Part Two: When Exile Began Within
I did not write this story to turn the past into a monument, nor to grant any people a perfection that belongs to no human being. Collective memory, much like individual memory, chooses what brings comfort, magnifies what inspires pride, and quietly sets aside what disturbs its image. Yet history does not become more just when denial is replaced with glorification, nor does tragedy become more humane when its victims are transformed into flawless legends, stripped of fear, doubt, and human frailty.
What I seek is something deeper: an understanding of the human condition when the very land that once gave a person identity and security becomes the place they are forced to abandon. How does a house built to protect a family become a landmark that guides soldiers to its door? How does land cease to be a family's inheritance and become a military objective, then an administrative record, and finally an empty space on the victor's map?
The catastrophe did not begin on May 21, 1864, even though that date has come to symbolize the end of the war and the beginning of the Circassian exile. Great tragedies rarely arrive all at once. They gather slowly: a village abandoned, a road closed, a harvest destroyed, a promise broken, a warning ignored—until people suddenly realize that every path they believed remained open has disappeared.
Aviation taught me the same truth. An accident does not begin the moment an aircraft strikes the ground. It begins much earlier—with misunderstood information, a warning overlooked, a delayed decision, or a small assumption upon which countless others are quietly built. As errors accumulate and time grows short, options begin to disappear until survival itself becomes difficult. In that sense, 1864 was not the beginning of the Circassian catastrophe; it was its point of impact. The descent had begun years before.
After the capture of Imam Shamil in 1859, marking the end of a major phase of resistance in the eastern Caucasus, the Russian Empire was able to redirect greater military strength toward the northwestern Caucasus. The Circassians, however, were not a centralized nation governed from a single capital. They were tribes, communities, and regional alliances, each interpreting the danger differently. Some chose armed resistance. Others placed their hopes in negotiation. Still others believed that compromise remained possible. Many simply refused to leave their villages because the human heart cannot easily accept that history itself may arrive at the front door and demand that an entire life be abandoned.
A home is never merely walls and a roof. It is the order through which a person understands the world: the place where water is drawn, the direction of the morning sun, the graves of one's ancestors, the tree planted by a father, the path children follow home each evening. To lose all of this is not simply to lose property. It is to lose the invisible order that gives ordinary life its meaning.
That is why the journey into exile did not begin at the shoreline. It began within the human soul. It began the day people realized that the land could no longer protect them, and that the house had ceased to be a refuge, becoming instead a place where they might one day be trapped. Exile begins the moment a family stops repairing its roof, postpones planting its fields, and looks at its belongings for the first time not as possessions, but as questions: What can we carry with us? What must we leave behind forever?
When Circassian communities crossed the Black Sea and were resettled throughout the Ottoman Empire, they did not arrive in an empty land or a blank page of history. Eastern Jordan was then part of Ottoman Greater Syria, inhabited by established communities, tribes, villages, and towns, each possessing its own traditions, memories, and way of life. The newcomers were not the only ones beginning a new chapter, nor were the local inhabitants standing before an unwritten future. What emerged was, above all, an encounter between human beings—between one memory and another, united by a shared search for stability after years of upheaval.
The Circassians did not seek to recreate the Caucasus upon this land, nor did they attempt to erase what had existed before them. They understood, even if they never expressed it in words, that a homeland cannot be packed like luggage, and that mountains do not cross the sea with those forced to leave them behind. What they carried instead were the things exile could never confiscate: their language, their customs, their values, and the names of villages that continued to live in memory long after they had vanished from everyday life. With these, they began again in a land that did not yet know them, just as they did not yet know it.
Slowly, unfamiliarity became understanding, understanding became trust, and trust became partnership. They cultivated the land, helped restore places where life had faded, contributed to the growth of new settlements, and shared their knowledge with the communities around them. This was not the achievement of a single year or even a single generation. It was the result of decades of perseverance, labor, and coexistence, until people of different origins found themselves building a common future together.
Belonging to this new land did not require forgetting the Caucasus, just as remaining faithful to the Caucasus did not mean rejecting the land that had offered refuge. A person does not betray the past by building the future, nor lose their roots by allowing new ones to grow. The Caucasus remained the homeland of memory, while Eastern Jordan became the homeland of everyday life—a place where children and grandchildren were born, where families took root, and where necessity gradually became belonging.
As the decades passed, the Circassian story became more than the story of a people who survived exile. It became part of the history of the land itself. When the Emirate of Transjordan was established, and later the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan emerged, the descendants of those displaced families had already become partners in building, serving, and defending their new homeland. History ultimately reveals a profound truth: a person can carry one homeland in memory while giving another their heart and their life's work. True nations are not built upon forgetting. They are built upon faithfulness—faithfulness to the past that shapes identity, and faithfulness to the present that opens the way to the future.