Urums

Based on Wikipedia: Urums

In 1777, Empress Catherine the Great issued an order that would fracture a centuries-old community and scatter its people across the northern Black Sea steppe: all Greeks were to leave Crimea. This was not a gentle invitation but a strategic decree following the Russian annexation of the peninsula. The destination was the North Azov region, specifically around Mariupol, where these displaced families would be rebranded as the "North Azovian Greeks." Among them were those who no longer spoke Greek. They were the Urums, a people whose very name is a linguistic artifact of empire, identity, and survival, standing at the crossroads of Turkic tongues and Orthodox faith. Their story is not merely one of migration; it is a testament to how language can shift while belief remains anchored, creating an identity that defies simple categorization in a region forever reshaped by geopolitical tides.

The Urums are several groups of Turkic-speaking Greek Orthodox people native to Crimea, northeastern Turkey, and Transcaucasia. To understand them, one must first dismantle the modern assumption that ethnicity and language are inextricably linked. In the 21st century, we often equate speaking a language with belonging to a specific nation. For the Urums, this equation has historically been inverted. They are Greek by faith and heritage—Eastern Orthodox Christians tracing their roots to ancient colonization—but they speak a Turkic dialect. This unique synthesis emerged over centuries, from the 13th to the 17th centuries, as Crimean Greeks merged with Greek-speaking Crimean Alans, Crimean Goths, and other indigenous groups. The result was a gradual transformation of collective identity that produced a people who were culturally distinct from their neighbors yet spiritually aligned with their distant ancestors in Constantinople and Trebizond.

There is no single origin story for the Urums, but rather a tapestry of theories woven by historians and linguists. One prevailing hypothesis suggests that Crimean Urums arose when some Crimean Greeks adopted the language of their conquerors and neighbors, the Crimean Tatars, while retaining their Christianity. Another theory posits the reverse: that a group of Crimean Tatars converted to Christianity and gradually assimilated into Greek culture, keeping their Turkic tongue as a marker of their distinct history. A more complex speculation links the Urums of Crimea and Ukraine with those in Georgia, suggesting a shared origin from Anatolia. However, linguistic data complicates this unity; while they share the label "Urum," the languages spoken by these groups differ significantly enough to suggest divergent evolutionary paths rather than a single, uniform migration event.

The word itself carries the weight of history. "Urum" is derived from the Arabic rūm (روم), meaning Roman, which subsequently came to denote Byzantine and Greek people in the Islamic world. In the Turkic languages, a prothetic 'u' was added to words beginning with 'r', transforming Rum into Urum. Under the Ottoman Empire, the term Rum specifically denoted Orthodox Christians living within the empire's borders. In modern Turkish, it refers strictly to Greeks in Turkey and Cyprus. The Urums adopted this designation as a form of ethnic self-identification, distinguishing themselves from their Greek-speaking relatives, the Romaioi, who spoke Rumeíka (also known as Mariupol Greek).

"The term is used by the following sub-ethnic groups of Greeks as a way of ethnic self-identification: Crimean-Tatar speaking Greeks of North Azov (Ukraine) (Crimean Greeks) Turkish speaking Greeks of Tsalka (Georgia)."

This distinction was not merely semantic; it dictated social reality. In the Crimea and the adjacent Azovian region, two distinct groups coexisted for centuries. The Romaioi preserved their ancient Greek dialects, a direct linguistic link to the colonizers of the 4th century BC through the Byzantine era. The Urums, conversely, spoke a Turkic language. Both groups were descendants of the ancient Greek and Byzantine Christian settlers of the northern Black Sea shores, yet they also included Pontic Greeks who fled northeastern Anatolia between the fall of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. These refugees and economic migrants brought with them a layered identity: they were Greek by blood and faith, but their daily speech had been reshaped by centuries of contact with Turkish-speaking populations in Anatolia.

