For example, in 1859, a play by Dion Boucicault called The Octoroonopened in London. This hair style was a sort of exhibit's trademark and was achieved by washing the hair of women in beer, drying it and then teasing it. A sovereign remedy for surfeits, scorching from the heat of the sun, freckles, blights from cold and chills of winter, scorbutic, pimples or eruptions of the face and skin, however violent or disfigured, animalcula generated under the cuticle or outer skin, prickley heat, shingles, ring worms, redness of the nose and chin, obstinate cutaneous diseases, and for every impurity or unnatural appearance with which the skin may be affected; to be used as a common wash for clearing and improving the complexion, and in a superior degree to preserve, soften, cleanse and beautify the skin. Racial theories of the mid 19th century held that the people living in the Circassian mountains near the Black Sea were examples of the purest stock of the Caucasian race. Day of mourning for the Circassians. In the Russo-Circassian War (17631864) the Circassians were expelled from their homeland by Tsar Alexander II, forcing 1.5 million to flee to the Ottoman Empire. Circassian beauties - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia How intentional this exposure was is evident in the portrait of Zublia Aggolia: in high magnification, one can see that the photographer has retouched the negative to accentuate the cleavage of her bustsomething that would never occur in an ordinary portrait of a Victorian lady. But at the same time, at her throat, just above the bust, hanging like a protective talisman, lies a large, ornate crucifix, an item common to Circassian portraits. The idea of a woman being at the sexual mercy of her owner was not foreign to the imagination of the white public at the time in the United States, but Powerss statue of a naked white woman alluded only indirectly (and perhaps for that reason in the only way then publicly possible) to the fate of many enslaved black women: it was a well-known but largely unspoken fact that slave owners in the United States often entered into sexual relationships with their enslaved women, relationships that involved a range of coercion, almost all of which we would classify as rape today. In this sense, the sideshow served as an inoculation against genuine questions that, if given a real voice, might have unsettled the prevailing categories and assumptions of human classifications such as race and gender. Beautiful Circassian Woman. Gustav Hugo - a German jurist once wrote that beauty can be found in a Circassian slave girl. Maker unknown, Circassian wife and husband, albumen photograph (circa 1865). [9] Mark Twain reported in The Innocents Abroad (1869) that "Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople, but not publicly. Her sale sent home some disappointed bawlers, But his offhand valorization of the Circassian woman as the ideal of whiteness and the Guinean man as the anti-ideal of blackness could not be more evident; while he holds that they form part of the same species, he clearly considers the Guinean man a devolution from the Circassian type, itself supposedly the most perfect form of the Caucasian. According to Blumenbach, the white race originated in the Caucasus region, and all other human races derived from this original source as degenerations of the Caucasian, the highest type. While individuals may choose to refuse these labels, the sheer fact is that these categories are so deeply engraved into our ways of seeing that they are even embraced by those victimized by that history, in part precisely because they were victimizedas such and bythat history of race. In an astonishing historical irony, when the police gave their first press conference in the manhunt for the two men suspected of perpetrating the Boston Marathon bombing, an officer identified one suspect as a light-skinned or Caucasian male. This time, though, the people in question actuallywereCaucasians: they came from the Caucasus as modern refugees from the age-old conflicts there. At the same time writers and illustrators were also creating images depicting the authentic costumes and people of the Caucasus. There were also several classical Turkish music pieces and poems that praise the beauty of the Circassian ethnic group like "Lepiska Sal erkes" (Straight, flaxen-haired Circassian; "lepiska" refers to long blonde hair which is straight, as if flatironed). Pinterest. Why not just give up using this freakish label, whose only reality has been a staged reality, as a performed character in a circus sideshow? Thomas Gamaliel Bradford, Map of Caucasian Countries and Turkey in Asia (1835), Wikipedia Commons. In consequence, most wives and mothers of several Ottoman Sultans were ethnic Circassians, including Perest Valide Sultan, evkefza Valide Sultan, Tirimjgan Valide Sultan, Nkhetseza Bahanmefendi, emsiruhsar Hatun, Sabal Sultan, Hmaah Haseki Sultan, Hatice Muazzez Haseki Sultan, Aye Haseki Sultan, Bedrifelek I, Bidar II, Kamures I, Servetseza I, Bezmara VI, Dzdidil III, Hayrandil II, Meyliservet IV, Mihrengiz II, Neerek III, Nurefsun II, Reftaridil II, ayan III, amongst many others. [13] Many of the Circassian women in the Ottoman harem were described as having "green eyes and long, dark blond hair, pale skin of translucent white colour, thin waist, slender body structure, and very good-looking hands and feet". As Dewan points out, the word Caucasiangives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your vehicle instead