"I still have faith in a beautiful Circassian girl if you can get one very beautiful. The Circassians With The Most Beautiful Women In The World There are folk songs in various languages throughout the Middle East and the Balkan peninsula that describe the superior appearance of Circassian girls. 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. I'm sure the sultans had good taste . They were typically identified by the distinctive hairstyle, which was held in place by the use of beer. 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. Thomas Gamaliel Bradford, Map of Caucasian Countries and Turkey in Asia (1835), Wikipedia Commons. My father was of course never forgiven the fact that he had chosen his favourite children Sharfe and Choleboth by Circassian mothers, Sharfe even being blue-eyedfrom the hateful race of "cats". Thomas Jefferson himself had sired children with his slave Sally Hemings, herself the child of an enslaved mother and a white masterand the half sister of Jeffersons deceased wife. 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. We are caught in the Catch-22 of history: only if we acknowledge the historical and constructed meaning of race can we face up to the ongoing burden of that history in our present. It claims that the product was endorsed by Lady Mary Wortley Montague who stated that it was very helpful "for removing those sebacious impurities so noxious to beauty". The Circassians were finally defeated in 1864, and the Russians brutally dispersed hundreds of thousands of them from their native land. 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. [22] In the United States, the girls disguised as "Circassians" exhibited by Phineas T. Barnum were in fact Catholic Irish girls from Lower Manhattan. It is not history, it is fiction.Like mermaids.The fact that you think it is real tells a lot about why this site has turned into such a laughing stock. It is worth underlining this use of hair as a marker of forbidden sexuality, for it turns up again with the Circassian Ladies, but in a more subtle form. What might be particularly striking to the modern viewer, again, is the big hair, which looks so much like the Afro of the late 1960s and 1970s, then as much symbol of Black Power as a fashion statement. Double click the images to enlarge and view them in original size. Under these circumstances it was bound to happen that occasionally a kind of ridiculous "racism" broke out among my brothers and sisters. The term Circassian Beauty refers to the romanticized portrayal of women from The Caucasus: breathtakingly beautiful and feminine, slender-waisted and pale-skinned, with rosy cheeks and lustrous, big blue eyes. 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. The image below presents a woman of the Circassian style who is labeled a Caucasian; bear in mind that all these titles are fictions applied to a person performing an imagined type: Apart from the influence of the new science of race, another cause for this fascination with Circassians was that, starting in the mid-1700s, it had become a matter of dramatic and romantic lore that beautiful Circassian women were being sold in the slave markets of Istanbul and throughout the Ottoman Empire, to serve in the harems of the sultan and other potentates as the most desirable beauties of the realm. 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. [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. 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. Jul 31, 2017 - Explore lynda heath's board "circassian women" on Pinterest. Thomas Benyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865). 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. [31], Bayard Taylor observed the Circassian women during his trip to the Ottoman Empire and argued that "the Circassian face is a pure oval; the forehead is low and fair, an excellent thing in woman, and the skin of an ivory whiteness, except the faint pink of the cheeks and the ripe, roseate stain of the lips."[11]. And above all, who but must long for an article, from the seraglio of the Grand Turk, which produces a near resemblance to the Georgian and Circassian beauties? In 1856 The New York Times published a report entitled "Horrible Traffic in Circassian Women Infanticide in Turkey", asserting that a consequence of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus was an excess of beautiful Circassian women on the Constantinople slave market, and that this was causing prices of slaves in general to plummet. The pustules of the child in whom the artificial small-pox has been thus inoculated are employed to communicate the same distemper to others. 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. It would be impossible to paint more charming visages, or better figures, than those of the Georgians (Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 269). document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Circasians: The Most Beautiful Women in the World. Circassians are depicted in images of harems at this time through these ideologies of racial hierarchy. Required fields are marked *. Had decked her out in all the hues of heaven. After all, there is no more reality to the designation Caucasian than there is to the frizzed hairstyle of the Circassian Ladies. Legend had it that the Circassians produced the worlds most beautiful white women, who were consequently in great demand for the harems of Turkish sultans. "[11], An anthropological literary suggests that Circassians were best characterized by what was called "rosy pale" or "translucent white skin". This theme replicated itself in fiction, too. [28] This fuelled the idea of female Circassian beauty. In the British version, they do marry, despite the taboo (and the laws) against miscegenation, and they live out their lives together, but not before fending off another man who attempts to see her enslaved as a declared black woman so that he can buy her as his own mistress. Whatever we might say about the complexities of their particular relationship, mass rape was a defining feature of the history of slavery in the United States. [6] It is not clear why Barnum chose this hairstyle. 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. The fame of these women inspired more than just literary achievement. Circassian-Abkhaz Beauties! Measures about 58 X 23 inches. 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. Thomas M. Barrett (1998), "Southern Living (in Captivity): The Caucasus in Russian Popular Culture", Last edited on 27 February 2023, at 12:54, Said bin Sultan, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, "Chapter 2. As Dewan points out, the word Caucasiangives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your vehicle instead of your car. As her article makes clear, this pseudoscientific discourse, which makes the pretense of objective neutrality, actually masks the fact that people are uncomfortable talking about race, especially what counts as white. This prudery about race contributes to the conceptual inertia about race in our society, because the inability to speak openly about the arbitrary and ambiguous nature of whiteness helps hold in place the color scheme of racial categories, with white its privileged and supposedly unambiguous status at the top. "[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". "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. Indeed, arousal was precisely the point of contention. Greenwood found no one worth exhibiting, and Barnum instructed him via letter to instead look