After 1854, almost all Ottoman harem concubines were of Circassian origin; the Circassians had been expelled from Russian lands in the 1860s and the improverished refugee parents sold their daughters in a trade that was formally banned, but tolerated.[5]. She is of Swedish, German & British Isles descent. 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. It would be impossible to paint more charming visages, or better figures, than those of the Georgians (Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 269). All actresses are 100% of European descent. John Frederick Lewis's The Harem portrays Circassians as the dominant mistresses of the harem, who look down on other women, as implied in the review of the painting in The Art Journal, which described it as follows: It represents the interior of a harem and slaves at Cairo, wherein is seated in luxurious ease a young man, attired in the excess of Moslem fashion. May 21, 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. . This was June of 2014. Whether it's Chechnya, a country where many Circassians are or any Caucasus country you will be breaking your neck left and right seeing how many beautiful women walk around. Hugo's comment was later condemned by Karl Marx in The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law (1842) on the grounds that it excused slavery. The type included a number of key features: the woman must be pretty, or even beautiful, by Victorian standards; she would wear exotic clothing, generally more revealing than that worn by European and American woman of that era; she might display striking jewelry and other ornaments, such as strings of pearls or richly embroidered clothes. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, and Hunter, John, On the Natural Variety of Mankind inThe Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. Aug 11, 2014 - I noticed many half-created topics here on the Circassians, so I decided to make a real complete one on behalf of my people This should make a decent. Later in 1864, Barnum put on show someone he dubbed Zalumma Agra (Star of the East), a young woman who had come to his operation seeking work whom he dressed up in the invented costume that became the model for the Circassian Ladies who subsequently sprang up in circus sideshows all over the country. That potent combination of horror and fascination was evident at least as early as the display of Hiram Powerss statue The Greek Slaveat the Great Exhibition in London in 1845 and then again in 1851. 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 first photograph of a Circassian Lady I found led me on a journey of inquiry whose strangeness I would never have guessed. 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. "Circassian Eye-Water" was marketed as "a sovereign remedy for all diseases of the eyes",[35] and in the 1840s "Circassian hair dye" was marketed to create a rich dark lustrous effect.[36]. Pinterest. Their imposing bearing, their romantic dress and their natural dignity of mien, stamp them as very superior Raven haired, black-bearded, broad-browed, with wide springing eyebrows of sooty black these bronzed and armed children of the mountains tend to put us out of love with our own specimens of men, and suggests thoughts not complementary to the types of manhood which, in this country, they are surrounded. "[11], An anthropological literary suggests that Circassians were best characterized by what was called "rosy pale" or "translucent white skin". The Orientalist fantasy, especially the imagining of the harem and the seraglio, allowed Europeans and Americans to project their subterranean prurience onto a safely distant world. Dec 30, 2016 - erkesler. 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. A circa 1900 albumen photograph (3 7/8 in. They are also constrained by collective decisions, both conscious and unaware, about what things mean; as such, those decisions can mold widespread beliefs and attitudes as well as governmental policy in the narrow sense. I'm sure the sultans had good taste . Still, we might notseehow laughablyabsurd that white mythology is until confronted with it in the form of the Circassian Lady. 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. 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. "[24], During the 19th century, various Western intellectuals offered pseudoscientific explanations for the light complexion present among Circassians. When Zublias photograph was taken, around 1870, Circassia had long been a battleground between the Russians to its north and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire to the south, after Russia invaded the Caucasus, starting in the late eighteenth century. Here the majority of the women were Circassian, who without any doubt are much more distinguished in appearance. Of course, back in Powerss American homeland, what was most on the publics mind when the sculpture went on tour there was the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act. While most Circassian tribes were famous for abundance of fair or dark blond and red hair combined with greyish-blue or green eyes,[12] many also had the pairing of very dark hair with very light complexions, a typical feature of Peoples of the Caucasus. Photo taken by Itamar Grinberg for the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. Day of mourning for the Circassians. All of these women were local girls, most of whom were encouraged to wash their hair in beer and then tease it out for that exotic Circassian do. In the 1860s the showman P.T. The Sultana Served by her Eunuchs, Painting by Charles Amedee Philippe van Loo.Circassian woman, 1870s-80s. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful and attractive, spirited, smart and elegant, and as such were desirable (although most Circassians refuse to marry non-Circassians, a requirement of Adyghe Xabze). 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". 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. Similar claims about Circassian women appear in Lord Byron's Don Juan (18181824), in which the tale of a slave auction is told: Some went off dearly; fifteen hundred dollars . They may be mans best friend, but man has also changed them beyond all recognition, these incredible pictures of dog breeds reveal. Pontios. 