in Turkey and Cyprus. The word "Urum" involves a protheticu- that generally appears inTurkic language loanwords initially starting with ar-.[4] The common use of the termUrum appears to have led to some confusion, as mostTurkish-speaking Greeks were called Urum.
The term is used by the following sub-ethnic groups of Greeks as a way of ethnic self-identification:
The Greeks of Crimea (and later of the adjacent Azovian region; present-dayDonetsk Oblast, Ukraine) were represented by two groups: the Hellenic-speakingRomaioi, whose dialect is known asRumeíka, a.k.a.Mariupol Greek, and the Turkic-speaking Urums (also called Graeco-Tatars).[3] Both groups populated the region over the course of many centuries, and consist of both the descendants of the ancient (4th century BC – 4th century AD) Greek and Byzantine Christian Greek colonizers of the northern shores of theBlack Sea and interior of southern Russia and Ukraine, and also ofPontic Greeks who fled as refugees or economic migrants from northeastern Anatolia between the fall of theEmpire of Trebizond to the Ottomans in 1461 and the1828-29 Russo-Turkish War. Some Greek settlers of the Crimea region gradually adopted theCrimean Tatar language as a mother tongue.
In 1777, after theannexation of Crimea by theRussian Empire, EmpressCatherine the Great ordered all Greeks from the peninsula tosettle in theNorth Azov region aroundMariupol, and they have been known as the North Azovian Greeks (приазовские греки / priazovskie greki) henceforth. Some linguists believe that the dialect spoken by the North Azovian Urums differs from the common Crimean Tatar language on a more than just dialectical level and therefore constitutes a separate language unit within theKypchak language sub-group (seeUrum language).
Urums practiceEastern Orthodox Christianity.[5] Throughout history, they represented an isolated cultural group and rarely settled in towns populated by the Romaioi, despite sharing Greek heritage with them.[6] Unlike Greek, Urum has never been a language of secondary education in Ukraine.Turkologist Nikolai Baskakov estimated that by 1969, 60,000 people spoke Urum as a native language. According to the All-Ukrainian Population Census of 2001, only 112 of theDonetsk Oblast's 77,516 Greeks listed languages other thanGreek,Ukrainian andRussian as their mother tongue.[7]
Tsalka Urums are sometimes referred to as theTrialeti Greeks or the Transcaucasian Turcophone Greeks,Pontic Greeks andCaucasus Greeks, orΤσαλκαλίδες (Tsalkalides), a name that refers to the Georgian town ofTsalka, where Urums once made up the largest ethnic community.
Between the fall of theEmpire of Trebizond to the Ottomans in 1461 and theRussian annexation of Georgia in 1801 there had been several waves ofPontic Greeks who left the easternBlack Sea coastline and the highlands of thePontic Alps, and then settled as refugees or economic migrants in Georgia and theSouth Caucasus. The largest and most recent waves came in the late 18th and especially the early 19th century, when the South Caucasus experienced mass migrations ofGreeks from the Ottoman Empire, mainly from the region ofPontus, as well as the vilayets ofSivas andErzurum in northeastern Anatolia. This wave of Pontic emigrants is particularly associated with the1828-29 Russo-Turkish War, when manyPontic Greeks collaborated with or welcomed theRussian army that had occupied the region and then, to escape likely Turkish reprisals, followed it with their families when it withdrew back into Russian territory.
Many Pontian Greeks spoke Turkish either as Greek-Turkish bilinguals, or as a mother tongue due to linguistic assimilation processes that isolated groups of the Anatolian Greeks were exposed to.
