Nağaybäk Erotic

The Nağaybäk speak Tatar, hold an Orthodox Christian faith, and descend from Cossacks who guarded the Russian frontier in the southern Urals for close to two centuries. That combination is what sets them apart. Across the Volga-Ural region, speaking Tatar and practicing Islam usually go together. The Nağaybäk broke that pattern long ago and built an identity on the difference. Recent censuses count fewer than ten thousand of them. Most live in a small cluster of villages in the Nagaybaksky and Chebarkulsky districts of Chelyabinsk Oblast, on the eastern side of the southern Urals.

Their speech is a local form of the middle dialect of Tatar, the same dialect that underlies the literary language of Kazan. That places it in the Kipchak branch of Turkic, alongside Bashkir and Kazakh, both heard in the surrounding region. Nearly everyone also speaks Russian. Most Russian and Tatar historians treat the Nağaybäk as a Christian branch of the Volga Tatars and close kin to the Kryashens of Tatarstan. Russian law takes a different view: since 2000 it has listed them as a small indigenous people in their own right. Soviet statistics had mostly counted them simply as Tatars, so the recognition was a real shift.

Historians still argue over how far back their Christianity goes and which Turkic communities they descend from. The record gets firmer in the eighteenth century, when baptized Tatars were settled around the Nagaybak fortress in what is now Bashkortostan and enrolled as Cossacks, later serving in the Orenburg Cossack Host. Nağaybäk Cossacks fought in the wars against Napoleon. In the mid-nineteenth century the community was moved east to garrison a new defensive line, and the new settlements took their names from those campaigns. That is why Nağaybäk families live in places called Fershampenuaz, after the 1814 battle of Fère-Champenoise, and Parizh, which now has a scaled-down Eiffel Tower that doubles as a mobile phone mast.

Orthodoxy remains the community's faith, though decades of Soviet atheism thinned church attendance here as it did across Russia. The Cossack estate was abolished after the Revolution. Today the Nağaybäk are a largely rural people who combine a Tatar language, an Orthodox faith and a Cossack past in a way none of their neighbors quite match.