{"id":15339,"date":"2009-10-12T21:17:56","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T19:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=15339"},"modified":"2023-04-05T10:35:37","modified_gmt":"2023-04-05T07:35:37","slug":"georgia-after-decades-in-exile-meskhetian-turks-return-to-lost-homeland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2009\/10\/12\/georgia-after-decades-in-exile-meskhetian-turks-return-to-lost-homeland\/","title":{"rendered":"GEORGIA: AFTER DECADES IN EXILE, MESKHETIAN TURKS RETURN TO LOST HOMELAND"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>10\/09\/09<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Roughly 65 years ago, Osman, a 90-year-old Meskhetian Turk, lost his home in Georgia to Stalin\u2019s dictat. Now, after a lifetime in Central Asia, Osman, along with hundreds of other Meskhetian Turks, is trying to come home again.<\/p>\n<p>Even after Stalin\u2019s death in 1953, Meskhetians, a Muslim people who speak a Turkish dialect, were allowed to live anywhere in the Soviet Union except for Georgia itself. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a few hundred Meskhetians started to trickle back, in search of their roots. Instead, they found problems.<\/p>\n<p>Many Christian Georgians termed the Meskhetians\u2019 return to their native Samtskhe-Javakheti region in southern Georgia &#8220;the Turks\u2019 second great invasion&#8221; &#8211; a reference to Ottoman Turkey\u2019s takeover of Samtskhe-Javakheti in the 16th century. That prejudice still lingers.<\/p>\n<p>Despite it, a few thousand Meskhetians now live in Georgia. The Georgian government says that it has laid the groundwork for more to return this year.<\/p>\n<p>Osman\u2019s village of Abastumani in Samtskhe-Javakheti is one of the few places where these exiles have returned to their truly ancestral land. The ruins of the house where Osman was born lie just a stone\u2019s throw away from his current dwelling. But as Osman and other Meskhetians are learning, the divide that keeps Meskhetians strangers in their own land is wide, and it remains difficult to bridge the gap.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s Note<\/strong>: Temo Bardzimashvili is a freelance photojournalist based in Tbilisi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>10\/09\/09 Roughly 65 years ago, Osman, a 90-year-old Meskhetian Turk, lost his home in Georgia to Stalin\u2019s dictat. Now, after a lifetime in Central Asia, Osman, along with hundreds of other Meskhetian Turks, is trying to come home again. Even after Stalin\u2019s death in 1953, Meskhetians, a Muslim people who speak a Turkish dialect, were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":60691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[9741,2277],"class_list":["post-15339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-georgia-caucasus","tag-georgia-caucasus","tag-meskhetian-turks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}