According toAndrei Popov, throughout the 19th century hundreds of Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox families fromErzurum,Gümüşhane andArtvin moved to Southern Russia and settled on theTsalka Plateau, in present-day Georgia.[8] During the Soviet era they populated over 20 villages in Georgia'sTsalka,Dmanisi,Tetritsqaro,Marneuli, andAkhaltsikhe regions. In 1926, there were 24,000 Greeks living inTiflis and the neighbouring area with 20,000 of them being Turcophone.[9]
Tsalka language, the dialect spoken by the Tsalka Urums, is similar to that of the Meskhetian-Ahiska Turks, an Eastern Anatolian dialect of Turkish, which hails from the regions of Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin. The Turkish Meskhetian-Ahiska dialect has also borrowed from other languages (including Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek) which the Meskhetian-Ahiska Turks have been in contact with during the Russian and Soviet rule.[10] However some linguists, likeNikolai Baskakov, classify it as a separateOghuz language due to differences in phonetics, vocabulary and grammar.[11] Present-day Tsalka language is also thought by some to be phonetically closer toAzeri than to the literary Turkish, which leads them to believe that it is rather a dialect of Azeri.[12] Late Soviet censuses also showed Azeri as the mother tongue of the Tsalka Urums, however this may have been done simply due to the Soviets' somewhat unfavourable attitude towards Turkish culture. No secondary education in Urum Turkish has been available; its speakers attended schools where subjects were taught in Azeri and later in Russian.[13]
The Tsalka Urums themselves call their languagebizim dilja (turk. 'our language') ormoussourmanja (turk. 'Muslims' language). Nowadays, the majority speaks Russian. Also starting from the 1960s, there has been a modest cultural revival among the Turcophone Greeks. HistorianAirat Aklaev's research showed that 36% of them consideredGreek their mother tongue despite not speaking it; 96% expressed a desire to learn Greek.[14]
A documentation project on the language of Caucasus Urum people compiled a basic lexicon, a sample of translations for the study of grammar, and a text collection. The website of the project contains further information about the language and the language community.[15]
After thedissolution of the Soviet Union, serious migration did take place, so Greeks are no longer the largest ethnic group in Tsalka. Between 1989 and 2002, their population declined from 35,000 to 3,000. Many emigrated toGreece, particularlyThessaloniki and other parts ofGreek Macedonia inNorthern Greece, and also to the relatively near theNorth Caucasus region ofKrasnodar Krai and other parts ofSouthern Russia (particularly the cities ofKrasnodar,Abinsk,Sochi, andGelendzhik).
By religion, the majority of Urums areGreek Orthodox Christians. Urums tend to practice their religion in Greek,Georgian orRussian Orthodox churches. Despite there not being any liturgical practices in the Urum language, 60% (18/30 respondents) of native Urum speakers reported that they use Urum in praying. 23% of Urum vocabulary in the field of religion or belief are said to be loanwords - much less than the average across world languages, being estimated to be 43%.[4] According to legend common among the Urums of Georgia, long before they left Turkey, the Orthodox Greeks were forced to make a choice between their language and faith. Being devout Christians, they chose to keep their Orthodox faith and thus relinquished their language. However, most historians consider this to be a myth.[16]
The language of the North Azov Urums is a Turkic language belonging to theWest Kipchak branch.[17] It has been written with theGreek alphabet, and between 1927 and 1937 it was written withYañalif, and it was taught in some schools.[18] After Yañalif's replacement by theCyrillic script in 1940, the Urum language was to only be written in Cyrillic.[19] Urum is considered by some to be a dialect of Crimean Tatar.[18]
Much of Urum's religious vocabulary is descended from words of Turkic origin, for example,Allah for ‘God’ orcänäm for ‘hell’ (compare Turkish allah, cehennem). However, Russian loanwords are restricted to narrow Christian terms, e.g.,gimn meaning ‘hymn’, derived from Russiangimn (Гимн) andepiskop meaning ‘bishop’, derived from Russianepiskop (Епископ).[4]
TheTsalka Urum language belongs to theOghuz branch of the Turkic language and displays substantial similarities with theTurkish dialects of Anatolia (e.g. in vocal harmony), but also withRussian (e.g. in the use of subordinate clauses).[4]
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