Gagauz people
The Gagauzes are a Turkic people living mostly in southern Moldova and southwestern Ukraine. The Gagauz are Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Geographical distribution
Today Gagauz people outside Moldova live mainly in the Ukrainian regions of Odessa and Zaporizhia, as well as in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Brazil, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Turkey, and the Russian region of Kabardino-Balkaria.Etymology
The Encyclopedia of World Cultures lists the ethnonym of the Gagauz as "Turkish" and "Turkish speaking Bulgars". Astrid Menz writes this about the etymology:Language
The Gagauz language belongs to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages, which also includes the Azerbaijani, Turkish, and Turkmen languages. The Gagauz language is particularly close to the Balkan Turkish dialects spoken in Greece, northeastern Bulgaria, and in the Kumanovo and Bitola areas of North Macedonia. The Balkan Turkic languages, including Gagauz, are a typologically interesting case, because they are closely related to Turkish and at the same time contain a North-Turkic element besides the main South-Turkic element. The modern Gagauz language has two dialects: central and southern .Religion
The vast majority of Gagauz are Eastern Orthodox Christians.Culture
Economy
The traditional economy centered on animal husbandry and agriculture that combined grain and market gardening with viticulture. Even in the recent past, despite the cultural similarity of the Gagauz to the Bulgarians of Bessarabia, there were important differences between them: the Bulgarians were peasant farmers; although the Gagauz also farmed, they were essentially pastoralist in outlook.Food
The staple food is grain, in many varieties. A series of family holidays and rituals was connected with the baking of wheat bread, both leavened loaves and unleavened flatcakes.The favorite dish was a layered pie stuffed with sheep's milk cheese and soaked with sour cream before baking. Other delicacies were pies with crumbled pumpkin and sweet pies made with the first milk of a cow that had just calved. The traditional ritual dish called kurban combined bulgar wheat porridge with a slaughtered ram and is further evidence of the origins of the Gagauz in both the Balkan world and the steppe-pastoral complex. Peppered meat sauces are especially important: one combines onion and finely granulated porridge, while another is tomato-based. A red house wine is served with dinner and supper. Head cheese is an indispensable component of holiday meals.
Clothing
Women's
Toward the end of the 19th century, in good weather, a Gagauz woman's costume consisted of a canvas shirt, a sleeveless dress, a smock, and a large black kerchief. In winter, they donned a dress with sleeves, a cloth jacket, and a sleeveless fur coat. Required features of female dress were earrings, bracelets, beads, and, among wealthy Gagauz, a necklace of gold coins. "So many of their decorations are hung about," wrote a pre-Revolutionary researcher, "that they cover the entire breast down to the waist."Men's
Traditional male clothing included a shirt, cloth pants, a wide red sash or belt, and a hat. The winter cap was made of Karakul sheep wool. The shepherd's costume was the usual shirt combined with sheepskin pants with the fleece turned in, a sleeveless fur coat, and a short sheepskin jacket, the latter sometimes decorated with red-on-green stitching.Origin
The origin of the Gagauzes is obscure. In the beginning of the 20th century, Bulgarian historian M. Dimitrov counts 19 different theories about their origin. A few decades later the Gagauz ethnologist M. N. Guboglo increases the number to 21. In some of those theories the Gagauz people are presented as descendants of the Bulgars, the Cumans-Kipchaks or a clan of Seljuk Turks or as linguistically Turkified Bulgarians. The fact that their confession is Eastern Orthodox Christianity may suggest that their ancestors already lived in the Balkans prior to the Ottoman conquest in the late 14th century.Seljuk (Anatolian) hypothesis
According to the Seljuk theory, supported by the Polish orientalist Tadeusz Jan Kowalski, the Gagauz descended from the Seljuk Turks who in the 13th century followed the Anatolian Seljuk Sultan Kaykaus II and supposedly settled in the Dobruja region of the medieval Second Bulgarian Empire. There they presumably mixed with other Turkic peoples such as Pechenegs, Uz and Cumans who came from the Russian steppe at about the same time. After settling in the eastern Balkans, these Seljuks are thought to have converted from Islam to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the 13th century, and later became known as "Gagauz". Seljuk theory advocates claim the name derives from "Kay Kāvus", which would make Gagauz an ancient tribal name.In fact Kaykaus is known to have finally settled in Crimea.
Steppe hypothesis
The Steppe hypothesis suggests that the Gagauzes may be descendants of the Turkic nomadic tribes from the Eurasian steppes. In the 19th century, before their migration to Bessarabia, the Gagauzes from the Bulgarian territories of the Ottoman Empire considered themselves Bulgarians. Ethnological research suggest that "Gagauz" was a linguistic distinction and not ethnic. Gagauzes to that time called themselves "Hasli Bulgar" or "Eski Bulgar" and considered the term Gagauz, applied to them by the Slavic-speaking Bulgarians, demeaning. The Gagauzes called their language Turkish and accordingly claimed descent from early Turkic Bulgars who in the 7th century established the First Bulgarian Empire on the Danube. Indeed, one modern Gagauz surname is Qipcakli.The Russian Empire Census of 1897 did not distinguish the Gagauz as a specific group, but it reported the existence of 55,790 native speakers of a "Turkish language" in the Bessarabia Governorate.
