🇬🇪🇩🇪 200 лет назад тысячи немцев приехали поселиться на Южном Кавказе, спасаясь от войны и голода дома. Они основали в Грузии ряд поселений, в том числе Катариненфельд – нынешний Болниси. Этот город фактически стал центром европейской жизни в стране.

В 1941 году большая часть немцев была депортирована Сталиным, опасавшимся, что они станут «пятой колонной» во время войны с Германией.

Сегодня там пропадает уникальная 200-летняя архитектура, которая все еще остается в этом маленьком некогда европейском городке.

📷 Фотографии и рассказы об уникальном городе в материале JAMnews.

Мощнейшая будет конференция🔥💪

Panel on Circassian history at the 56th ASEEES Annual Convention in Boston this November!

The (Re-)Discovery of Circassia, Then and Now
Fri, November 22, 1:30 to 3:15pm
This panel explores the discovery of the Circassians in the northwestern Caucasus during the 19th century and links it to current efforts to rediscover, preserve and study their history. After the Circassian genocide, the history of Circassia was largely forgotten and became marginalised as a footnote in Russia’s imperial narrative or Circassian diaspora lore. Yet as 19th century sources show, Circassia at that time was seen as a full-fledged political actor and a crucial participant in the Great Game, the competition between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Asia. In line with this year’s convention theme, this panel “discover[s] and constructively address[es] forms of marginalization or silencing within our field” and “instances of epistemic injustice” by looking at the role Circassia played in diplomatic sources and in the foreign policy discourse of the European powers at the time. It further explores how British Russophobia and popular infatuation with Circassia contributed to the creation of a Circassian flag. And it discusses how Catholic missionaries and Italian diplomats and adventurers went to the East Coast of the Black Sea in order to prove or disprove medieval conceptions of the Caucasus and its inhabitants. The panel thus provides three methodologically quite different approaches to Circassian history. In short, it puts Circassia back on the map of Eastern European and Eurasian historiography from which it had been largely expunged.

Chair - Hubertus F. Jahn, University of Cambridge
Discussant - Sergey Salushchev, UC Santa Barbara

Between Exoticism and Imperial Politics: European Diplomatic Sources About Circassia in the 19th Century.
Khatuna Gvaradze, Independent Researcher

Based on a large body of archival foreign policy sources, this paper discusses the ways in which European diplomats became exposed to and concerned with Circassia and the North Caucasus in the 19th century and how they attempted to use Circassians as potential allies against the Russian Empire. A particular focus will be on the complex combination of power politics and ethnographic assumptions, political expectations, and cultural misunderstandings with regard to the people on the Eastern shore of the Black Sea and in the North Caucasus.

Memory, Adventure, and the Rediscovery of Circassia: A Look at Italian Sources, 18th-19th Centuries.
Lorenzo Caravaggi, Lancaster University

To Italian missionaries, diplomats, and adventurers who travelled to or through the North Caucasus between the 18th and 19th centuries, Circassia appeared as a dangerous place yet also as a land of opportunity for economic gain, religious activism, and strategic observations. Through the analysis of their dispatches and private correspondences, this paper will argue that the various views of Circassia were rooted in both historical memory of the medieval past and recent geopolitical developments. In particular, these were the renewed cultural interest in the study of Genoese late-medieval settlements in the Black Sea and the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Russian Empire and the Italian states from the late 1700s onwards, which inevitably put the Black Sea back on the map of global geopolitical interests.

A Flag for Circassia, or a Curious Episode in the Great Game.
Azamat Kumykov, University of Cambridge

During the 1830s, the British public was increasingly infatuated with the image of freedom loving Circassian mountaineers propagated in popular culture, while the British foreign policy establishment considered Circassia pragmatically as one of the weak spots of the Russian Empire, which could be used to retard its "progress in the East".

As Russia’s war in the Caucasus continued to drain its financial and human resources, a group of Russophobes started to congregate around King William IV who was increasingly running his own shadow foreign policy, relying primarily on covert operations. Based on new archival materials, this paper investigates one of these operations by telling the fascinating story of how the Circassian national flag came into being, thereby fusing the popular with the political interest in Circassia.