for "a beautiful Circassian girl if you can get one". When I first stumbled across the photograph reproduced below, over fifteenyears ago at an antique show, it struck me as ludicrous, inexplicable, and yet also somehow haunting. Mine Tugay (born July 28, 1978, Istanbul, Turkey) - Turkish actress. The play was a huge hit in England, but when it came to the United States, the ending changed: there is no marriage, and Zoe dies along with her lover in a final fiery cataclysm. Photographic reproductions of Bells statue circulated onstereoview cards in the United States (see below), which allowed viewers to get a three-dimensional sense of the figure. has its own identity,and its history serves to enforce their sence of identity, Your email address will not be published. [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". In the late 18th century, it was claimed by Western European couturiers that "the Circassian Corset is the only one which displays, without indelicacy, the shape of the bosom to the greatest possible advantage; gives a width to the chest which is equally conducive to health and elegance of appearance". Poetic romance-descriptions of Circassian girls appear in Don Juan by Lord Byron (1818-1824), in which the story of a slave auction is related: Some went off dearly; fifteen hundred dollars For one Circassian, a sweet girl, were given, Warranted virgin. Knowledge of this "Liquid Bloom" had been brought back by a "well-regarded gentleman" who had traveled and lived in the region. Our choices about language are never just private. The Circassians became major news during the Caucasian War, in which Russia conquered the North Caucasus, displacing large numbers of Circassians southwards. This hair style was a sort of exhibit's trademark and was achieved by washing the hair of women in beer, drying it and then teasing it. Originally published in German in 1775. 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. Circassian beauties, or Moss-haired girls as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. . 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? "So even if you don't know that a word highlighted like this _____ denotes sarcasm, the context should have given it away. The max they could do is steal children from Caucasus and make fight . The Most Beautiful Girl Beautiful Actresses Red Beard Celebrity Style Formal Dresses Long Elegant Arzu Yanarda, erkes oyuncu ve manken, Circassian actress and model from Turkey Unusual Design Portrait Color Mixing Nefise Karatay (Circassian women from Turkey) F FALCON MULTIMEDIA Circassian beauties Top Model Business Women Music Videos 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. What the Circassian costume did do was invoke a certain Orientalism, a hint of the harem and the seraglio. The luxurious palaces of the sultans housed Georgians, Abkhazians and Circassians as concubines and odalisques. They furnish with those beauties the seraglio of the Turkish Sultan, of the Persian Sophy, and of all of those who are wealthy enough to purchase and maintain such precious merchandise. Around ten percent live in the country formerly known Circassia, now divided into four administrative areas: The Republic of Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Krasnodar Krai. 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. I am grateful forthe detailed comments and valuable suggestions provided by Linda Frost when this essay was under review. Credit attribution requested to the photographer and to the Ministry of Tourism 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. An advertisement from 1782 titled "Bloom of Circassia" makes clear that it was by then well established "that the Circassians are the most beautiful Women in the World", but goes on to reveal that they "derive not all their Charms from Nature". The Colonial Contexts for the Harem Representation", "XLIV. He displayed a "Circassian Beauty" at his American Museum in 1865. 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 Elin Sangu, Turkish actress from a Circassian family. The novel is based on a true story told in a village in the Turkish highlands close to the Georgian border. Barnum had written to John Greenwood, his agent in Europe, asking him to purchase a beautiful Circassian girl to exhibit, or at least to hire a girl who could "pass for" one. Abraham Bogardus, Caucasian Girl, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of the author. This reputation dates back to the later . Dress of black gossamer net over white satin slip, round frock front edged with Vandyke lace. [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. 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. 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. 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. In the 1860s the showman P.T. Whatever faults remain, of course, are my responsibility. 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. In 2014, the Circassian diaspora across the world sought to use the hosting of the Olympic Games in Sochi, where the Russians celebrated their victory over the Circassians in 1864, as an opportunity to protest the 150th anniversary ofwhat some have calledthe first genocide inmodern European history. The Retro Modern style is associated with the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. 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. It describes what seems to be a Greek monk on M A cool photo collection that shows what naughty ladies looked like in the 1950s. It is history and has to be known. Daguerreotype of a "Circassian beauty" by Matthew Brady, New York, circa 1861. What I know now is that the woman depicted here fits the model of a kind of performed personality dubbed the Circassian Lady or the Circassian Beauty in mid-nineteenth-century America. Titillation should not be confused with illumination. This story drew widespread attention to the area, as did later conflicts. In consequence, most wives and mothers of several Ottoman Sultans were ethnic Circassians, including Perest Valide Sultan, evkefza Valide Sultan, Tirimjgan Valide Sultan, Nkhetseza Bahanmefendi, emsiruhsar Hatun, Sabal Sultan, Hmaah Haseki Sultan, Hatice Muazzez Haseki Sultan, Aye Haseki Sultan, Bedrifelek I, Bidar II, Kamures I, Servetseza I, Bezmara VI, Dzdidil III, Hayrandil II, Meyliservet IV, Mihrengiz II, Neerek III, Nurefsun II, Reftaridil II, ayan III, amongst many others. 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. Why the Circassian Lady as the title for this particular type of circus performer? At Bet il Sahel there was much more luxury and grand style than at Bet il Mtoni. 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". Her sale sent home some disappointed bawlers, 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. 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. 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. They are called "Cherkesses" by the Russians and Turks, but their word for themselves is "Adighe." [37], The trend spread, with supposedly Circassian women featured in dime museums and travelling medicine shows, sometimes known as "Moss-haired girls". Wunder, Richard, Hiram Powers: Vermont sculptor, 1805-1873 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). [37] Actual Circassian hairstyles bore no resemblance to Barnum's fantasy. Many postcards of Circassians also circulated. Bogdan, Robert,Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Maker unknown, Barnums Circus, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of Greg French.