The Crimea comes to Nevşehir

But what was this? To one side of the backcloth hung the familiar Turkish flag, but I had only to swivel my head sideways to see a far less familiar blue flag embossed with a symbolic three-pronged yellow tamğa (stamp). For the first time ever I was seeing the flag of the Tatar Crimea, the peninsula in southern Ukraine which had been an independent state with roots stretching back to the Middle Ages until 1783 when it was seized by the Russians.

A few weeks ago I'd spotted a poster in Göreme inviting everyone to an evening of Crimean-Turkish song and dance and had remembered a friend raving about what a good time he'd had at a previous similar event. That's how I'd ended up in Nevşehir on a bleakish winter evening standing to attention while first the Turkish and then the Crimean national anthems were played to kick things off.

Just across the aisle from me sat a group of men and women from İzmir's Crimean-Turkish Association. The men were wearing kalpak hats, while the women were bare-headed, thus setting themselves apart from the Nevşehirli women, almost all of whom wore scarves. The İzmirlis had brought with them small versions of the flag on the wall, which reminded me of the mini-ensigns we used to buy on beach holidays in England to decorate the towers of our sandcastles. Their enthusiasm was infectious as they joined in every song, seemingly word-perfectly.

Guiltily it occurred to me that I knew nothing about the Crimean Turks (aka Crimean Tatars) despite the fact that I'd learned from a huge book on sale in the hallway that there was a Crimean-Turkish settlement not a million miles away from Göreme at Kalecik near Kozaklı. A quick peruse of Wikipedia threw up the usual sad story of a displaced people: most of them driven out of the Crimea by the Russians in the 18th century, with many of the remainder expelled to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944.

More interestingly, the Internet threw up Filiz Tutku Aydın's thesis, “Crimean Turk-Tatars: Crimean Tatar Diaspora Nationalism in Turkey,” in which she explained how large numbers of Crimean Tatars had been resettled in Turkey, especially around Eskişehir, where they had become so assimilated that few of them remembered their ancestral language. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union had sparked a revival of interest in their origins and the growth of what she called transnationalism, with the Crimean Turks now resembling “a child whose mother is Crimea and whose father is Turkey”.

At the end of the evening we all -- Turks, Crimean-Turks and Turkish-English me -- joined in a rousing rendition of “Bir Başkadır Benim Memleketim,” itself in origin a Jewish song, and I felt tears pricking my eyes as it occurred to me that I was participating in the celebrations of a nationalism that managed to hold within it the comfort of an accepted form of multiculturalism at the same time.

Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.