Throughout its centuries-old history, the Armenian people have been subjected to numerous trials, faced with great empires, created their own national states and destroyed others. However, the time came, and the Armenian people themselves lost their statehood and were dispersed. At that moment, sub-ethnic groups began to appear, among which were the Hamshen Armenians, several centuries long, and today there is a surge of interest in it both in Turkey and abroad.
The origin of the Hamshen Armenians
The Hamshens, according to some historians, are a rather heterogeneous group of peoples united more geographically than ethnically. However, most researchers are of the opinion that it would be more correct to call this sub-ethnic group Hamshen Armenians.
Hamshen region is a part of historical Lesser Armenia. Today, this area is located in the northeast of Turkey. in close proximity to the Georgian border. On the territory of Hamshen there are such large cities as Rize and Trabzon, known for their developed agriculture.
Presumably, the first Hamshen Armenians weretwelve thousand families resettled from the lands occupied by the Arabs in the 5th century to the territory of the Byzantine Empire, with which at that time Armenia had common borders. It was in this region that the main processes of the formation of a new community took place.
Rize is the homeland of the Hamshen Armenians
In the vicinity of the small Turkish city of Rize, which is located on the Black Sea coast, in close proximity to Georgia, the Hemshils ethnogenesis took place, as the Armenians living in this area are sometimes called.
It is authentically known that the ancestors of the Hamshens appeared in the Pontic region in the ninth century AD, however, some biased historians insist that the first Armenian settlers appeared in those parts two thousand years before the birth of Christ. This information should be subjected to additional verification, since a direct connection between the ancient state of Hayas and the modern Armenian people has not been definitely established.
Already in the early stages of the formation of a new sub-ethnos, the differences between the Hamshen Armenians and their relatives who lived in the Armenian Highlands and in Transcaucasia began to appear. Their isolation from the main mass of Armenians affected.
Armenian population of Byzantium
Before the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans, the Hamshen Armenians preserved the Christian religion and the folklore corresponding to it. Official ties were established between the Black Sea communities of Armenians and the Byzantine nobility, and the leaders of the Armenian settlements received Byzantine titles.
However, after the capture of the entire peninsula of Asia Minor and the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus by the Turks, local Christians were forced to reconsider their religious views.
Many Georgian Christians and Hemshils converted to Islam. Such transitions were often a mere formality that helped to avoid paying taxes to the imperial treasury. At the same time, many Armenians continued to speak their native language, which already in the fifteenth century was quite different from the main dialects of the Armenian language.
Settlement in the Ottoman Empire
Hamshen Armenians who converted to Islam were not persecuted by the authorities and could preserve their language and culture. However, their brothers, who decided to preserve the faith of their ancestors, were forced to leave the habitat of their fathers and head west. Thus, Trabzon and Giresun, as well as Samsun and other coastal cities of the western Black Sea coast, became the main place of settlement of the Hemshils.
But the settlement of Armenians was not limited to a narrow strip of the Black Sea coast. Many families moved to Istanbul and on the coast of the Aegean Sea, to Izmir and Bursa, and some even left the empire and became subject to the Russian Empire, where they found shelter and protection, as well as the opportunity to practice Christianity in complete safety.
Resettlement in neighboring countries
Answering the question of where the Hamshen Armenians came from, it is worth starting with the fact that they are an integral part of everythingArmenian people, which is extremely widespread throughout the world. And although the Hemshils are a rather peculiar sub-ethnic group with peculiarities of language and historical development, the majority of Armenians living both in the Republic of Armenia and in the Diaspora recognize them as their compatriots.
Hamshen Armenians in Turkey, along with other groups of the Armenian population, suffered greatly from the genocide that occurred in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they suffered little from Armenian pogroms in the nineteenth century.
The Armenian genocide forced many thousands of Armenians to leave the territory of the empire and settle in neighboring countries, such as the Russian Empire, which actively accepted refugees and allowed them to arrange a new life on the Black Sea coast.
Hamshen ethnic groups
Significant geographical distancing of various groups of Hamshen Armenians created the necessary prerequisites for identifying additional groups within the Hemshil ethnos. While the Western and Eastern Hamshenis are overwhelmingly Muslim, their northern ethnic group are descendants of the non-Islamized population.
In addition, a group of Hamshens living on the territory of the Autonomous Republic of Adjara deserves special mention. In 1878, as a result of a peace agreement between Russia and Turkey, the Batumi District, along with twelve Hemshil villages, fell under the rule of the Russian Empire.
Hamsheni were not persecuted in the territoryRussia until the middle of the twentieth century, when, as a result of the Second World War, they were recognized by the government of the USSR as an unreliable population and, together with the Greeks and Kurds, were resettled in Central Asia, from where they began to return only at the end of the twentieth century.
However, despite the complexity of the history of the Hamshen Armenians, despite the persecution, pogroms and genocide, researchers count up to two million people in the territory of modern Turkey who call themselves either Hamshens or descendants of Islamized Armenians.
Ethnic conflicts after the collapse of the USSR
In some regions, the collapse of the Soviet Union was extremely painful and caused ethnic clashes between representatives of different peoples. As a result of ethnic tension, many Hamshens were forced to leave their places of compact residence in Central Asia, where they were deported en masse in the forties of the twentieth century.
Besides, there were many conflicts in the Caucasus. One of the most bloody was the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict, in which the Hamshen Armenians were involuntarily involved, photos of which in national costumes can be seen in the article.
Although in the USSR the Hamshens were discriminated against in the same way as the Meskhetian Turks, in post-Soviet Russia they began to massively settle in the territory of the Krasnodar Territory. Since many Hamshen Armenians in Abkhazia also suffered from the civil war, they moved to the territory of Russia along with other refugees from the republic.
Modernity of the ethnos
At the end of the twentieth century, the interest of the world scientific community in the sub-ethnic group of the Hamshen began to grow, which sociologists and ethnographers began to actively study.
In addition, the Hamshens themselves began to comprehend their history and build their own identity. Newspapers and magazines devoted to the life of the Hamshen communities in the Krasnodar Territory began to appear on the territory of Russia. Also, cultural clubs and ensembles began to be created, the basis for which was the ethnographic material of the Hamshen people.
The history of the Hamshen sub-ethnos has become the subject of many conferences held in Armenia with the assistance of the Academy of Sciences.
