beautiful circassian girl

"Not to be denied his harem slave, Barnum hired a frizzy-haired local woman, put her in a Turkish costume and dubbed her Zalumma Agra, Star of the EastThe Circassian beauty was an instant success, soon to be followed by a succession of imported beauties with an enigmatic letter Z figuring prominently in all their names. University of Texas Press. While individuals may choose to refuse these labels, the sheer fact is that these categories are so deeply engraved into our ways of seeing that they are even embraced by those victimized by that history, in part precisely because they were victimizedas such and bythat history of race. The Most Beautiful Girl Beautiful Actresses Red Beard Celebrity Style Formal Dresses Long Elegant Arzu Yanarda, erkes oyuncu ve manken, Circassian actress and model from Turkey Unusual Design Portrait Color Mixing Nefise Karatay (Circassian women from Turkey) F FALCON MULTIMEDIA Circassian beauties Top Model Business Women Music Videos What do Chechen and Circassian girls generally look like? Our choices about language are never just private. In the Russo-Circassian War (17631864) the Circassians were expelled from their homeland by Tsar Alexander II, forcing 1.5 million to flee to the Ottoman Empire. 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. 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. [22] In the United States, the girls disguised as "Circassians" exhibited by Phineas T. Barnum were in fact Catholic Irish girls from Lower Manhattan. These maidens are very honourably and virtuously instructed how to fondle and caress men; are taught dances of a very polite and effeminate kind; and how to heighten by the most voluptuous artifices the pleasures of their disdainful masters for whom they are designed. As a type, the Circassian Lady became quite familiar in the United States, especially after the mid-1860s, when various performers in circus sideshows began playing this role. I'm sure the sultans had good taste . The fame of these women inspired more than just literary achievement. [6] It is not clear why Barnum chose this hairstyle. I have not observed a single ugly face in that country, in either sex; but I have seen angelical ones. 30. Originally published in German in 1775. The fact is that the Circassian Lady or the Circassian Beauty was a staple of nineteenth-century sideshows, but not the Circassian Gentleman. With the occasional exception of a Circassian child (see illustration below), all the photographs we find of sideshow Circassians are of women. 0 Ratings 0 Want to read; 0 Currently reading; 0 Have read; Not in Library. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Touch device users, explore by touch or with swipe . From there, the viewerprimarily the white male viewercould contemplate a further question: whether the sideshow depicts an erotic truth that is or ought to be more than a sideshow in ordinary domestic life. The statue sealed Powerss fame, despite the debates that the statue aroused. Adygheans,Circassians, Cherkess, Kabardin Kabardinka, Kabardin Beauty, Circassian beauties,Adyghea,circassia,karachay-cherkessia,real Caucasians,chechens,oss. "So even if you don't know that a word highlighted like this _____ denotes sarcasm, the context should have given it away. Emma Stone. Daguerreotype of a "Circassian beauty" by Matthew Brady, New York, circa 1861. Near him, and reclining upon cushions, are two European Circassian women, whom also dressed in the extremity of Egyptian Oriental taste of Cairo On the right is seen a tall Nubian eunuch, who removes from the shoulders of an African Black slave the shawl by which she had been covered, in order to show her to the master of the harem; this figure with her high shoulders and the characteristics of her features, is a most successful national impersonation. "The First 'Circassian Exodus' to the Ottoman Empire (18581867)". The Circassians are a North Caucasian ethnic group native to Circassia. Not that I am the first to learn about these portraits of women like Zublia; scholars such as Linda Frost have cleared the path to make sense of them in a much broader nineteenth-century context of gender and racial representation. This reputation dates back to the later . What I know now is that the woman depicted here fits the model of a kind of performed personality dubbed the Circassian Lady or the Circassian Beauty in mid-nineteenth-century America. It is a testimony to the influence of Blumenbach that we still use the term Caucasian to signify white people, and of course the color scheme of white, yellow, brown, black, and red still has currency, too, although in altered forms. [12] The fact that Circassian women were traditionally encouraged to wear corsets in order to keep their posture straight might have shaped their wasp waist as a result. 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". In Blumenbachs racial typology, then, the purest, most original white people came from the Caucasus region. Jelena is a gorgeous name originating from both Russian and Slavic languages. Today Circassians live around the world in countries such as Turkey (with almost eighty percent of the community), Israel, Syria, Lebanon, United States and several European countries. Perhaps it will take an event as revolting and traumatic as the Marathon bombing to finally uncouple the name Caucasian from whiteness and lay it to rest. Francis Davis Millet depicted Circassian women during his 1877 coverage of the Russo-Turkish war, specifying local costume and hairstyle. A circa 1900 albumen photograph (3 7/8 in. Circassian beauties, or "Moss-haired girls" as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. ISBN 978-0-292-78335-5. p. 6-8, Rosser-Owen (2007). Hailing from the North Caucasus and the northeastern Black Sea coast, Circassians are an ethnic group historically famous for their alluring females. [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". As such, Greece became a symbol of republican liberty against corrupt tyranny. 