was fleeing from pogroms in Uzbekistan, where his parents had moved to after their deportation from the Meskheti region of Georgia in 1944. This house became a home for his three children and fifteen grandchildren.
I hear muffled clattering in the kitchen. Jasim’s wife, fifty-eight-year-old Marpula, ties up the checkered headscarf on her head and carries tea and sweets into the room. We sit down cross-legged at a low traditional table, a sofra, decorated with images of the moon and stars against a red background. Now and then younger women from the family join us.
“Meskheti,” the man begins the story and for a moment holds his breath. “That’s what our land is called.”
This cultural and historical region on the border between Turkey and Georgia has been divided between the two countries since time immemorial. In 1921 the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian Soviet Republics on one side and Turkey on the other concluded the so-called Treaty of Kars, as a result of which a portion of the Armenian territory went over to Turkey and five Turkish regions were incorporated into Georgia.
“Yes, my parents were born in the already Georgian Meskheti,” Jasim explains, “but in 1944 Stalin got the idea of relocating us because of a concern that our people could collaborate with Turkey.”
And he relocated them.
On the basis of a State Defense Committee resolution, on November 14 Jasim’s people were herded onto freight trains and taken across the Urals.
“The journey to Central Asia took forty days,” Jasim describes, his eyes seemingly blacker than soil. “People died in the train wagons. Children cried. How many people died? No one knows and no one counted. Some say 100,000, others say 120,000.”
This same story is recounted by both children and grandchildren in every house.
“Would you like to go back to Meskheti?” I ask.
“I’ve wanted to my whole life!” Jasim replies without a hint of hesitation. “And my parents wanted us to return there their whole lives. I remember how in 1966, when I was seven, my uncle traveled to Georgia, to Tbilisi, but that was as far as they’d let him go. He wanted to take a look at his motherland. In 1989 Moscow also dismissed the idea of the Meskhetian Turks returning home. Last year my brother was driving to Turkey and stopped by the neighborhood where our parents were born—seventy-two years after the fact. Our father used to describe it to us: the third house from the school, the one with a garden… The village my parents were born in is now a border crossing point to Turkey.”
These days everything is different.
ІІ. Bugün, or Today
From Meskheti, the Soviet government deported the Meskhetian Turks to Central Asia, largely to Uzbekistan.
“We lived in Samarqand. It was the first capital of Uzbekistan.” Jasim talks as he breaks ekmek, Turkish flatbread. “I had a good job: I worked in a factory. Our lives were very peaceful. I don’t know what happened.”
What happened in May of 1989 is known as the Ferghana Pogroms. An ordinary quarrel at the bazaar grew into an interethnic conflict. If you were to ask around about the underlying causes of the tragedy, very few would be able to explain much of anything.
“We share one religion, we share one faith,” Jasim reflects aloud. “In Islam there are Sunnis and Shi’ites. We’re Sunni. And Uzbekistan is also 95–96 percent Sunni. There were no disagreements over language. Moscow had given the directive to cultivate the chornozem, the fertile black soil. The Ferghana Valley was the most densely populated region in Central Asia. Maybe we should have booted out the nonessentials. But we’re peaceful and hard-working people: We quietly worked and minded our own business. I don’t know.”
The story goes that some Turk was rude to an Uzbek saleswoman at the bazaar and knocked over a crate of her strawberries, some other men jumped to her defense, and a fight broke out.
“In the seventies or early eighties, they honestly could’ve stabbed someone to death and gotten away with it, but here they had a fist fight and the whole thing got blown up into an international fallout,” the community elder recalls.
In an article for the news portal Krym.Realiyi, Gulnara Bekirova writes that the events of May 1989 were preceded by rallies in Tashkent in December 1988, marked by calls of “Russians, back to your Russia; Crimean Tatars, back to Crimea.” Perhaps hatred toward resettlers expanded to include the Meskhetian Turks too: “…the agitation didn’t abate; conversations circled among young Uzbeks that the Turks needed to be ‘given a good lesson.’”
On May 23 violence broke out in the streets of Quvasoy, with several hundred people involved on each side. The crowd tried to force its way into the neighborhoods of the Meskhetian Turks and other ethnic minorities to launch a pogrom. Over three hundred police officers were needed to quell the riot. Fifty-eight individuals were injured; of them thirty-three were hospitalized.
Rumors were flying in the region that the Meskhetian Turks allegedly beat up Uzbeks, rape their women, and torture their children. In the morning of June 3, a group of Uzbeks raided the Turkish neighborhoods in Toshloq. They set houses on fire and assaulted residents. The following day houses were burning not only in Ferghana and Toshloq, but also in Margilan and other settlements where Meskhetian Turks lived.
“People started showing up in Samarqand and threatening us: ‘Either you leave, or we’ll do the same thing to you as happened in Ferghana,’” Jasim recalls, his voice even. “I remember the moment that we understood our life there was over. So we left in search of a new home.”
Even though the head of the family narrates all of this with detachment, the young women struggle to remain unemotional and leave the room.
That’s when men from different families got together in groups and traveled from region to region in search of a new place to live, hoping that elsewhere someone would welcome them.
“Eight of us set out,” Jasim says, remembering the events from twenty-eight years ago. “First we had to find a place where our families wouldn’t suffer. It was June. We were told that there were houses available in the Stavropol region of Russia. But when we arrived there, they didn’t let us in. Next we headed to the town of Prokhladny. It was right when the Adler train had started running through all of Kazakhstan. Through Kalmykia, through Dagestan, we traveled to Grozne, to Bielorechensk. We took a look—not bad, but we weren’t used to those kinds of conditions. Heavy June rains, dirt everywhere, sludge beneath our feet—how could we live there? So we headed back. On the Baku-Krasnovodsk ferry we met a family traveling to Turkmenistan for medical treatment. The husband says to us, ‘There are a lot of collective farms in our area, you can come and have a look. I’ll be home in fifteen days.’ He gave us his phone number. He says, ‘Let’s agree that I’ll meet you at the station. Give me a call tomorrow.’”
ІІІ. Yarın, or Tomorrow
The man turned out to be the mayor of the village of Vasiukivka in the Donetsk region, which was still Soviet at the time.
“He met us at the train station and showed us around the collective farm,” Jasim continues his story. “He showed us the houses that stood empty. We liked it here, and we decided to move.”
Eight men made the decision to relocate their families here to Vasiukivka. For over four days they traveled by train, through