of your car. As her article makes clear, this pseudoscientific discourse, which makes the pretense of objective neutrality, actually masks the fact that people are uncomfortable talking about race, especially what counts as white. This prudery about race contributes to the conceptual inertia about race in our society, because the inability to speak openly about the arbitrary and ambiguous nature of whiteness helps hold in place the color scheme of racial categories, with white its privileged and supposedly unambiguous status at the top. But if they ask $4000 each, probably one would be better than two, for $8000 in gold is worth about $14,500 in U.S. currency. During the Ottoman Empire and Persian Safavid and Qajar dynasties, Circassian women living as slaves in the Sultan's Imperial Harem and Shah's harems started to build their reputation as extremely beautiful, which then became a common trope in Western Orientalism.[4]. The article continues: Any lady must be as great an Infidel as the Grand Sultan himself, who, after receiving such authority can doubt that her skin will become as superlatively smooth, soft, white and delicate, as that of the lovely Fatima, whatever may have been its feel or its appearance before. It may have been a reference to the Circassian fur hat, rather than the hair. I have not observed a single ugly face in that country, in either sex; but I have seen angelical ones. I'm sure the sultans had good taste . "The Role of Circassian Slaves in the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the Crimean Khanate in the Early Modern Period." The Colonial Contexts for the Harem Representation", "XLIV. Circassian beauties, or "Moss-haired girls" as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. [28] This fuelled the idea of female Circassian beauty. After 1854, almost all Ottoman harem concubines were of Circassian origin; the Circassians had been expelled from Russian lands in the 1860s and the improverished refugee parents sold their daughters in a trade that was formally banned, but tolerated.[5]. Already in his 1775 text, Blumenbach specifically identified the Circassian women among the peoples of the Caucasus as the single most beautiful representatives of this pure and primordial "Caucasian" type: "Take, of all who bear the name of man, a man and a woman most widely different from each other; let the one be a most beautiful Circassian A similar yet smaller literature also exists for Circassian men, who were thought to be especially handsome. The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem. See more ideas about women, crimean tatars, beautiful. 1. The Circassian women look languidly to the African with an expression of supreme contempt, which is responded to by a sneer on the face of the Nubian eunuch.[32]. This extraordinary hairdo was entirely Barnums invention, but it stuck as one of the defining markers of the Circassian woman, no matter what circus or sideshow put a Circassian performer on the stage: a huge mass of hair, washed in beer and teased to a frizzy cloud resembling what might remind someone today of an Afro from the 1960s or 1970s. Add to this the fact that the Circassian Ladies were no Circassians at all but ordinary women costumed and frizzed to pass for a purely invented Circassian type, and the ambiguities rise to an even greater height: these transgressive women were not the Other at all but the white viewers own kind. Circassian beauties - Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core It offered the viewer an opportunity to view, and stare at, a sexualized white woman and to imagine her possible fate as a slave were she not spared it by appearing in the sideshow. Still, we might notseehow laughablyabsurd that white mythology is until confronted with it in the form of the Circassian Lady. Credit attribution requested to the photographer and to the Ministry of Tourism It has been argued that the distinctive hairstyle affiliates the side-show Circassian with African identity, and thus, resonates oddly yet resoundingly with the rest of her identifying significations: her racial purity, her sexual enslavement, her position as colonial subject; her beauty. Later in 1864, Barnum put on show someone he dubbed Zalumma Agra (Star of the East), a young woman who had come to his operation seeking work whom he dressed up in the invented costume that became the model for the Circassian Ladies who subsequently sprang up in circus sideshows all over the country. Her sale sent home some disappointed bawlers, Who bade on till the hundreds reached the eleven, But when the offer went beyond, they knew Twas for the Sultan, and at once withdrew. Don Juan, canto IV, verse 114. 31. First of all, we have to take into account that the myth of the Circassian included several intersecting elements of overwhelming interest, if not fixation, for nineteenth-century white Americans: race, slavery, and ideals of feminine virtue, beauty, and sexuality. Circassians commemorate the banishment of the Circassians from Russia in Taksim, stanbul, Illustration of skulls of the five races, from. Furthermore, white viewers would have had one very striking point of comparison for supposedly outlandish frizzy hair: this was the hair texture they would attribute to black people. Circassia is a mountainous region on the northeast shore of the Black Sea in the Caucasus (see the map below, with the close-up of Circassia in green). - YouTube 0:00 / 3:21 Circassian-Abkhaz Beauties! (Although we must remember that this was a fantasy: the Circassian Ladies were performers playing a part.) Barnum exhibited women he claimed to be from Circassia. In this passage, Blumenbach is discussing the fact that all human beings form part of the same species, because they can reproduce together, despite the external differences of appearance. white slavery. Biographical outline of the beautiful Circassian girl, Zobeide Luti, or Measures about 58 X 23 inches. But can we really choose to give up such a term, one that is so intertwined with our history and collective ways of seeing that some of us still use the label Caucasian as a way of identifying ourselves and others, even when we know, or at least ought to know, that it is a fantasy? 