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. Jelena. Abraham Bogardus, Caucasian Girl, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of the author. 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. 2020. For an American audience both morbidly fascinatedand panicked by the prospect of race mixing, transgression of the taboo could go only so far before being sealed with disaster. Here the majority of the women were Circassian, who without any doubt are much more distinguished in appearance. Another Circassian celebrity from Turkey (Tokat), Sari Seker Sema is a prominent radio and television host, presenter, DJ and columnist. I have decided to finish this article with a excerpt from the travel diary of Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, who referred to Circassian women as the most graceful and most sensual-looking creatures I have ever seen. A little tribute to a people who have been denied their homeland and who struggle to maintain their traditions. 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. It is worth underlining this use of hair as a marker of forbidden sexuality, for it turns up again with the Circassian Ladies, but in a more subtle form. 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. Beautys brightest colours Had decked her out in all the hues of heaven. Circassian beauties, or Moss-haired girls as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the young womans abstracted gaze with the absurdly wild mass of hair flaming around her head. One Circassian woman, favoured with an aristocratic appearance, was avoided and even hated by the chocolate-coloured African women through no fault of hers, but simply because she looked majestic. Dec 30, 2016 - erkesler. Biographical outline of the beautiful Circassian girl, Zobeide Luti, or, Lady of beauty [microform] together with a brief sketch of the manners, customs, and inhabitants of Circassia. [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. Dress of black gossamer net over white satin slip, round frock front edged with Vandyke lace. : case sensitive: see the pronunciation key for a guide on how to write the sounds; sounds can only be searched in names that have been assigned pronunciations * is a wildcard that will match zero or more letters in the pronunciation example: *lee matches names which end with the sound lee _ is a wildcard that will match exactly one letter in the pronunciation Had we understood that, we mightknownow that Blumenbachs division of the human species into five different colorswith the Circassian Caucasians as the purest white, the most original and true of them allis simply false, a fantasy of European narcissism about the pure origins of the white race. The legend of Circassian women was also repeated by legal theorist Gustav Hugo, who wrote that "Even beauty is more likely to be found in a Circassian slave girl than in a beggar girl", referring to the fact that even a slave has some security and safety, but a "free" beggar has none. But the very appearance of the Circassian Lady in the circus sideshow, alongside other human types designated freaks, must have blunted all such questions. Explore. Her sale sent home some disappointed bawlers, Barnum's Circassian beauties were young women with tall, teased hairstyles, rather like the Afro style of the 1970s. For one Circassian, a sweet girl, were given, Whiteness, then, might be seen as no longer a guarantee of liberty and mastery, and so the prospect of the Circassian Lady offered the subtle thrills of danger and ambiguity. 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? What I learned about what is essentially a circus identity I find fascinating because of what it tells us about how nineteenth-century Americans treated race, even the white race, as a spectacle, as aperformed identity that might not be what it seemed. Circassians commemorate the banishment of the Circassians from Russia in Taksim, stanbul, Illustration of skulls of the five races, from. [24] In Scotland, in 1862, Circassian chiefs arrived to advocate their cause against Russia and to persuade Britain to stop the actions of the Russian army at that time,[25] and upon the arrival of two Circassian leaders, Hadji Hayder Hassan and Kustan Ogli Ismael, the Dundee Advertiser reported that "the Chiefs are two remarkable looking men. The luxurious palaces of the sultans housed Georgians, Abkhazians and Circassians as concubines and odalisques. The image below presents a woman of the Circassian style who is labeled a Caucasian; bear in mind that all these titles are fictions applied to a person performing an imagined type: Apart from the influence of the new science of race, another cause for this fascination with Circassians was that, starting in the mid-1700s, it had become a matter of dramatic and romantic lore that beautiful Circassian women were being sold in the slave markets of Istanbul and throughout the Ottoman Empire, to serve in the harems of the sultan and other potentates as the most desirable beauties of the realm. Still, we might notseehow laughablyabsurd that white mythology is until confronted with it in the form of the Circassian Lady. An advertisement from 1782 titled "Bloom of Circassia" makes clear that it was by then well established "that the Circassians are the most beautiful Women in the World", but goes on to reveal that they "derive not all their Charms from Nature". [37] As the original fad faded, the "Circassians" started to add to their appeal by performing traditional circus tricks such as sword swallowing. The Sultana Served by her Eunuchs, Painting by Charles Amedee Philippe van Loo.Circassian woman, 1870s-80s. We have to remember that the explosion of frizzed hair in the portraits of Circassian women was an entirely artificial effect, both cosmetically and culturally: it had to be created with beer shampoo and teasing comb; it had nothing to do with how actual Circassian women wore their hair. Legend had it that the Circassians produced the worlds most beautiful white women, who were consequently in great demand for the harems of Turkish sultans. 