Throughout its long history, the Armenian people have been subjected to numerous trials, faced with great empires, created their own nation states and destroyed other nations. However, the time has come, and the Armenian people themselves have lost their statehood and have been scattered. At this moment, sub-ethnic groups began to appear, among which there were Hamshen Armenians, several centuries long, and today there is a surge of interest in it both in Turkey and abroad.
Origin of Hamshen Armenians
Hamshens, according to some historians, are a rather heterogeneous group of peoples, united more along a geographical principle than an ethnic one. However, most researchers are of the opinion that this sub-ethnic group would be more correctly called Amshen Armenians.
Amshen region is a part of historical Little Armenia. Today this area is located in the north-east of Turkey. in close proximity to the Georgian border. On the territory of Amshen, there are such large cities as Rize and Trabzon, known for their developed agriculture.
Presumably, the first Hamshen Armenians were twelve thousand families resettled from the lands taken by the Arabs in the Vlll century into the territory of the Byzantine Empire, with which Armenia had common borders at that time. It was in this region that the basic processes of the formation of a new community took place.
Rize is the homeland of Hamshen Armenians
In the vicinity of the small Turkish city of Rize, which is located on the Black Sea coast, in the immediate vicinity of Georgia, ethnogenesis of the Khemshil took place, as the Armenians living in this area are sometimes called.
It is reliably known that the ancestors of the Hamshens appeared in the Pontic region in the ninth century of a new era, however, some engaged historians insist that the first Armenian settlers appeared in those parts two thousand years before the birth of Christ. This information should be subjected to additional verification, since the direct connection between the ancient state of Hayas and the modern Armenian people has not been established.
Already in the early stages of the formation of a new subethnos, differences between Hamshen Armenians and their relatives living in the Armenian Highlands and Transcaucasia began to appear. Affected by their cut off from the bulk of the Armenians.
Armenian population of Byzantium
Before the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans, Hamshen Armenians maintained the Christian religion and the corresponding folklore. Official ties were established between the Black Sea communities of Armenians and the Byzantine Nobility, and the leaders of the Armenian settlements received Byzantine titles.
However, after the capture of the entire peninsula of Asia Minor and the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus by the Turks, local Christians were forced to reconsider their religious views.
Many Georgian Christians and Khemshils converted to Islam. Such transitions were often a simple formality that helped to avoid paying taxes to the imperial treasury. At the same time, many Armenians continued to speak their native language, which already in the fifteenth century was quite different from the main dialects of the Armenian language.
Ottoman settlement
Amshen Armenians who converted to Islam were not persecuted by the authorities and could preserve their language and culture. However, their brothers, who decided to preserve the faith of their ancestors, were forced to leave the habitat of their fathers and head west. Thus, Trabzon and Giresun, as well as Samsun and other coastal cities of the west of the Black Sea coast, became the main place of resettlement of the Khemshil.
But the resettlement of Armenians was not limited to a narrow strip of the Black Sea coast. Many families moved to Istanbul and the coast of the Aegean Sea, to Izmir and Bursa, and some even left the empire and became citizens of the Russian empire, where they found shelter and protection, as well as the opportunity to profess Christianity in complete safety.
Resettlement to neighboring countries
Answering the question of where the Hamshen Armenians came from, it is worth starting with the fact that they are an integral part of the entire Armenian people, which is extremely widespread throughout the world. And although Khemshils are a rather peculiar sub-ethnic group with peculiarities of language and historical development, the majority of Armenians living both in the Armenian Republic and in the Diaspora recognize their compatriots in them.
Hamshen Armenians in Turkey suffered greatly along with other groups of the Armenian population from the genocide that occurred in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century, but they suffered little from the Armenian pogroms in the nineteenth century.
The Armenian genocide forced many thousands of Armenians to leave the empire and settle in neighboring countries, such as the Russian Empire, which actively accepted refugees and allowed them to arrange a new life on the Black Sea.
Hamshen ethnic groups
The significant geographical distance of the various groups of Hamshen Armenians created the necessary prerequisites for the allocation of additional groups within the Khemshil ethnic group. While the western and eastern Hamshens are overwhelmingly Muslims, their relatives from the northern ethnic group are descendants of a population not subjected to Islamization.
In addition, a group of Hamshens living in the Autonomous Republic of Adjara deserves special mention. In 1878, as a result of a peace agreement between Russia and Turkey, the Batumi district, together with the twelve Khemshil villages, became part of the Russian Empire.
The Hamshens were not persecuted in Russia until the middle of the twentieth century, when, according to the results of World War II, they were recognized by the government of the USSR as an unreliable population and, together with the Greeks and Kurds, were resettled in Central Asia, from where they began to return only at the end of the twentieth century.
However, despite the complexity of the history of Hamshen Armenians, despite persecution, pogroms and genocide, researchers in the territory of modern Turkey have up to two million people who call themselves either Hamshens or descendants of Islamized Armenians.
Ethnic conflicts after the collapse of the USSR
In some regions, the collapse of the Soviet Union was extremely painful and caused ethnic clashes between representatives of different peoples. As a result of ethnic tension, many Hamshens were forced to leave their places of compact residence in Central Asia, where they were deported en masse in the forties of the twentieth century.
In addition, many conflicts occurred in the Caucasus. One of the most bloody was the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict, in which Hamshen Armenians were involuntarily involved, photos of which in national costumes can be seen in the article.
Although in the USSR the Hamshens were discriminated against in the same way as the Meskhetian Turks, in post-Soviet Russia they began to settle en masse across the territory of the Krasnodar Territory. Since many Hamshen Armenians in Abkhazia also suffered from the civil war, they moved to the territory of Russia along with other refugees from the republic.
