While most Circassian tribes were famous for abundance of fair or dark blond and red hair combined with greyish-blue or green eyes,[12] many also had the pairing of very dark hair with very light complexions, a typical feature of Peoples of the Caucasus. 30. Not that I am the first to learn about these portraits of women like Zublia; scholars such as Linda Frost have cleared the path to make sense of them in a much broader nineteenth-century context of gender and racial representation. "[24], During the 19th century, various Western intellectuals offered pseudoscientific explanations for the light complexion present among Circassians. 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. Observations on the Hypothesis of some modern Writers, that America has been peopled by a distinct Race of Men and Animals; with some Proofs arising from the Natural History and Appearances of the new Continent in favour of the Mosaic Account of the Deluge", "Horrible Traffic in Circassian WomenInfanticide in Turkey", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Circassian_beauty&oldid=1141901272, Natalia Krlikowska-Jedlinska. Originally published in German in 1775. The Colonial Contexts for the Harem Representation", "XLIV. Slow down please, and enjoy the info. As Linda Frost has suggested, the Circassian woman occupied a very peculiar place in the nineteenth-century imagination, a place that challenged the dominant classifications of race, gender, and sexuality. Though Barnum claimed his agent, dressed in full Turkish costume, had there seen a large number of beautiful Circassian girls and women, for one reason or another he failed to return with one. Racism was created by policy. Bogdan, Robert,Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 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. You readEdmund Morgans workand actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. In the case of The Greek Slave, he meant to portray a whiteChristian woman facing a terrible fate with faith, modesty, and fortitude. So now we are in a better position to answer our question: Why Circassian Ladies but not Circassian Gentlemen? "Not to be denied his harem slave, Barnum hired a frizzy-haired local woman, put her in a Turkish costume and dubbed her Zalumma Agra, Star of the EastThe Circassian beauty was an instant success, soon to be followed by a succession of imported beauties with an enigmatic letter Z figuring prominently in all their names. Updated on July 7, 2013, to included a discussion of the essay Has Caucasian Lost Its Meaning?by Shaila Dewan. This story drew widespread attention to the area, as did later conflicts. In this way, the purest white is made an Otherby associating it, however subconsciously, with white Americans physiological stereotypes about blacks. In the 1860s the showman P. T. Barnum exhibited women who he claimed were Circassian beauties. The Sultana Served by her Eunuchs, Painting by Charles Amedee Philippe van Loo.Circassian woman, 1870s-80s. Circassian girls are beautiful especially the older generation , but this is not specific to them , Caucasus girls are . But the very appearance of the Circassian Lady in the circus sideshow, alongside other human types designated freaks, must have blunted all such questions. Jelena. The first thing to consider is the designation Circassian itself. 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. The Grail Myth is the True Soul of The West. For an American audience both morbidly fascinatedand panicked by the prospect of race mixing, transgression of the taboo could go only so far before being sealed with disaster. As with PowerssGreek slave, the presumed Christian faith of the Circassian Beauty puts into play another paradox: the sexualized Other who is nevertheless both contained and made virtuous by her deep faith, despite her terrible fate. 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. As another example, in 1868, the English sculptor John Bell produced a sculpture entitled The Octoroon. Circassian beauties are admired for their abundant and luxuriant yellow hair and blue eyes. 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 legend of Circassian women was also repeated by legal theorist Gustav Hugo, who wrote that "Even beauty is more likely to be found in a Circassian slave girl than in a beggar girl", referring to the fact that even a slave has some security and safety, but a "free" beggar has none. And yet we can combat the most absurd aspects of racial nomenclature. 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). 06-14-2013, 06:51 AM. The crucifix also shows up in Powerss statue The Greek Slave, where it can be seen, along with her removed clothes, just beneath her hand on the post on which she leans. He displayed a "Circassian Beauty" at his American Museum in 1865. Cosmetic products were advertised, from the 18th century on, using the word "Circassian" in the title, or claiming that the product was based on substances used by the women of Circassia. Beauty's brightest colours (Although we must remember that this was a fantasy: the Circassian Ladies were performers playing a part.) In a letter of May 1864, Barnum authorized his agent, John Greenwood Jr., to spend up to $5,000 in gold each (a vast sum in that day) for two Circassian beauties if Greenwood could successfully infiltrate the slave markets of Istanbul to buy them without being detected as a Westerner. One Circassian woman, favoured with an aristocratic appearance, was avoided and even hated by the chocolate-coloured African women through no fault of hers, but simply because she looked majestic. 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. It is also understood from the memoirs of Princess Emily Ruete, a half-Circassian and half-Omani herself, that Circassian women, who were captured in Constantinople and brought to Africa for the harem of Zanzibari Said bin Sultan, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, were envied by their rivals who considered Circassians to be of the "hateful race of blue-eyed cats". Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, and Hunter, John, On the Natural Variety of Mankind inThe Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Fate: Story of a Circassian Slave Girl follows the dark fate of a beautiful Circassian girl sold to the Ottoman Palace by her parents at the end of the 19th Century. The Circassians became major news during the Caucasian War, in which Russia conquered the North Caucasus, displacing large numbers of Circassians southwards. Pontios. H. R. Doane, Zaluma Agra, Star of the East, cartes-de-visite, two views (circa 1865), collection of Greg French. [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. Of course, individuals may make that choice in the waythey use everyday language, but that choice is made more difficult to the extent that government officials still employ Caucasian as a legitimate identifying label, as Shaila Dewan has pointed out in a recent essay,Has Caucasian Lost Its Meaning?,in the New York Times:Justice Anthony M. Kennedy saw fit to use the term in the pivotal affirmative action decision, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin; on the very first page, in the statement of facts, Justice Kennedy describes Abigail NoelFisher, who sued the university for discrimination, as the Petitioner, who is Caucasian . document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Circasians: The Most Beautiful Women in the World. It is history and has to be known. But there was no mistaking the meaning of that fate, even then: as a slave, her body would be at the disposal of her buyer, and it was precisely this fact that would be staring the statues viewers in the face as they stared, in turn, at her white granite bodyor the many photographic reproductions of that body. Beautiful Hijab Cute Beauty Chapel Veil Muslim Beauty Lace Wrap Beauty A soft, lovely all-over embroidered multi-color black floral English net is trimmed in a vintage style gold leaf motif trim and includes a sewn-in clip to hold it in place! Of breathtaking beauty, big and bright eyes and everything that could constitute a Venus. Was how the American traveler and writer Maturin Murray Ballou (1820-95) described the Circassian woman. Her social media activities reveal that she is very interested in Circassian cuisine, history and culture in general. 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. But dont we now have a choice? They may be mans best friend, but man has also changed them beyond all recognition, these incredible pictures of dog breeds reveal. The carte-de-visite of Zublia Aggolia displays the prevalent features of a Circassian portrait. 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. [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". Daguerreotype of a "Circassian beauty" by Matthew Brady, New York, circa 1861. 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. 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. Hugo's comment was later condemned by Karl Marx in The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law (1842) on the grounds that it excused slavery. The idea that a white woman might be sold into slavery, and especially sold into a slavery that marked her as a sexual object in a potentates harem, was a matter of both moral horror and transgressive fascination to the white imagination. I have decided to finish this article with a excerpt from the travel diary of Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, who referred to Circassian women as the most graceful and most sensual-looking creatures I have ever seen. A little tribute to a people who have been denied their homeland and who struggle to maintain their traditions. Her sale sent home some disappointed bawlers, The "golden age" of the Circassian beauty may be considered to be between the 1770s, when the Russian Empire seized the Crimean Khanate and cut off their slave trade, which increased the demand for Circassian women in Near Eastern harems; and the 1860s, when the Russians massacred thousands of Circassians and conquered Circassia. The Circassian Lady therefore literally embodied a taboo. We, the children of Circassian women, were usually called "cats" by those of our brothers and sisters who had African blood in their veins, because some of us had the misfortune of possessing: blue eyes. Hair in the Eastern style with Spartan diadem. Europeans had sympathized with Greece not only for its being the font of Western civilization and its ideal of freedom but also for its resistance as a Christian nation against the Muslim Ottomans. Check out the first comment. 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. See more ideas about women, crimean tatars, beautiful. Measures about 58 X 23 inches. Zoe looks white and lives free on a plantation in the American South. 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 woman and the other an African born in Guinea, as black and ugly as possible (Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 363). 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. [38] Barnum's first "Circassian" was marketed under the name "Zalumma Agra"[39] and was exhibited at his American Museum in New York from 1864. in, This page was last edited on 27 February 2023, at 12:54. Zalumma was the first of several Circassians in Barnums shows, and even her name was his invention. Who bade on till the hundreds reached the eleven, 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. And that, in turn, would suggest that the white American lady was, at bottom, in her unadorned, uncultured nature, no different from the Circassianand so no different from the African. 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 [22] In the United States, the girls disguised as "Circassians" exhibited by Phineas T. Barnum were in fact Catholic Irish girls from Lower Manhattan. Enjoy the story, stop bringing your hate into this. [9] Mark Twain reported in The Innocents Abroad (1869) that "Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople, but not publicly. p. 46, Delaware Gazette and State Journal, 2 February 1815. Of course, back in Powerss American homeland, what was most on the publics mind when the sculpture went on tour there was the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act. Charles Eisenmann, Zumiya the Egyptian, Age 20, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1870s), collection of Greg French. Nature has there lavished upon the women beauties which are not to be seen elsewhere. [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. Derisively they called us "Highness", a proof of how annoyed they were about us having been born with lighter skin. 