The human cost of these shifting borders is etched into the demographic history of the region. The 1777 relocation by Catherine the Great was a pivotal moment that separated the Urums from their Crimean homeland. They moved to the North Azov region, where they became known as the priazovskie greki. Here, in the steppes, their language began to diverge further from common Crimean Tatar. Some linguists argue that this divergence was so profound that it constituted a separate language unit within the Kypchak language sub-group, now recognized as the Urum language. Yet, despite this linguistic distinction, they remained an isolated cultural group, rarely settling in towns populated by their Greek-speaking kin. They lived side-by-side with other Orthodox communities but maintained a distinct identity, speaking a language that was neither purely Turkish nor purely Greek, but a unique hybrid forged in the crucible of the Crimean Khanate and later the Russian Empire.

The isolation of the Urums was not just geographical but educational and political. Unlike Greek, Urum has never been a language of secondary education in Ukraine. For generations, children grew up speaking their mother tongue at home while navigating a world where Russian and Ukrainian were the languages of power, commerce, and schooling. Turkologist Nikolai Baskakov estimated that by 1969, approximately 60,000 people spoke Urum as a native language. This number tells a story of vitality, but the subsequent decades revealed a stark decline. According to the All-Ukrainian Population Census of 2001, only 112 of the Donetsk Oblast's 77,516 Greeks listed languages other than Greek, Ukrainian, or Russian as their mother tongue. The gap between the estimated 60,000 speakers in 1969 and the mere 112 recorded in 2001 is not just a statistical anomaly; it represents a massive loss of cultural transmission, likely driven by Soviet assimilation policies, migration, and the social pressure to conform to dominant linguistic norms.

Across the mountains and borders, in the South Caucasus, another branch of the Urum people was carving out their existence. These are the Tsalka Urums, sometimes called Trialeti Greeks or Transcaucasian Turcophone Greeks. Their name derives from the Georgian town of Tsalka, where they once formed the largest ethnic community. Like their Crimean counterparts, their history is tied to the collapse of empires and the flight of refugees. Between 1461 and 1801, waves of Pontic Greeks left the eastern Black Sea coastline and the highlands of the Pontic Alps. They settled in Georgia as both refugees and economic migrants.

The most significant migration occurred in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. This was a time of profound peril for Greek Orthodox families living under Ottoman rule. As the Russian army occupied regions such as Sivas, Erzurum, and Kars in northeastern Anatolia, many Pontic Greeks collaborated with or welcomed the Russian forces, hoping to escape Ottoman reprisals. When the Russian army eventually withdrew back into its own territory, these families followed, uprooting themselves to start anew on the Tsalka Plateau.

"According to Andrei Popov, throughout the 19th century hundreds of Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox families from Erzurum, Gümüşhane and Artvin moved to Southern Russia and settled on the Tsalka Plateau."

In the Soviet era, these communities flourished numerically, populating over 20 villages in Georgia's Tsalka, Dmanisi, Tetritsqaro, Marneuli, and Akhaltsikhe regions. By 1926, there were 24,000 Greeks living in Tiflis (Tbilisi) and the surrounding areas, with a staggering 20,000 of them being Turcophone. They brought with them a dialect known as Tsalka language, which bears a striking resemblance to the Meskhetian-Ahiska Turkish dialect from the regions of Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin. This dialect was not static; it borrowed heavily from the languages of their neighbors—Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek—as they navigated life under Russian and Soviet rule.

The linguistic identity of the Tsalka Urums has been a subject of intense debate among scholars. Some, like Nikolai Baskakov, classify it as a separate Oghuz language due to distinct differences in phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar. Others argue that its phonetic structure is closer to Azerbaijani than to literary Turkish, suggesting it may be a dialect of Azeri. The Soviet censuses further complicated matters by listing "Azeri" as the mother tongue of the Tsalka Urums. This classification was likely less a reflection of linguistic reality and more a result of the Soviet Union's unfavorable attitude toward Turkish culture, which they viewed with suspicion due to its Pan-Turkic associations. In the classrooms of Georgia, no secondary education in Urum Turkish was ever available; children attended schools where subjects were taught first in Azeri and later in Russian.