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. But failing in this quest to obtain Circassian slaves, the showman went on to look for women who could fake it for him. [20][21], Similar descriptions of the Circassian women appear in Florence Nightingale's travel journal where Nightingale called Circassians "the most graceful and the most sensual-looking creatures I ever saw". 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. Aggie also wears the crucifix, just above a low neckline, and she seems to relish the pose of this persona, playing it with conscious irony by mimicking the actual pose of the small bronze shepherdess on the table beside her. There were also several classical Turkish music pieces and poems that praise the beauty of the Circassian ethnic group like "Lepiska Sal erkes" (Straight, flaxen-haired Circassian; "lepiska" refers to long blonde hair which is straight, as if flatironed). 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. Abraham Bogardus, Caucasian Girl, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of the author. Our choices about language are never just private. The Circassians were finally defeated in 1864, and the Russians brutally dispersed hundreds of thousands of them from their native land. 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. 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. 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. 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. Because this strange position enticed nineteenth-century viewers to transgress these categories, at least in their imaginations while viewing the sideshow or in private while gazing at a photographic portrait, the natural place for this kind of performance was the strange and yet protected and circumscribed space of the freak show, pioneered so effectively by P. T. Barnum himself. They wore a distinctive curly, big hair style, which had no precedent in earlier portrayals of Circassians, but which was soon copied by other female performers in the United States, who became known as "moss-haired girls". "[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". [38] Barnum's first "Circassian" was marketed under the name "Zalumma Agra"[39] and was exhibited at his American Museum in New York from 1864. Elin Sangu, Turkish actress from a Circassian family. The article continues: Any lady must be as great an Infidel as the Grand Sultan himself, who, after receiving such authority can doubt that her skin will become as superlatively smooth, soft, white and delicate, as that of the lovely Fatima, whatever may have been its feel or its appearance before. As another example, in 1868, the English sculptor John Bell produced a sculpture entitled The Octoroon. The Circassian blended elements of white Victorian True Womanhood with traits of the enslaved African American woman in one curiosity. So can we retire not just the fantastical label Caucasian as a name for whiteness but also the very notion of the human divisions that constitute whiteness itself, as well as the whole umbrella concept of race as color, in which white, black, brown, yellow, and red find their place? Surely that is part of what was so titillating to the white male viewer of the Circassian Beauty as a type: her narrowly avoided fate as a harem slave, her strange clothes, her exposed flesh, her half-mad hair all indicate an uninhibited, if publicly exposed, even forced, sexuality. What the Circassian costume did do was invoke a certain Orientalism, a hint of the harem and the seraglio. 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. 2020. This pustule produces the same effect in the arm it is laid in as yeast in a piece of dough; it ferments, and diffuses through the whole mass of blood the qualities with which it is impregnated. It is fun to read and enjoy that people actually believed stuff like this, hence the reason they are no longer out there entertaining people, we got smart, not hate filled like you the first poster. 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. The Circassian Lady therefore literally embodied a taboo. Dated 19th Century RM 2HEH22X - Regency woman and child in mourning dress. This was an explosive idea because it raised questions about the assumptions that white people in the United States might have held about the supposedly natural inviolability of the white race when it came to both submitting toslavery and surrendering sexual virtue: here were white women, supposedly from the stock of the purest and most beautiful white women in the world, who were nevertheless no longer able to enjoy the certainty of freedom to which their race, at least in the United States, would have entitled them. Many writers and travelers through the ages have described Circassians as the most beautiful women in the world. Barnum exhibited women he claimed to be from Circassia. Circassians commemorate the banishment of the Circassians from Russia in Taksim, stanbul, Illustration of skulls of the five races, from. Wrap in several ways, or wear down. Jelena is a gorgeous name originating from both Russian and Slavic languages. Each is canceled with a stamp that reads Barnums Museum and dated April 26, 1866 (left) and December 5, 1865 (right). Barnum's Circassian beauties were young women with tall, teased hairstyles, rather like the Afro style of the 1970s. There is also the factthat so many Circassian womens stage names began with Z: the letter itself is largely foreign to English and American namesalmost none begin with it. And we can account for this by connecting the dots: both African slaves and Circassian slaves were subject to sexual exploitation, even if the latter were supposedly rescued from that fate, and this is the point of contact that played so powerfully on white Americans imagination: wildness, even a contained and constrained wildness, suggested that the sexual exploitation was in some sense natural to the enslaved womens own instincts, character, and desires.