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. Abraham Bogardus, Caucasian Girl, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of the author. She embodies ideals of womanly purity and virtue, but also sexuality; she is alluringly exotic, yet familiar. 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]. 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. 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. Wunder, Richard, Hiram Powers: Vermont sculptor, 1805-1873 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). 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. In 1802 "the Balm of Mecca" was also marketed as being used by Circassians: 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. Not to be denied his harem slave, Barnum hired a frizzy-haired local woman, put her in a Turkish costume and dubbed her Zalumma Agra, Star of the East . That potent combination of horror and fascination was evident at least as early as the display of Hiram Powerss statue The Greek Slaveat the Great Exhibition in London in 1845 and then again in 1851. The fact is that the Circassian Lady or the Circassian Beauty was a staple of nineteenth-century sideshows, but not the Circassian Gentleman. With the occasional exception of a Circassian child (see illustration below), all the photographs we find of sideshow Circassians are of women. In the 1860s the showman P.T. Galilee Area - portrait. 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. As a name for whiteness, Caucasian is among the most pernicious because of its role as a label for the purest, most original race. Updated on February 8, 2014, to discuss recent efforts by the Circassian community to protest the Circassian genocide and the hosting, by Russia, of the Olympic Games in Sochi, the site of the Circassians final defeat and mass deportation in 1864. 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]. We can refuse to use Caucasian to describe people, we can point out its absurdity whenever possible, and we can insist that the government not use it in any official capacity. The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem. So one of the most beautiful would do, but be sure & get a decent-looking chap of 16 years old or more. They used a concoction supposedly extracted from a vegetable native to Circassia. Emily Jean "Emma" Stone was born on November 6, 1988 in Scottsdale, Arizona to Krista Jean Stone (ne Yeager), a homemaker & Jeffrey Charles "Jeff" Stone, a contracting company founder and CEO. Barnum exhibited women he claimed to be from Circassia. The sideshow therefore only exploited the ambiguities; it never truly challenged them, and the Circassian Lady never really allowed the Victorian world to call into question the dividing lines of race, freedom, and sexual self-possession that she embodied, if only as a performance of an imaginary human type. I'm sure the sultans had good taste . "[19], The characteristics of Circassian and Georgian women were further articulated in 1839 by the author Emma Reeve who, as stated by Joan DelPlato, differentiated "between 'the blond Circassians' who are 'indolent and graceful, their voices low and sweet' and what she calls the slightly darker-skinned Georgians who are 'more animated' and have more 'intelligence and vivacity than their delicate rivals'". At the same time writers and illustrators were also creating images depicting the authentic costumes and people of the Caucasus. More to the point,isnt it just as absurd that now, nearly 250 years after Blumenbach, we still refer to white people as Caucasians? 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 charged ambiguity of the Circassian Beauty, straddling sexual transgression and religious transcendence, marks this type of person with a certain mystical value grounded in her freakish whiteness. Beautiful Circassian Woman. Thomas Benyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865). - YouTube 0:00 / 3:21 Circassian-Abkhaz Beauties! Circassian people. Heres a newspaper clipping from the Edinburg Daily Courier, and is dated October 29, 1938. As the peasants danced to the mournful melodies of the accordion and . One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. Watch. Circassian beauties is a term 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 Ottoman Empire when Circassian women living in . 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 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. "[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". This theme replicated itself in fiction, too. 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. As such, Greece became a symbol of republican liberty against corrupt tyranny. *Updated April 19, 2013, adding everything after But dont we now have a choice? Minor corrections made on May 22, 2013. 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. 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). Circassian Beauty carte de visite, 4 x 2.5 inches, circa 1870 . 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, or Moss-haired girls as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. This natural superiority was the cause of a good deal of ill-will and envy. Their imposing bearing, their romantic dress and their natural dignity of mien, stamp them as very superior Raven haired, black-bearded, broad-browed, with wide springing eyebrows of sooty black these bronzed and armed children of the mountains tend to put us out of love with our own specimens of men, and suggests thoughts not complementary to the types of manhood which, in this country, they are surrounded. She wears a jeweled crucifix and pearl-studded, low-cut dress, and the characteristic hairstyle is unmistakable. Perhaps it will take an event as revolting and traumatic as the Marathon bombing to finally uncouple the name Caucasian from whiteness and lay it to rest. This is confirmed by the portrayal of other types in the circus sideshows of the period, such as this Egyptian (another performed persona): So here we land in yet another seeming paradox: the putatively purest, most primordial, most beautiful form of the white race, the Circassian, is constructed to share, however subtly, its signature featurea wild mane of hairwith Africans. Frost, Linda, The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Imperialism, and American Popular Entertainment, in Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in US Popular Culture, 18501877(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).