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). So now we are in a better position to answer our question: Why Circassian Ladies but not Circassian Gentlemen? African women were routinely portrayed as sexually lascivious, and therefore in some sense willing and complicit in their sexual exploitation. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. 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. Derisively they called us "Highness", a proof of how annoyed they were about us having been born with lighter skin. Barnums obsession originally led him to take advantage of the repercussions of the Circassian war to enter the slave market in Istanbul illegally. Why? Explore. 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. . 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. What the Circassian costume did do was invoke a certain Orientalism, a hint of the harem and the seraglio. has its own identity,and its history serves to enforce their sence of identity, Your email address will not be published. Said that the Circassian beauties with the hair "Massimi as moss" captivate with their beauty and are much in demand in the harems of Oriental sovereigns. 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. In the 1860s the showman P. T. Barnum exhibited women who he claimed were Circassian beauties. Appear in advertisements on Turkish TV, in the theater. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the young womans abstracted gaze with the absurdly wild mass of hair flaming around her head. Measures about 58 X 23 inches. 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. The luxurious palaces of the sultans housed Georgians, Abkhazians and Circassians as concubines and odalisques. H. R. Doane, Zaluma Agra, Star of the East, cartes-de-visite, two views (circa 1865), collection of Greg French. Not to be denied his harem slave, Barnum hired a frizzy-haired local woman, put her in . All of these women were local girls, most of whom were encouraged to wash their hair in beer and then tease it out for that exotic Circassian do. 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. 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. 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. Symbolic and only barely covert sexualization seems to have thrived in the liminal space of the sideshow freaks, as in this portrait of a snake charmer: The mystical symbolism of a freakish whiteness seems to have been even more accentuated in the case of some albinos, the whitest persons of all, who adopted the cachet of mysterious powers, such as mind reading, as a feature of their sideshow acts: This comes full circle in the portrait below of Aggie Zolutia, representing the highest possible pitch of a fetishized whiteness: an albino Circassian. 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. As a name for whiteness, Caucasian is among the most pernicious because of its role as a label for the purest, most original race. Originally published in German in 1775. What is especially ironic is the tax stamp on the back of the portrait of Zulumma Agra: these stamps raised revenues for the Federal troops fighting in the Civil War, and yet the image traded in part on their titillating suggestion of white women sold into slavery. 2020. These Circassians were actually women from the countryside of the United States who had a more exotic appearance, which he exaggerated by styling them with afro haircuts. Zoe looks white and lives free on a plantation in the American South. 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? [37] Actual Circassian hairstyles bore no resemblance to Barnum's fantasy. 'Twas for the Sultan, and at once withdrew. Their beauty is mentioned in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), in which Fielding remarked, "How contemptible would the brightest Circassian beauty, drest in all the jewels of the Indies, appear to my eyes!"[8]. Such adventures bring no lasting insight or transformation; quite the reverse, in fact: they tend to shunt a disquieting experience or question off into a limbo that has the effect of making it disappear from active reflection. As such, Greece became a symbol of republican liberty against corrupt tyranny. Circassians are depicted in images of harems at this time through these ideologies of racial hierarchy. Our choices about language are never just private. [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". More to the point,isnt it just as absurd that now, nearly 250 years after Blumenbach, we still refer to white people as Caucasians? "[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". 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. Emma Stone. 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. 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.
100 Beautiful Russian Girl Names (With Their Meanings) - Honey Name 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. What fair one but must yield implicit faith, when she has the honour of the Countess De fairly pledged, that all sepacious [sic] impurities will be at once removed by this wonder-working nostrum. There was scientific, such as Voltaires letter On inoculation, and even mercantile as many products began to be sold with an allusion to Circassians, such as the Bloom of Circassia in London. However, it seems that "Zalumma Agra" was probably a local girl hired by the show, as were later "Circassians". Though Barnum's original women were portrayed as proud and genteel, later images of Circassians often emphasised erotic poses and revealing costumes. The Circassians were often sent to the sultans court as gifts from the governors, bought in slave markets after being kidnapped or sold by impoverished parents. This was an explosive idea because it raised questions about the assumptions that white people in the United States might have held about the supposedly natural inviolability of the white race when it came to both submitting toslavery and surrendering sexual virtue: here were white women, supposedly from the stock of the purest and most beautiful white women in the world, who were nevertheless no longer able to enjoy the certainty of freedom to which their race, at least in the United States, would have entitled them. Enjoy the story, stop bringing your hate into this. 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. 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. Still, we might notseehow laughablyabsurd that white mythology is until confronted with it in the form of the Circassian Lady. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. Circassian beauties are admired for their abundant and luxuriant yellow hair and blue eyes. [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. Abraham Bogardus, Caucasian Girl, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of the author. 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? The supposedly scientifically established purity of the Circassian Ladies whiteness played on a white audiences need for reassurance about its identity in a world where octoroons like Zoe might dare to cross the color line. Hailing from the North Caucasus and the northeastern Black Sea coast, Circassians are an ethnic group historically famous for their alluring females. [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. [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. Included in my top most beautiful female athletes of the world. This resulted in the death of approximately 400,000 Circassians, mostly from epidemics or accidents during the long journey to the Black Sea. 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. [29], In 1873, the decade after the expulsion of Circassians from the Caucasus where only a minority of them live today, it was argued that "the Caucasian Race receives its name from the Caucasus, the abode of the Circassians who are said to be the handsomest and best-formed nation, not only of this race, but of the whole human family. Circassians commemorate the banishment of the Circassians from Russia in Taksim, stanbul, Illustration of skulls of the five races, from. 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.