Bzhedug Erotic

The Bzhedug are one of the twelve Adyghe tribes whose stars sit on the Circassian flag, and one of the few that still exists as a settled community in the Caucasus rather than mainly abroad. Their country is the right bank of the Kuban in what is now the Republic of Adygea, south of Krasnodar: flat, hot, well watered farmland cut by the Psekups, the Pshish and the Belaya as those rivers come down out of the mountains and slow. Circassian tradition says they did not start there. They came over from the Black Sea slope onto the plain a few centuries ago, and the move is still part of how they tell their own story. The tribe has long been counted in two branches, Khamyshey and Cherchenei.

They speak Bzhedug, one of the West Circassian dialects. Adyghe belongs to the Northwest Caucasian family, which has no relatives anywhere outside its own corner of the world: its nearest kin are Kabardian, Abaza and Abkhaz, plus Ubykh, which died with its last speaker in 1992. The family is known for enormous consonant inventories set against a famously small number of vowels. The literary standard taught in Adygea's schools rests on the Temirgoy dialect rather than Bzhedug, so Bzhedug speakers grow up reading a near neighbor of their own speech instead of it.

Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school reached the western Adyghe late, mostly across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it layered over older practice instead of erasing it. What actually regulates conduct is Adyghe Khabze, the unwritten code covering hospitality, deference to elders, physical restraint and the exact choreography of a table where an older man is presiding. Bzhedug society was one of the princely ones, with a titled nobility over a body of free commoners, and in 1796 that arrangement broke open at Bziyuqo, where the Bzhedug nobles, backed by Black Sea Cossack artillery, put down a rising of their own tfokotl and their Shapsug allies. It was the sort of internal fracture that gave Russia a way in. Seven decades later the Russo Circassian War ended in the expulsions of 1864, which emptied most of Circassia into the Ottoman Empire. The Bzhedug lost people to that too, and there are Bzhedug families in Turkey, Jordan and Syria today, but proportionally more of them stayed than almost any other western tribe, which is why the Bzhedug villages are still where they were.