On Crimean Tatars, Or, Meet My Didactic Side

Today, I had a mani/pedi. My host mother, Ira (she's really like my host big sister) pictured below, runs a small subterranean salon where she also offers makeup tattoos and "depilatsiya" with sugar (a process shrouded in mystery, even after much questioning). But this was really only the very first thing that happened today.

Ira offered me a mani/pedi practically upon my arrival last week, partly because I'm a guest in her home, but also because a co-worker of hers is a Tatar woman. So Gulnara, a pretty dyed-blond Tatar woman, told me an incredible story about her family's deportation from and return, half a century later, to Crimea - while I had my nails painted in an ornate poppy flower design. She delivered her story in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable: We lost $15,000 when we left Uzbekistan, sold our house there for nothing. We came here and were homeless. My father couldn't get a job. He still can't. We decided to come spontaneously, and it's been hard, but life is hard. Etc. 

A quick review: On May 18, 1944, the entire population of Crimean Tatars - some 200,000 - were loaded onto cattle cars by order of Stalin, who believed that they were conspiring against the Soviet regime, and deported en masse to Central Asia. Many Tatar men were serving on the front, so the majority of those deported were women, children, and the elderly. It is estimated that 1/2 to 2/3s of the total population of Tatars died on the trains before they reached Central Asia. Shortly after, the Soviet regime pushed a propaganda campaign to encourage ethnic Russians and Eastern Ukrainians to move to Crimea. Land of Sun and Sea! Boundless opportunity awaits! Land land land! Many Turkic place names were changed to Russian names, mosques destroyed, houses resettled, books burned. In 1954, Khrushchev gifted Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR as a token of 300 years of friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian people. 

In 1991, Crimea became independent along with Ukraine, and after an extremely volatile decade - with threat of secession from multiple sides and huge fights over the Black Sea fleet - the Crimean autonomous republic of Ukraine seems to have settled into an unsteady compromise, somewhere between complacency and tolerance, for its present political affiliations.

Crimean Tatars weren't given the right of return to the Crimean peninsula until 1988. Even then, they weren't provided any guarantees about access to land, jobs, education, or, really, anything. In 1991, the Crimean Tatars formed an independent governing body, the Mejlis, to advocate for their rights. By the end of the 1990s, about 250,000 Crimean Tatars had returned to Crimea. Many squatted in vacant homes and lots. Some, when forced by authorities to surrender land, threatened self-immolation and in some cases, made good on the threat. The international human rights community became involved. NGOs proliferated,  the Crimean Tatars were considered for special status as a Ukrainian "indigenous" group. Things were looking better. The international human rights community slowly left. Many NGOs began to disintegrate.

Today, Crimean Tatar is being offered in some secondary schools and universities, such as the Crimean Engineering and Pedagogical University, pictured below. (I'm studying here.)

Many Tatars have found jobs and homes, but many haven't. On the way out of Simferopol, I observed vast open fields that are cluttered with tiny mustard-yellow brick houses, many of which look like the ruins of shacks that never got built. These houses represent the claims of Tatar families seeking to gain legal rights to build on the land (though I was told today that other ethnic groups have caught on to that plan). 

Feelings of animosity towards the Tatars are surprisingly quick to rise to the surface. I visited two English language classes today where I explained that I came here to study Crimean Tatar culture and music. Afterwards, the teacher told me that, when I say such things, it is really shocking to her students, because no one wants to study Tatar culture here. Tatars, she explained, are largely despised by Russians and Ukrainians. They are not all bad, she said, but they feel entitled to something that is no longer theirs. 

This certainly is not the opinion of everyone I've spoken to. But the "shock" over my decision to come and study this culture is evidence of something, and has been observable since I first opened my yap about this whole project. 

I met a lot of Tatars today. On my walk to university, I grabbed a quick lunch and met Rushen, who operates a small shawarma/cheburek stand in the central bazaar. We chatted as he prepared my food - his Ukrainian was really good - and shared his family's story of deportation and return. Incredible how consistent his telling was with Gulnara's a few hours earlier.

I also met the gentleman pictured below at the University. Refat is a WWII war veteran and autodidact philologist/ethnographer who is working on publishing his 5th volume of oral history of the Crimean Tatar deportees. He was overwhelmed by the fact that a Ukrainian-American New Yorker was interested in his culture.

I have to confess, though, that my first lesson in Crimean Tatar didn't go so well. Switching from Russian through Ukrainian to English to Crimean Tatar is quite taxing on the brain. It's difficult for me to pronounce. And I'm still jet-lagged. And Milara-odzha, my teacher, threw a lot at me. Including 37 letters of the alphabet, 4 of which don't exist in either Ukrainian or Russian. It's been hard, but life is hard. And this is probably not an example of that.

So, I convinced Milara that we should go for a walk. That was fun. Women in this part of the world tend to take other women under the arm, and I quite like walking around like that. We promenaded by a statue and she told me the legend of Арзы Кьыз, pictured below. And then we walked to the Gasprinsky library, from which we could hear the evening call to prayer.

We sat in the security man's little shack outside the library with first two, then three, then four, impassioned Tatar men. They talked about how the Krym-Tatar community's aspiration to build a "cathedral-like mosque" in the center of Simferopol has been repeatedly thwarted by the city administration. But they plan to keep trying.

Thanks if you actually read all this. These'll be shorter from now, I think.