30. The untamed hair evoked exoticism; it served as a marker that this woman, who otherwise appeared entirely white, was in fact something Other. See more ideas about people, costumes, picture. Thomas M. Barrett (1998), "Southern Living (in Captivity): The Caucasus in Russian Popular Culture", Last edited on 27 February 2023, at 12:54, Said bin Sultan, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, "Chapter 2. [40] Barnum also produced a booklet about another of his Circassians, Zoe Meleke, who was portrayed as an ideally beautiful and refined woman who had escaped a life of sexual slavery. The legend of the Circassian woman involved a provocative component for white Americans: the idea that the Circassians were the most primordial form of the white race, and therefore also the purest and most beautiful exemplars of whiteness, especially their women; yet at the same time, these Circassian women were subject to the slave trade of the Ottoman Empire. Maker unknown, Circassian child, carte-de-visite (circa 1865), collection of the author. The beauty of the Circassian women in the 19th century were considered legendary throughout the world. I consider it to be impossible to look at them without loving them. The Grail Myth is the True Soul of The West. They may be mans best friend, but man has also changed them beyond all recognition, these incredible pictures of dog breeds reveal. [12] The fact that Circassian women were traditionally encouraged to wear corsets in order to keep their posture straight might have shaped their wasp waist as a result. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, and Hunter, John, On the Natural Variety of Mankind inThe Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Crane, Sylvia E., Greenough, Powers and Crawford, American Sculptors in Nineteenth Century Italy(Coral Gables,Florida: University of Miami Press, 1972). This story drew widespread attention to the area, as did later conflicts. It is a cruelly ironic twist of history that the Circassian Lady became an invented trope of circus spectacle in the United States at precisely the time that the actual Circassians were suffering ethnic cleansing in their homelandby some estimates, over six hundred thousandCircassians died in the Russian campaign to expel them from the region. The US Internal Revenue stamps on the back of each image were required on photographs by law, from August 1864 to August 1866, to raise funds for the Civil War. In 1802 "the Balm of Mecca" was also marketed as being used by Circassians: Galilee Area - portrait. has its own identity,and its history serves to enforce their sence of identity, Your email address will not be published. Maker unknown, Aggie Zolutia, carte-de-visite (circa 1875), collection of Steven Bolin. After all, there is no more reality to the designation Caucasian than there is to the frizzed hairstyle of the Circassian Ladies. In 1856 The New York Times published a report entitled "Horrible Traffic in Circassian Women Infanticide in Turkey", asserting that a consequence of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus was an excess of beautiful Circassian women on the Constantinople slave market, and that this was causing prices of slaves in general to plummet. Lord Byrons epic poem, Don Juan (18181824), contains this telling passage (Canto IV, verses 114 and 115) about a slave market in Istanbul: The legend of the white Circassian Beauty being sold into sexual slavery had taken on such a life of its own that in the early 1860s P. T. Barnum, the great American showman and promoter of hokum, conceived the idea of buying a Circassian woman out of captivity in Turkey to exhibit in his wildly successful American Museumin New York City. Abraham Bogardus, Caucasian Girl, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of the author. Had decked her out in all the hues of heaven. The statue sealed Powerss fame, despite the debates that the statue aroused. Our choices about language are never just private. The Orientalist fantasy, especially the imagining of the harem and the seraglio, allowed Europeans and Americans to project their subterranean prurience onto a safely distant world. The writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has emphasized the potential vulnerability of such constructed concepts in an essay, Good People, Racist People: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. by Gregory Fried Published March 15, 2013*. [33] The story drew on ideas of racial hierarchy, stating that: The temptation to possess a Circassian girl at such low prices is so great in the minds of the Turks that many who cannot afford to keep several slaves have been sending their blacks to market, in order to make room for a newly purchased white girl. History of Circassian Beauties - YouTube But the very appearance of the