Several indigenous peoples of the northwest of the Caucasus were forced into exodus at the end of the Caucasian War by victorious Russia. The exodus was launched even before the end of the war in 1864 and it continued into the 1870s, although it was mostly completed by 1867. The peoples involved, mainly the Circassians (Adyghe in their own language), Ubykhs, Abkhaz, and Abaza, were majority or even predominantly Muslim; hence the use in some Russ...
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Several indigenous peoples of the northwest of the Caucasus were forced into exodus at the end of the Caucasian War by victorious Russia. The exodus was launched even before the end of the war in 1864 and it continued into the 1870s, although it was mostly completed by 1867. The peoples involved, mainly the Circassians (Adyghe in their own language), Ubykhs, Abkhaz, and Abaza, were majority or even predominantly Muslim; hence the use in some Russian language historiography of the word mukhadzhirstvo/мухаджирство (or makhadzhirstvo/махаджирство), deriving from the Arabic term muhajir, meaning literally "departee" and by extension "emigrant", to describe this exodus.
This exodus involved an unknown number of people, perhaps numbering hundreds of thousands. The Russians had come to refer to them as mountaineers (gortsy) (meaning, not "mountain climbers", but "mountain dwellers"). The Russian army rounded up people, driving them from their villages to ports on the Black Sea, where they...
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