Natukhai Erotic

The Natukhai are one of the old named tribes of the Circassians, the Adyghe peoples of the northwest Caucasus. Their country was the far western corner of Circassia, where the Caucasus foothills run down to the Black Sea: the hills behind Anapa and the land around the bay where Novorossiysk now stands, reaching north toward the marshy lower Kuban. To be Natukhai meant belonging to that stretch of coast and hill country, to a known set of families and assemblies, and to a recognizable way of speaking Adyghe.

That speech is the Natukhai dialect of Adyghe. It is part of the western branch of Circassian and belongs to the small Northwest Caucasian family, whose closest relative is Kabardian to the east and whose more distant relatives are Abkhaz and Abaza. The dialect is especially close to that of the Shapsugs, the Natukhai's southern neighbors, and the two tribes shared much of their history. Like the Shapsugs and Abzakhs, the Natukhai were one of the so-called democratic tribes. In the late 18th century they curbed the power of their princes and nobles and increasingly ran their affairs through assemblies of elders and free households. That set them sharply apart from princely neighbors such as the Bzhedugs and Kabardians.

Geography made them a frontier people. Anapa was an Ottoman fortress, and when the Ottomans ceded the coast to Russia in the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, the Circassians who actually lived there refused to accept that anyone could sign their land away. The Natukhai spent the following decades in the long Russo-Circassian War, watching Russian forts go up on their shoreline. Islam, which spread among the western Circassians under Ottoman and Crimean influence, gradually replaced older Christian and native beliefs. Daily conduct, though, still answered to Adyghe Xabze, the unwritten code covering hospitality, deference to elders and how men and women carry themselves in public. Circassian households kept a separate guest house for visitors, and noble families often sent their sons to be raised by foster families.

The war ended in catastrophe. In the early 1860s Russian forces cleared the western Circassian lands. The Natukhai were driven to the coast and shipped to the Ottoman Empire along with the Shapsugs, Abzakhs and others, and huge numbers died along the way. Cossack stanitsas and settlers took over the valleys. Descendants now live mainly in Turkey, with others in Syria, Jordan and beyond. The tribal name survives in family histories and some communities, but it has largely merged into a wider Circassian identity. For most, Natukhai is now a mark of lineage rather than an address, carried by people whose homeland has belonged to someone else for more than 150 years.