The Tsalka Urums themselves have their own names for their language: bizim dilja, meaning "our language," or moussourmanja, which translates to "Muslims' language"—a curious name for a Christian people, reflecting the linguistic origins of the word but also perhaps an ironic detachment from their religious identity in favor of their spoken tongue. Yet, by the late 20th century, the majority of Tsalka Urums had shifted to speaking Russian as their primary language. The cultural revival that began in the 1960s was modest but significant. Historian Airat Aklaev's research revealed a poignant disconnect: 36% of the community considered Greek their mother tongue despite not being able to speak it, while 96% expressed a deep desire to learn it. This statistic captures the tragedy of assimilation—a people reclaiming an identity they had lost generations ago, yearning for a connection that time and policy had severed.

A documentation project on the language of the Caucasus Urum people has attempted to preserve what remains, compiling a basic lexicon, translations, and grammar studies. These efforts are crucial acts of resistance against oblivion. However, the post-Soviet era brought new challenges. Serious migration took place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as economic hardship and the changing political landscape drove many Greeks to leave Georgia for Greece or other destinations. As a result, Greeks are no longer the largest ethnic group in Tsalka, a town that once defined them.

The story of the Urums is a narrative of resilience in the face of erasure. They are a people who have been squeezed between empires—Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Soviet—and yet they persist. Their identity is a complex mosaic: Orthodox Christians speaking Turkic tongues, Greeks who call themselves "Romans," and migrants who found home in lands that were not their own by birth but became theirs through struggle. They remind us that culture is fluid, that language can be a bridge or a barrier, and that faith can survive even when the mother tongue fades.

The human cost of these geopolitical shifts cannot be overstated. When Catherine the Great ordered the Greeks out of Crimea, families were uprooted from homes they had inhabited for centuries. When Pontic Greeks fled Anatolia in 1829, they left behind villages, churches, and ancestors' graves to escape the wrath of retreating Ottoman forces. In the Soviet era, the suppression of their language was a subtle but effective form of cultural violence; by denying them education in their own tongue, the state sought to dissolve the bonds that held their community together. The census numbers—the drop from 60,000 speakers to 112—are not just data points; they represent thousands of families who stopped speaking Urum at the dinner table, who feared the stigma of being different, or who simply could not pass on a language that had no future in the official curriculum.

Today, as Russia continues to exploit Ukraine's Greek community and redraw borders once again, the history of the Urums serves as a stark warning. Their existence is a testament to the fragility of minority identities in the face of great power politics. They are living proof that one can be Greek without speaking Greek, Christian while speaking a "Muslim" language, and native to a land they were forced to leave.

The future of the Urums hangs in the balance. In Ukraine, their numbers have dwindled to near invisibility in official records, yet the desire to reconnect with their heritage remains strong. In Georgia, the community is scattered, but the effort to document their language continues. They are a people defined by their ability to adapt, to absorb the languages of their neighbors while holding fast to the core of their faith and history.

"36% of them considered Greek their mother tongue despite not speaking it; 96% expressed a desire to learn Greek."

This statistic is the heartbeat of the Urum story. It is a cry from the past into the future, a longing for an identity that feels lost but is never forgotten. The Urums have survived the fall of empires, the redrawing of maps, and the silent erasure of their language. Whether they can survive the next century depends on how much they are allowed to speak, to teach, and to be who they are without fear. In a world that often demands monolithic identities, the Urums stand as a complex, enduring reminder that human identity is rarely simple, often contradictory, and always worth preserving.

The legacy of the Urums is written not in stone monuments but in the quiet persistence of families who remember their names, their dialects, and their history even when the world around them has forgotten. They are the children of the Black Sea steppe and the Anatolian highlands, the survivors of the Russian annexation and the Ottoman retreat, and the keepers of a unique tradition that blends the cross and the crescent in a way that only they understand. As we look at their history, we see not just a footnote in the annals of Crimea or Georgia, but a profound lesson on what it means to belong when you are told you do not fit anywhere.

The Urums are still here. They are speaking a language that no one else speaks quite like them, praying in churches that have stood for centuries, and trying to teach their children the words of a heritage that is both theirs and not entirely theirs. In an age of homogenization, their existence is a radical act of difference. And as long as there are Urums who remember bizim dilja, the story of these Turkic-speaking Greeks will continue to be told, one word at a time.