Pan-Turanism in two declarations

 Conquests, Folkways, Linguistics  1 Response »
Mar 062012
 

From the 1971 English translation of Zarevand’s Miatzyal yev angach Turania gam intch gu dzrarken Turkeru (United and independent Turania: Aims and designs of the Turks) (1926):

Typical and quite revealing is the bragging of a Magyar who considers himself a ‘Turanian’ (meaning Ural-Altaic) kinsman of the Turks. In the course of an interview he tells an author in 1919 in Buda-Pest: “All these subject nationalities, Serbs, Slovaks, Rumanians, whom the Supreme Council (of the Paris Peace Conference) is cutting off from our body politic, must inevitably return (to us), for they are naturally subordinate, and we are naturally the masters. But you can’t be expected to understand that, for you are Indo-European, Aryan, and we are Turanians”.


From a more unexpected place — the liner notes for the komuz piece “Attila Khan”, Track 8 in the Smithsonian Folkways album Tengir-Too: Mountain music of Kyrgyztan:

“I dedicate this küü to the honor of the great Attila Khan. The melody represents a spiritual connection to those times. The Turks are one people, and the Mongols and Huns were our ancestors.” — Nurak Abdrakhmanov (b. 1947), composer and performer


Possibly some Meskhetians and Uzbeks feel differently.

Russo-Buryat warfare, 17th century

 Conquests  No Responses »
Dec 272010
 

I’m back, with a short selection from The Shaman’s Coat (Anna Reid, 2002), p. 67:

The original inhabitants of this Russian-Mongolian borderland were a Mongol people, the Buryat. Nomadising over a Sweden-sized territory of mixed forest and steppe around the southern shores of Lake Baikal, they were closely related to the Khalkha and Dzungar Mongols to their south, in today’s Mongolia. Possessors of a written language, firearms, metals, tribute-paying Ket and Nenets vassals, vast livestock herds and powerful clan leaders, they were the first formidable nationality, after the Tatars, the Russians encountered on their march across Siberia.

Conquering them took Muscovy over thirty years, in a series of raids, counter-raids, ambushes and sieges collectively known as the Buryat wars. Cossacks built their first fort in Buryat territory, Bratsk on the river Angara, in 1631. Three years later the Buryat burned it down and massacred its garrison, and in 1638 and 1658 unsuccessfully besieged its replacement. The first fort on the upper Lena, Verkholensk, was founded in 1641 and continuously besieged for the next five years by Buryat armies up to 2,000 strong. In a typical despatch, its defenders pleaded for more mail and muskets:

Sire, the Bratsk people [Buryats] have many mounted warriors, and they go into battle carrying metal shields and wear greaves on their forearms, and have spiked helmets; and we, Sire, your humble servants, are poorly outfitted, we have no armor, and our poor little guns cannot shoot through the shields of the Bratsk warriors… [Dmytryshyn et al. 1985, p. 206.]

There were more revolts throughout Buryat territory from 1695-6, during which Irkutsk came under siege, and Bratsk’s commander was still busy rounding up insurgents and uncovering arms caches when Gmelin and Müller passed through in the 1730s.

Works Cited:

Dmytryshyn, B., Crownhart-Vaughan, E.A.P., & Vaughan, T. (Eds.). (1985). To Siberia and Russian America: Three Centuries of Russian Eastward Expansion, 1558-1867 (Vol. 1). Portland: Western Imprints, The Press of the Oregon Historical Society.

Reid, A. (2002). The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.