GEORGIA: AFTER DECADES IN EXILE, MESKHETIAN TURKS RETURN TO LOST HOMELAND

Eurasia Insight
ticles/eav100909.shtml
10/09/09

Roughly 65 years ago, Osman, a 90-year-old Meskhetian Turk, lost
his home in Georgia to Stalin’s dictat. Now, after a lifetime in
Central Asia, Osman, along with hundreds of other Meskhetian Turks,
is trying to come home again.

Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, Meskhetians, a Muslim people who
speak a Turkish dialect, were allowed to live anywhere in the Soviet
Union except for Georgia itself. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, a few hundred Meskhetians started to trickle back,
in search of their roots. Instead, they found problems.

Many Christian Georgians termed the Meskhetians’ return to their
native Samtskhe-Javakheti region in southern Georgia "the Turks’
second great invasion" – a reference to Ottoman Turkey’s takeover of
Samtskhe-Javakheti in the 16th century. That prejudice still lingers.

Despite it, a few thousand Meskhetians now live in Georgia. The
Georgian government says that it has laid the groundwork for more to
return this year.

Osman’s village of Abastumani in Samtskhe-Javakheti is one of
the few places where these exiles have returned to their truly
ancestral land. The ruins of the house where Osman was born lie just
a stone’s throw away from his current dwelling. But as Osman and other
Meskhetians are learning, the divide that keeps Meskhetians strangers
in their own land is wide, and it remains difficult to bridge the gap.

Editor’s Note: Temo Bardzimashvili is a freelance photojournalist
based in Tbilisi.