CAUCASIAN DIASPORAS IN UKRAINE

Abstract

Geographically, Ukraine is close to the Caucasus, which made contacts between their populations much easier. People moved across the western fringes of the Eurasian steppes or across the sea that separated the Caucasus and the Crimea. At the turn of the first millennium A.D. Armenians (who were mainly traders) had to migrate along one of the arms of the Great Silk Road from Trabzon to the Crimea and then on to Kamenets-Podol’skiy, Lvov, and Western Europe under pressure from the Seljuk Turks, who spread into Asia Minor. Armenians, in turn, settled in compact groups in the Crimea and Western Ukraine; they were especially active in Eastern Crimea (Feodosia and Stary Krym where dozens of mediaeval Armenian churches can still be seen), the Christian principality of Feodoro (in the foothills of the peninsula’s western part), and in central and Western Ukraine. In the 13th-17th centuries, there were over 20 Armenian colonies in Western Ukraine with local self-administration granted by the Polish-Lithuanian state.1 Under the influence of their Turkic-speaking neighbors, the Armenians living in the Crimean Khanate started using the so-called Armenian-Kypchak language; in the 18th century the local Armenians embraced Catholicism in Rzeczpospolita and, together with the new faith, the Polish language. Practically no descendants of this diaspora can be found in Ukraine today: in 1948 they all emigrated to Poland under the treaty on population exchange between the Polish People’s Republic and the Soviet Union (according to the Polish 2002 population poll, only 1,100 descendants of this ethnic group remained in Poland). Long before that, in 1779, on the order of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, the Crimean Armenians (whose ethnic roots were close to those of the Armenians of Western Ukraine) were moved from the Crimea to the area where Rostov-on-Don is found today.