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). 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. The handsome and graceful Circassian women were much more numerous than at Bet il Mtoni, where my mother and her lady friend Medne were the only members of this race. kbals (honoured lady consorts) of Circassian descent were also numerous, most notable of them being Cevherriz II, Ceylanyar II, Dilfirib I, Nalandil III, and Nergis IV in addition to Gzdes (favourite lady consorts), including Drdane I, Hsnicenan III, Safderun IV, amongst others. Elin Sangu, Turkish actress from a Circassian family. Zublia Aggolia was almost certainly a stage name, given that probably none of the women performing this part were actual Circassians, a people from the Caucasus region in what is now modern Russia. Hair in the Eastern style with Spartan diadem. Maker unknown, Aggie Zolutia, carte-de-visite (circa 1875), collection of Steven Bolin. 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. Wrap in several ways, or wear down. Already in his 1775 text, Blumenbach specifically identified the Circassian women among the peoples of the Caucasus as the single most beautiful representatives of this pure and primordial Caucasian type: Take, of all who bear the name of man, a man and a woman most widely different from each other; let the one be a most beautiful Circassian woman and the other an African born in Guinea, as black and ugly as possible (Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 363). "This delicate as well as fragrant composition has been long celebrated as the summit of cosmetics by all the Circassian and Georgian women in the seraglio of the Grand Sultan". Emily Jean "Emma" Stone was born on November 6, 1988 in Scottsdale, Arizona to Krista Jean Stone (ne Yeager), a homemaker & Jeffrey Charles "Jeff" Stone, a contracting company founder and CEO. Updated on February 8, 2014, to discuss recent efforts by the Circassian community to protest the Circassian genocide and the hosting, by Russia, of the Olympic Games in Sochi, the site of the Circassians final defeat and mass deportation in 1864. [20], According to the feminist Harriet Martineau, Circassians were the only saving virtue of the Egyptian harem where these Circassian mothers produced the finest children and if they were to be excluded from the harem, the upper class in Egypt would be doomed. Bogdan, Robert,Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). [31], Bayard Taylor observed the Circassian women during his trip to the Ottoman Empire and argued that "the Circassian face is a pure oval; the forehead is low and fair, an excellent thing in woman, and the skin of an ivory whiteness, except the faint pink of the cheeks and the ripe, roseate stain of the lips."[11]. The Circassians became major news during the Caucasian War, in which Russia conquered the North Caucasus, displacing large numbers of Circassians southwards. And yet, at the same time, because the Circassian was thought to be the purest, most primordial exemplar of the white race, that may have led the white viewer to yet another thought: that the sexual fate and the sexual proclivities of the Circassian Lady (no true lady by Victorian standards because of these very proclivities) might just as well be those of any given American Lady, who must be, after all, the racial descendant of the woman on exhibit. Indeed, arousal was precisely the point of contention. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. What fair one but must yield implicit faith, when she has the honour of the Countess De fairly pledged, that all sepacious [sic] impurities will be at once removed by this wonder-working nostrum. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. I found a name, inscribed inpencil more than 130 years agoon the back of the photograph, Zublia Aggolia, and a title, Circassian Lady. Even today, I still know nothing about Zublia herself apart from her name, and even that is not what it seems. In the case of The Greek Slave, he meant to portray a whiteChristian woman facing a terrible fate with faith, modesty, and fortitude. 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. But can we really choose to give up such a term, one that is so intertwined with our history and collective ways of seeing that some of us still use the label Caucasian as a way of identifying ourselves and others, even when we know, or at least ought to know, that it is a fantasy? Double click the images to enlarge and view them in original size. has its own identity,and its history serves to enforce their sence of identity, Your email address will not be published. This resulted in the death of approximately 400,000 Circassians, mostly from epidemics or accidents during the long journey to the Black Sea. Said that the Circassian beauties with the hair "Massimi as moss" captivate with their beauty and are much in demand in the harems of Oriental sovereigns. Jun 24, 2015 - Portrait of a Circassian girl, in traditional garb. As a name for whiteness, Caucasian