| Chochiev G.V. Several Documents on the Settlement of Ossetians in Anatolia. |
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The article presents several documents from the Turkish Republic Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives related to the settlement of Ossetians in Central and Eastern Anatolia at the beginning of 1860s. The identification of the evidence on Ossetian immigrants in the Ottoman sources is a complicated task due primarily to the specificities of reflection of the Caucasian ethnic nomenclature there. So far we have found not more than a dozen of documents containing information about Ossetian subethnic and clan-caste groups (Digorians, Tagaurians / Tagiatas, Badeliatas) usually referred to as “tribes” within the wider entity of “Circassian Muhajirs”. Despite the limited nature of the body of available information, it still reflects a number of important aspects of the resettlement, colonization and adaptation of the migrants in the Ottoman state: methods and criteria for selecting the places of settlement, tendency to preserve communal unity, guardianship by the authorities of the traditional nobility and Muslim clergy, religious and educational integration, land conflicts with the local population, attempts to return to the homeland, etc. In case of further research – given that the opening of new archival collections is being witnessed regularly – some expansion of the scope of the known materials on the topic could be expected. Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Anatolia, Ossetians, Circassians, immigration, colonization, archival sources.
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