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The legend of Circassian women in the western world was enhanced in 1734, when, in his Letters on the English, Voltaire alludes to the beauty of Circassian women: The Circassians are poor, and their daughters are beautiful, and indeed it is in them they chiefly trade. It clearly states that he hired local women to pretend to be Circassians. 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. 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. 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. Long before this Diaspora, and for some time after it, these Circassians occupied an unusual place in the collective imagination of Europeans, Americans and Turks. It is worth underlining that this costume and hair had nothing to do with how actual Circassian women looked, as the illustrations below indicate. In the 1860s the showman P. T. Barnum exhibited women who he claimed were Circassian beauties. 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. I consider it to be impossible to look at them without loving them. Despite that, her portrait has taken me down a path of discovery whose connections I would have never guessed. In this way, the purest white is made an Otherby associating it, however subconsciously, with white Americans physiological stereotypes about blacks. 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 luxurious palaces of the sultans housed Georgians, Abkhazians and Circassians as concubines and odalisques. [37] As the original fad faded, the "Circassians" started to add to their appeal by performing traditional circus tricks such as sword swallowing. Powers insisted that the nakedness depicted was not offensive but rather elevating, that it was no incitement to lust but rather an instance of what he called an ideal type, a form that transcends the human body and symbolizes pure principles of human virtue. Slow down please, and enjoy the info. Explore. Why the Circassian Lady as the title for this particular type of circus performer? Though Barnum claimed his agent, dressed in full Turkish costume, had seen a large number of beautiful Circassian girls and women, for one reason or another he failed to return with one. See more ideas about women, traditional outfits, traditional dresses. 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. The Most Beautiful Women in the World: Vintage Portraits of Circassian Beauties With Their Big Curly Hair, Mihailo Tolotos, the Greek Orthodox Monk Who Lived 82 Years Without Ever Seeing a Woman, 30 Cool Pics That Capture Naughty Ladies of the 1950s, Victorian Postmortem Photography: The Myth of the Stand Alone Corpse, The Lost Janis Joplin Topless Photos in Copacabana, Rio De Janeiro in the Summer of 1970, 40 Vintage Photos Show What Living Rooms Looked Like in the 1960s, 40 Amazing Kodachrome Snaps Show What Life Looked Like in the Late 1950s, Incredible Then and Now Pictures That Show What Popular Dog Breeds Looked Like Before And After 100 Years of Breeding. Chardin, T. I. p. m. 171.The blood of Georgia is the best of the East, and perhaps in the world. From a historical perspective,Circassian/Abjaz dispora,very similar to both Irish & Jewish dispora before,Buti Still,Circassia [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. . This was June of 2014. 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]. It is a testimony to the influence of Blumenbach that we still use the term Caucasian to signify white people, and of course the color scheme of white, yellow, brown, black, and red still has currency, too, although in altered forms. Updated on July 7, 2013, to included a discussion of the essay Has Caucasian Lost Its Meaning?by Shaila Dewan. Other features suggested this Otherness, such as the clothing. kbals (honoured lady consorts) of Circassian descent were also numerous, most notable of them being Cevherriz II, Ceylanyar II, Dilfirib I, Nalandil III, and Nergis IV in addition to Gzdes (favourite lady consorts), including Drdane I, Hsnicenan III, Safderun IV, amongst others. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. They furnish with those beauties the seraglio of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy, and of all of those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise. They wore a distinctive curly, big hair style, which had no precedent in earlier portrayals of Circassians, but which was soon copied by other female performers in the United States, who became known as "moss-haired girls". The imperial harem was famous for the extraordinary beauty of its maids, who were considered the most attractive in the Turkish-Ottoman Empire. Also peculiar is how many of the Circassians have names beginning with a combination of Z and A or A and ZZublia Aggolia, Zalumma Agra, Aggie Zolutiaas if they were the alpha and omega of whiteness. Many Georgian and Circassian families even encouraged their daughters to enter concubinage for the promise of a life of luxury and comfort, and many Circassians become favorite wives or consorts to the Ottoman sultans. This rule applies to Great Britain and Ireland, to the Germans, Danes, Swedes, and Circassians; but going to the eastward in the same latitude, as we depart from the ocean or the Black Sea, having more dry land to the windward, by which the air is charged with sun-dry exhalations, the skin changes its colour; it ceases to be perfectly fair.[27]. 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? 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? What I know now is that the woman depicted here fits the model of a kind of performed personality dubbed the Circassian Lady or the Circassian Beauty in mid-nineteenth-century America. The Colonial Contexts for the Harem Representation", "XLIV. Zublia Aggolia was almost certainly a stage name, given that probably none of the women performing this part were actual Circassians, a people from the Caucasus region in what is now modern Russia. They also often performed in pseudo-oriental costume. The Grail Myth is the True Soul of The West. Who bade on till the hundreds reached the eleven, Circassian beauties, or "Moss-haired girls" as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. [23], Circassian men were also exalted for their beauty, manliness and bravery in Western Europe, in a way Caucasus historian Charles King calls "homoerotic". They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de' Medici. They may be mans best friend, but man has also changed them beyond all recognition, these incredible pictures of dog breeds reveal. 