is among the most pernicious because of its role as a label for the purest, most original race. A sovereign remedy for surfeits, scorching from the heat of the sun, freckles, blights from cold and chills of winter, scorbutic, pimples or eruptions of the face and skin, however violent or disfigured, animalcula generated under the cuticle or outer skin, prickley heat, shingles, ring worms, redness of the nose and chin, obstinate cutaneous diseases, and for every impurity or unnatural appearance with which the skin may be affected; to be used as a common wash for clearing and improving the complexion, and in a superior degree to preserve, soften, cleanse and beautify the skin. Thomas Benyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865). Why not just give up using this freakish label, whose only reality has been a staged reality, as a performed character in a circus sideshow? This natural superiority was the cause of a good deal of ill-will and envy. Maker unknown, inscribed on reverse Zoe Meleke, Circassian Lady, Born in Asia Minor, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of Greg French. 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. Why? Victorian postmortem photos did exist, no one denies that, however, they were never taken in a standing pose using a stand. Clearly influenced by Powerss The Greek Slave, Bells statue depicts an octoroon, that is, a person of one-eighth African ancestry, as a naked woman in shackles, perhaps awaiting the auction block, her modesty protected only by her inordinately long hair. P. T. Barnum perfected the sideshow as a form of exploitation and entertainment, imitated by hundreds of carnivals and circuses throughout the nation, that allowed the visitor to depart from a customary world of limits and expectations, but only in a temporary way, and in a context that marked the experience as decisively exceptional, questionable, and quite possibly fraudulentin a word, freakish. In an astonishing historical irony, when the police gave their first press conference in the manhunt for the two men suspected of perpetrating the Boston Marathon bombing, an officer identified one suspect as a light-skinned or Caucasian male. This time, though, the people in question actuallywereCaucasians: they came from the Caucasus as modern refugees from the age-old conflicts there. It offered the viewer an opportunity to view, and stare at, a sexualized white woman and to imagine her possible fate as a slave were she not spared it by appearing in the sideshow. It is not merely arbitrary to compare theCircassian hairstyle and the Afro. It is worth underlining that this costume and hair had nothing to do with how actual Circassian women looked, as the illustrations below indicate. in, This page was last edited on 27 February 2023, at 12:54. The writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has emphasized the potential vulnerability of such constructed concepts in an essay, Good People, Racist People: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. Under these circumstances it was bound to happen that occasionally a kind of ridiculous "racism" broke out among my brothers and sisters. Galilee Area - portrait. The charm was not limited to the Middle East, Cosimo de Medici (ruler of Florence from 1429 to 1464) had an illegitimate son with a slave bought in Venice who was said to be Circassian. Moore Brothers, Zublia Aggolia, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1870), collection of the author. But there was no mistaking the meaning of that fate, even then: as a slave, her body would be at the disposal of her buyer, and it was precisely this fact that would be staring the statues viewers in the face as they stared, in turn, at her white granite bodyor the many photographic reproductions of that body. Titillation should not be confused with illumination. The combination of the popular issues of slavery, the Orient, racial ideology, and sexual titillation gave the reports of Circassian women sufficient notoriety at the time that the circus leader P. T. Barnum decided to capitalize on this interest. 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. The Most Beautiful Women in the World: Vintage Portraits of Circassian Beauties With Their Big Curly Hair, Mihailo Tolotos, the Greek Orthodox Monk Who Lived 82 Years Without Ever Seeing a Woman, 30 Cool Pics That Capture Naughty Ladies of the 1950s, Victorian Postmortem Photography: The Myth of the Stand Alone Corpse, The Lost Janis Joplin Topless Photos in Copacabana, Rio De Janeiro in the Summer of 1970, 40 Vintage Photos Show What Living Rooms Looked Like in the 1960s, 40 Amazing Kodachrome Snaps Show What Life Looked Like in the Late 1950s, Incredible Then and Now Pictures That Show What Popular Dog Breeds Looked Like Before And After 100 Years of Breeding. Gustav Hugo - a German jurist once wrote that beauty can be found in a Circassian slave girl. The novel is based on a true story told in a village in the Turkish highlands close to the Georgian border. What might be particularly striking to the modern viewer, again, is the big hair, which looks so much like the Afro of the late 1960s and 1970s, then as much symbol of Black Power as a fashion statement. 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. . This was June of 2014. Even more subversively, the very idea of white women as sexual slaves must have presented a titillating object to the imagination, at least for white men. Circassian is the name of a people living on the northeast shores of the Black Sea. Wunder, Richard, Hiram Powers: Vermont sculptor, 1805-1873 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991).

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