Circassian Lady in the circus sideshow, alongside other human types designated freaks, must have blunted all such questions. [6] It is not clear why Barnum chose this hairstyle. These maidens are very honourably and virtuously instructed how to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed. "[10], American travel author and diplomat Bayard Taylor in 1862 claimed that, "So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. [37], The trend spread, with supposedly Circassian women featured in dime museums and travelling medicine shows, sometimes known as "Moss-haired girls". [20], In parts of Europe and North America where blond hair was more common, the pairing of extremely white skin with very dark hair also present among some Circassians was exalted, even in Russia which was at war with the Circassians; Semyon Bronevskii exalted Circassian women for having light skin, dark brown hair, dark eyes and "the lineaments of the face of the Ancient Greek". Photo taken by Itamar Grinberg for the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. That irony has resonance even now. "The First 'Circassian Exodus' to the Ottoman Empire (18581867)". The self as Other, and the Other as self: in this liminal zone, which one defines the meaning of whiteness, of freedom, and of acceptable sexual license? When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. We are caught in the Catch-22 of history: only if we acknowledge the historical and constructed meaning of race can we face up to the ongoing burden of that history in our present. The max they could do is steal children from Caucasus and make fight . The costume did much to accent both exoticism and sexuality by using strange cuts, fabrics, jewelry, and embroidery, and often by exposing arms, legs, and busts in ways that would otherwise have been out of bounds for a white Victorian woman. For one Circassian, a sweet girl, were given, As the peasants danced to the mournful melodies of the accordion and . Maker unknown, inscribed on reverse Zoe Meleke, Circassian Lady, Born in Asia Minor, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of Greg French. Prodigies by James G. Mundie - Circassian Beauty - missionCREEP [41], Pseudoscientific explanations for fair skin, Brookes, Douglas Scott (2010). When I first stumbled across the photograph reproduced below, over fifteenyears ago at an antique show, it struck me as ludicrous, inexplicable, and yet also somehow haunting. [22] In the United States, the girls disguised as "Circassians" exhibited by Phineas T. Barnum were in fact Catholic Irish girls from Lower Manhattan. What might be particularly striking to the modern viewer, again, is the big hair, which looks so much like the Afro of the late 1960s and 1970s, then as much symbol of Black Power as a fashion statement. In 1775, the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (17521840) published On the Natural Variety of Mankind, a work that became one of the most influential texts in the emerging European science of race. The Most Beautiful Women in the World: Vintage Portraits of Circassian Watch. [14], It has also been suggested that a lithe and erect physique were favored for Circassians, and many villages had large numbers of healthy elderly people, many over a hundred years of age. And above all, who but must long for an article, from the seraglio of the Grand Turk, which produces a near resemblance to the Georgian and Circassian beauties? From personal experience of travelling to many countries in the Caucasus, they tend to be very very beautiful. John Frederick Lewis's The Harem portrays Circassians as the dominant mistresses of the harem, who look down on other women, as implied in the review of the painting in The Art Journal, which described it as follows: It represents the interior of a harem and slaves at Cairo, wherein is seated in luxurious ease a young man, attired in the excess of Moslem fashion. The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in US Popular Culture, 18501877. It is history and has to be known. Other features suggested this Otherness, such as the clothing. Nature has there lavished upon the women beauties which are not to be seen elsewhere. The Sultana Served by her Eunuchs, Painting by Charles Amedee Philippe van Loo.Circassian woman, 1870s-80s. : case sensitive: see the pronunciation key for a guide on how to write the sounds; sounds can only be searched in names that have been assigned pronunciations * is a wildcard that will match zero or more letters in the pronunciation example: *lee matches names which end with the sound lee _ is a wildcard that will match exactly one letter in the pronunciation "Circassian Lotion" was sold in 1806 for the skin, at fifty cents the bottle. If the interlocking themes of slavery, whiteness, Christianity, and freedom in Powerss Greek Slave resonated so deeply in the United States, it was because it hit home as a kind of portrait in racial negative of the tightening noose of slavery at home. At Bet il Sahel there was much more luxury and grand style than at Bet il Mtoni. That would be a fitting end to a term for whiteness worn out long ago. Lew Wallace and the Circassian Girl Hoax | Hoosier State Chronicles 35 Pictures of Circassians ideas | people, costumes, picture - Pinterest Circassian beauties is a phrase used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northern Caucasus.A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited, and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines.This reputation dates back to the later Middle Ages, when the Circassian coast was frequented . Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the young womans abstracted gaze with the absurdly wild mass of hair flaming around her head. The doctor of medicine Hugh Williamson, a signatory to the United States Constitution, argued that the reason for the extreme whiteness of the Circassian and coastal Celto-Germanic peoples can be explained by the geographical location of these folks' ancestral homelands which lie in high latitudes ranging from 45 to 55 N near a sea or ocean where westerlies prevail from the west towards the east. Jul 19, 2021 - And other beautiful women who are Georgian, Uyghur, Crimean Tatar, Chechen & ??? A circa 1900 albumen photograph (3 7/8 in. "Circassian Eye-Water" was marketed as "a sovereign remedy for all diseases of the eyes",[35] and in the 1840s "Circassian hair dye" was marketed to create a rich dark lustrous effect.[36]. 9 Batter E. Kadkoy Native Adighebze Speaker Author has 69 answers and 694.6K answer views 4 y Related How do Circassians feel about atheism? The Circassians became major news during the Caucasian War, in which Russia conquered the North Caucasus, displacing large numbers of Circassians southwards. From there, the viewerprimarily the white male viewercould contemplate a further question: whether the sideshow depicts an erotic truth that is or ought to be more than a sideshow in ordinary domestic life. This lovely name offers a range of beautiful pet names, such as Jelica, Jele, Lena, Lenotschka, and Lenka. Who bade on till the hundreds reached the eleven, The handsome and graceful Circassian women were much more numerous than at Bet il Mtoni, where my mother and her lady friend Medne were the only members of this race. It describes what seems to be a Greek monk on M A cool photo collection that shows what naughty ladies looked like in the 1950s. 16 Barnum, in his autobiography, says little about what followed, except that Greenwood disguised himself as a slave-buyer and saw "a large number of Circassian girls and women" in . And yet the imageof the Circassian Lady played into an already well-established, if illicit and subversive,fantasy of white women (or at least a white-seeming woman) subjected as slaves to the sexual whims of real or potential owners;after all, the sideshow allure of the Circassian Beauties was that they might well have ended up as slaves in a harem. What I learned about what is essentially a circus identity I find fascinating because of what it tells us about how nineteenth-century Americans treated race, even the white race, as a spectacle, as aperformed identity that might not be what it seemed. I found a name, inscribed inpencil more than 130 years agoon the back of the photograph, Zublia Aggolia, and a title, Circassian Lady. Even today, I still know nothing about Zublia herself apart from her name, and even that is not what it seems. [1][2][3], There are folk songs in various languages all around the Middle East and Balkans describing the unusual beauty of Circassian women, a trend popularised after the Circassian genocide, although the reputation of Circassian women dates back to the Late Middle Ages when the Circassian coast was frequented by traders from Genoa, and the founder of the Medici dynasty, Cosimo de' Medici, had an illegitimate son from a Circassian slave. Circassian people. These intentional freaks dressed in the very opposite attire of their modest Central Asian "sisters." (A major feature of the post-bellum American sideshows, Barnum's racial and sexual fantasies showed up on postcards, cigarette advertisements, and fliers. Mine Tugay (born July 28, 1978, Istanbul, Turkey) - Turkish actress. Because this strange position enticed nineteenth-century viewers to transgress these categories, at least in their imaginations while viewing the sideshow or in private while gazing at a photographic portrait, the natural place for this kind of performance was the strange and yet protected and circumscribed space of the freak show, pioneered so effectively by P. T. Barnum himself. Even more subversively, the very idea of white women as sexual slaves must have presented a titillating object to the imagination, at least for white men. Racism was created by policy. The portrayal of a white woman as a rescued slave at the time of the American Civil War played on the racial connotations of slavery at the time. "[30] Another anthropologist, William Guthrie, distinguished the Caucasian race and the "Circassians who are admired for their beauty" in particular by their oval form of their head, straight nose, thin lips, vertically-placed teeth, facial angle from 80 to 90 degrees that he calls the most developed one, and their regular features overall, which "causes them to be considered as the most handsome and agreeable". [15], Maturin Murray Ballou described Circassians as being of the "fair and rosy-cheeked race", and "with a form of ravishing loveliness, large and lustrous eyes, and every belonging that might go to make up a Venus". Her social media activities reveal that she is very interested in Circassian cuisine, history and culture in general. As such, Greece became a symbol of republican liberty against corrupt tyranny. The fame of these women inspired more than just literary achievement. Here is the full context from Blumenbachs On the Natural Variety of Mankind: Blumenbach adds this footnote to the word Georgian in the passage above: From a cloud of eye-witnesses it is enough to quote a classical one, Jo.