Aukhs Erotic

The Aukhs are Chechens whose home lies just outside Chechnya, and that single fact explains most of their story. Their villages sit in the foothills of western Dagestan, where the Aktash and Yaryksu rivers come down toward the Kumyk plain, a stretch of country long known to its neighbors as Aukh. They are also called Akkin Chechens, and family tradition traces them to highland communities in the mountains farther west. Settling this lowland edge put them among Kumyks, Avars and Laks, in one of the most crowded ethnic neighborhoods of the Caucasus. They speak the Akkin dialect of Chechen, a Nakh language within the Nakh-Dagestanian family. It is close kin to Ingush and unrelated to Kumyk, the Turkic language next door. Avar and Lak are only distant relatives, sitting on other branches of the same old tree. Nearly everyone also speaks Russian. Their faith is Sunni Islam of the Shafi'i school, carried through Sufi brotherhoods that are part of ordinary life and not a specialist pursuit. The loud zikr, a circle of men chanting and moving together, appears at funerals, on religious holidays and in moments of shared crisis. Beside it runs adat, the customary law of the mountains: loyalty to one's teip, strict hospitality, deference to elders, and avoidance rules between in-laws that still shape how a new bride carries herself in her husband's home.

History has not left them alone. In the nineteenth century Aukh fell within Imam Shamil's resistance to the Russian advance. On 23 February 1944, Stalin's government deported the entire Chechen nation, Aukhs included, to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Their Aukhovsky district was abolished and renamed Novolaksky, and Laks from the high mountains were moved into the emptied houses, many of them against their will. When Chechens were rehabilitated in 1957, Dagestani authorities kept the returning Aukhs out of their old villages. Families rebuilt in Khasavyurt and nearby settlements instead, a short drive from homes now lived in by others. In 1991 Dagestan's Congress of People's Deputies resolved to restore the district and resettle the Laks on new land near Makhachkala. That move has crept forward for decades, and the land question stays tender on both sides, since the Laks were also uprooted by the same upheaval. For the Aukhs this is not old history but everyday geography: which village your grandparents farmed, and whether your children will ever live there.