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. So one of the most beautiful would do, but be sure & get a decent-looking chap of 16 years old or more. It "instantly gives a Rosy Hue to the Cheeks", a "lively and animated Bloom of Rural Beauty" that would not disappear in perspiration or handkerchiefs.[34]. Titillation should not be confused with illumination. Circassian people. Day of mourning for the Circassians. They are also constrained by collective decisions, both conscious and unaware, about what things mean; as such, those decisions can mold widespread beliefs and attitudes as well as governmental policy in the narrow sense. Add to this heady brew the tincture of Orientalism that Edward Said has dissected as a feature of European colonial imagination, and we have in the Circassian Lady an archetype at the intersection of multiple Victorian obsessions, however covert. [37], The trend spread, with supposedly Circassian women featured in dime museums and travelling medicine shows, sometimes known as "Moss-haired girls". When Zublias photograph was taken, around 1870, Circassia had long been a battleground between the Russians to its north and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire to the south, after Russia invaded the Caucasus, starting in the late eighteenth century. Blumenbach was a specialist in comparative anatomy, and he initiated the division of human beings into five distinct races defined by region and color: the Caucasian or white race, the Mongolian or yellow race, the Malayan or brown race, the Ethiopian or black race, and the American or red race. 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. According to Voltaire, the practice of inoculation (see also variolation, an early form of vaccination) resulted in the Circassians having skin clean of smallpox scars: The Circassian women have, from time immemorial, communicated the small-pox to their children when not above six months old by making an incision in the arm, and by putting into this incision a pustule, taken carefully from the body of another child. In the British version, they do marry, despite the taboo (and the laws) against miscegenation, and they live out their lives together, but not before fending off another man who attempts to see her enslaved as a declared black woman so that he can buy her as his own mistress. Beautys brightest colours Had decked her out in all the hues of heaven. Those Ottomans never got past the Caucasus. 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. [22] In the United States, the girls disguised as "Circassians" exhibited by Phineas T. Barnum were in fact Catholic Irish girls from Lower Manhattan. 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. Thomas Jefferson himself had sired children with his slave Sally Hemings, herself the child of an enslaved mother and a white masterand the half sister of Jeffersons deceased wife. "[11], An anthropological literary suggests that Circassians were best characterized by what was called "rosy pale" or "translucent white skin". "[24], During the 19th century, various Western intellectuals offered pseudoscientific explanations for the light complexion present among Circassians. Mine Tugay (born July 28, 1978, Istanbul, Turkey) - Turkish actress. All the more remarkable is that the Afro of the 1960s was to a large extent a symbol of rebellion against the norm then for many blacks, namely, straightening the hair to look more white; with the Circassians, we have a nearly reverse effect: frizzing the hair to appear more other, while still remaining identifiably white. I'm sure the sultans had good taste . 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. From personal experience of travelling to many countries in the Caucasus, they tend to be very very beautiful. She was tall, and well, though slightly, shaped; and held herself, like all Circassians, men or women, very erect."[18]. 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. We have to remember that the explosion of frizzed hair in the portraits of Circassian women was an entirely artificial effect, both cosmetically and culturally: it had to be created with beer shampoo and teasing comb; it had nothing to do with how actual Circassian women wore their hair. 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 For example, in 1859, a play by Dion Boucicault called The Octoroonopened in London. Obermller and Kern, Miss Millie La Mar, Mind Reader, cabinet card (circa 1890), collection of the author. Appear in advertisements on Turkish TV, in the theater. I have not observed a single ugly face in that country, in either sex; but I have seen angelical ones. Circassian Beauty carte de visite, 4 x 2.5 inches, circa 1870 . Jelena is a gorgeous name originating from both Russian and Slavic languages. [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". Similar claims about Circassian women appear in Lord Byron's Don Juan (18181824), in which the tale of a slave auction is told: Some went off dearly; fifteen hundred dollars In the American context, that meant that human beings seeking to escape from their own form of very real enslavement could expect their liberty to be respected nowhere in the nation, not even in the supposedly free states of the North. Racism was created by policy. [26], There are not any people, on the old continent, perfectly fair, except those who live in high latitudes, where the westerly winds come from the sea, at no great distance, so tempered as not to be very sharp nor very dry. As such, Greece became a symbol of republican liberty against corrupt tyranny.