Genetics
In population comparisons, the Gagauzes were found to be more closely related genetically to neighboring southeastern European groups than to linguistically related Anatolian populations. More considerable distinctions in the distribution of Y chromosome components appeared between the Gagauzes and other Turkic peoples.The similarity to neighboring populations may be due to the lack of social barriers between the local and the Turkic-Orthodox populations of the Balkan Peninsula. Another possibility is language shift in accordance with the dominant minority model, i.e. Turkification.
Gagauz belong to Y-DNA haplogroups I2a, R1a, G, R1b, E1b1b1a1, J2 and Haplogroup N. Finally, the phylogenetic analysis of Y-DNA situates Gagauzes most proximal to Bulgarians, Macedonians, Romanians, Serbs and other Balkan populations, resulting in a high genetic distance from the Turkish people and other Turkic peoples. The analyses showed that Gagauzes belong to the Balkan populations, suggesting that the Gagauz language represents a case of language replacement in southeastern Europe. According to a more detailed autosomal analysis of thousands of SNPs, not just of the sex chromosome, Gagauzes are most proximal to ethnic Macedonians, followed by Greek Macedonians apart from Thessaloniki, and others such as Bulgarians, Romanians and Montenegrins.
After a genetic comparison between the populations of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Central Asia, the results showed that the Gagauz are part of the Balkan genetic group.
History
Late history
Between 1820 and 1846, the Russian Empire allocated land to the Gagauz and gave them financial incentives to settle in Bessarabia in the settlements vacated by the Nogai tribes. They settled in Bessarabia along with Bassarabian Bulgarians, mainly in Avdarma, Comrat, Congaz, Tomai, Cișmichioi and other former Nogai villages located in the central Budjak region. Originally, the Gagauz also settled in several villages belonging to boyars throughout southern Bessarabia and the Principality of Moldavia, but soon moved to join their kin in the Bugeac. Until 1869, the Gagauz in Bessarabia were described as Bulgarians. During the Romanian rule of southernmost Bessarabia, they supported Bulgarian schools in their settlements and participated in the Bulgarian national movement. Therefore, some ethnologists claim Bulgarian origin for the Gagauz.With the exception of a five-day independence in the winter of 1906, when a peasant uprising declared the autonomous Republic of Komrat, the Gagauzian people have mainly been ruled by the Russian Empire, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Moldova.
The wave of Stolypin agrarian policies carried some Gagauz to Kazakhstan between 1912 and 1914, and later yet another group settled in Uzbekistan during the very troubled years of initial collectivization. So as not to lose their civil rights, they called themselves "Bulgars" in the 1930s; The Gagauz of the village of Mayslerge in the Tashkent District retain that designation to this day.
Soviet Union and Republic of Moldova
Gagauz nationalism remained an intellectual movement during the 1980s but strengthened by the end of the decade as both elites and opposition groups in the Soviet Union began to embrace nationalist ideals. In 1988, activists from the local intelligentsia aligned with other ethnic minorities to create the movement known as the "Gagauz People". A year later, the "Gagauz People" held its first assembly which accepted the resolution to create an autonomous territory in the southern Moldavian SSR, with Comrat designated as capital. The Gagauz nationalist movement increased in popularity when Moldovan was accepted as the official language of the Republic of Moldova in August 1989.In August 1990, Comrat declared itself an autonomous republic, but the Moldovan government annulled the declaration as unconstitutional. The Gagauz were also worried about the implications for them if Moldova reunited with Romania, as seemed increasingly likely. Support for the Soviet Union remained high, with a local referendum in March 1991 yielding an almost unanimous "yes" vote to stay in the USSR; Moldovans in Gagauzia, however, boycotted the referendum. Many Gagauz supported the Moscow coup attempt, further straining relations with Chişinău. However, when the Moldovan parliament voted on whether Moldova should become independent, six of the twelve Gagauz deputies voted in favor.
Gagauzia declared itself independent as the Gagauz Republic on 19 August 1991—the day of the Moscow coup attempt—followed by Transnistria in September. In February 1994, President Mircea Snegur, opposed to Gagauz independence, promised a Gagauz autonomous region. Snegur also opposed the suggestion that Moldova become a federal state made up of three "republics": Moldova, Gagauzia, and Transnistria. In 1994, the Moldovan parliament awarded "the people of Gagauzia" the right of "external self-determination" should the status of the country change. This means that in the event that Moldova decided to join another country, the Gagauzians' would be entitled to decide whether to remain or not a part of the new state by means of a self-determination referendum.
As a result of a referendum to determine Gagauzia's borders, thirty settlements expressed their desire to be included in the Gagauz Autonomous Territorial Unit. In 1995, George Tabunshik was elected to serve as the Governor of Gagauzia for a four-year term, as were the deputies of the local parliament, "The People's Assembly" and its chairman Peter Pashali.