Circassia

ser-kash'l-a, a region of Europe lying on both slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. It is now a part of Russia. The region is one of valleys, gloomy defiles, table lands, and glaciers. The country yields timber, oil, precious ores, and the products of the flock. The people, now almost replaced by inferior races, have been noted for graceful forms and great beauty. For generations the young folks seem to have been eager to leave their mountain home. The young men have sought employment abroad as soldiers, and the young women have been marketed to traders who sold them at a profit to the Turkish harems. There appears to have been little sentiment against the practice, even on the part of the women themselves, who were enabled in this way to see something of life in distant cities.

In an article contributed to Everybody's Magazine for October, 1909, E. Baden Powell, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, writes entertainingly of the pains taken to perfect the complexions of the family beauties, the rivalry among the daughters to fetch a high price, and their expectation of luxurious life in the polygamous homes of the wealthy of Constantinople, Cairo, Smyrna, Fez, Bagdad, Teheran, or Mecca. The wife of the khedive of Egypt and the sultana of the deposed sultan, Abdul Aziz, were Circassian slave girls. Indeed, these fair-skinned Circassian beauties, if we may credit Mr. Powell, exercise petticoat government in the capitals of all Mohammedan countries. The young women are purchased by traveling buyers, usually Armenians, who pay down a part of the purchase price and the remainder on delivery at some obscure port on the Black Sea. They are forwarded to be sold at auction, usually at Constantinople, Smyrna, Saloniki, or Trebizond.

Mr. Powell's observations were made at first hand while traveling in the mountain villages of Circassia. He says:

I was repeatedly urged to buy a fine, buxom, upstanding creature for the equivalent of eighty dollars, while a ravishing beauty, who would have dislocated the necks of half the loungers on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly, was offered me for double that sum.

Lest any conscientious reader of this article feel impelled to go out to the Caucasus and lend his efforts to the suppression of this pernicious traffic, I will repeat a little incident which was told me one night in the Officers' Club at Tiflis. Said one of my companions, a commander in the Russian navy, who was in Tiflis on a visit. "Despite the utmost efforts of our government, the slave-traffic between the Caucasus and Turkish ports has increased, of late years, rather than declined. So, when I was given the command of a gunboat two or three years ago, and ordered to patrol that fever-haunted Mingrelian coast on the lookout for smugglers and slavers, I was as proud as some of these Circassians with a new bourka. In the gray of an early morning, after endless days of waiting, we caught sight of a suspicious-looking steamer slipping swiftly and silently out to sea from a port that I knew was almost unused except for the loading of wood, certainly not by anything as swift as this boat. It was a stern chase from the first, for the steamer I was pursuing boasted good engines, and it was not until a shell from one of our forward guns whined across her bows that she hove to and waited sullenly for our approach. My gig was lowered away and I was rowed across to the ship. I found, just as I had expected, that she was packed from stem to stern with Caucasian beauties en route for the slave-markets of Constantinople. I might as well admit that, as I went aboard her, I rather likened myself to a sort of modern Sir Galahad saving damsels in distress, but my knightly dreams were quickly dissipated. I gave orders that a prize crew be put aboard and that the slaver be taken to Batum, whence the girls would be returned to their homes. All this I tried to explain to the throng of frightened, wide-eyed beauties who surrounded me, but no sooner were my intentions understood than they threw themselves at my feet, begging me with tears in their eyes not to send them back to the squalor of their mountain homes but to forward them at once to their Turkish destination.

See Caucasian Race