EurasiaNet contributor Temo Bardzimashvili looks at the difficulties that many returning Meskhetian Turks face in their new/old homeland.
Roughly 65 years ago, Osman, a 90-year-old Meskhetian Turk, lost his home in Georgia to Stalins dictat. Now, after a lifetime in Central Asia, Osman, along with hundreds of other Meskhetian Turks, is trying to come home again.
Even after Stalins death in 1953, Meskhetians, a Muslim people who speak a Turkish dialect, were allowed to live anywhere in the Soviet Union except for Georgia itself. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a few hundred Meskhetians started to trickle back, in search of their roots. Instead, they found problems.
Many Christian Georgians termed the Meskhetians return to their native Samtskhe-Javakheti region in southern Georgia "the Turks second great invasion" - a reference to Ottoman Turkeys takeover of Samtskhe-Javakheti in the 16th century. That prejudice still lingers.
Despite it, a few thousand Meskhetians now live in Georgia. The Georgian government says that it has laid the groundwork for more to return this year.
Osmans village of Abastumani in Samtskhe-Javakheti is one of the few places where these exiles have returned to their truly ancestral land. The ruins of the house where Osman was born lie just a stones throw away from his current dwelling. But as Osman and other Meskhetians are learning, the divide that keeps Meskhetians strangers in their own land is wide, and it remains difficult to bridge the gap.
Editor's Note: Temo Bardzimashvili is a freelance photojournalist based in Tbilisi.
The Central Eurasia Project aims, through its website,
meetings, papers, and grants, to foster a more informed
debate about the social, political and economic
developments of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
It is a program of the Open Society
Institute-New York. The Open Society Institute-New
York is a private operating and grantmaking foundation
that promotes the development of open societies around
the world by supporting educational, social, and legal
reform, and by encouraging alternative
approaches to complex and controversial issues.
The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily
represent the position of the Open Society Institute and
are the sole responsibility of the author or
authors.