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The idea that a white woman might be sold into slavery, and especially sold into a slavery that marked her as a sexual object in a potentates harem, was a matter of both moral horror and transgressive fascination to the white imagination. [37], The trend spread, with supposedly Circassian women featured in dime museums and travelling medicine shows, sometimes known as "Moss-haired girls". Biographical outline of the beautiful Circassian girl, Zobeide Luti, or, Lady of beauty [microform] together with a brief sketch of the manners, customs, and inhabitants of Circassia. [26], There are not any people, on the old continent, perfectly fair, except those who live in high latitudes, where the westerly winds come from the sea, at no great distance, so tempered as not to be very sharp nor very dry. The fame of these women inspired more than just literary achievement. She wears a jeweled crucifix and pearl-studded, low-cut dress, and the characteristic hairstyle is unmistakable. That would be a fitting end to a term for whiteness worn out long ago. [1][2][3], There are folk songs in various languages all around the Middle East and Balkans describing the unusual beauty of Circassian women, a trend popularised after the Circassian genocide, although the reputation of Circassian women dates back to the Late Middle Ages when the Circassian coast was frequented by traders from Genoa, and the founder of the Medici dynasty, Cosimo de' Medici, had an illegitimate son from a Circassian slave. Pontios. Many writers and travelers through the ages have described Circassians as the most beautiful women in the world. - YouTube 0:00 / 3:21 Circassian-Abkhaz Beauties! In 2014, the Circassian diaspora across the world sought to use the hosting of the Olympic Games in Sochi, where the Russians celebrated their victory over the Circassians in 1864, as an opportunity to protest the 150th anniversary ofwhat some have calledthe first genocide inmodern European history. The first thing to consider is the designation Circassian itself. [6] It is not clear why Barnum chose this hairstyle. But the very appearance of the Circassian Lady in the circus sideshow, alongside other human types designated freaks, must have blunted all such questions. Around ten percent live in the country formerly known Circassia, now divided into four administrative areas: The Republic of Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Krasnodar Krai. Wunder, Richard, Hiram Powers: Vermont sculptor, 1805-1873 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). It "instantly gives a Rosy Hue to the Cheeks", a "lively and animated Bloom of Rural Beauty" that would not disappear in perspiration or handkerchiefs.[34]. This is confirmed by the portrayal of other types in the circus sideshows of the period, such as this Egyptian (another performed persona): So here we land in yet another seeming paradox: the putatively purest, most primordial, most beautiful form of the white race, the Circassian, is constructed to share, however subtly, its signature featurea wild mane of hairwith Africans. Moore Brothers, Zublia Aggolia, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1870), collection of the author. It claims that the product was endorsed by Lady Mary Wortley Montague who stated that it was very helpful "for removing those sebacious impurities so noxious to beauty". Thomas Gamaliel Bradford, Map of Caucasian Countries and Turkey in Asia (1835), Wikipedia Commons. [31], Bayard Taylor observed the Circassian women during his trip to the Ottoman Empire and argued that "the Circassian face is a pure oval; the forehead is low and fair, an excellent thing in woman, and the skin of an ivory whiteness, except the faint pink of the cheeks and the ripe, roseate stain of the lips."[11]. So one of the most beautiful would do, but be sure & get a decent-looking chap of 16 years old or more. According to Blumenbach, the white race originated in the Caucasus region, and all other human races derived from this original source as degenerations of the Caucasian, the highest type. If we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed. May 21, 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. Beautiful Hijab Cute Beauty Chapel Veil Muslim Beauty Lace Wrap Beauty A soft, lovely all-over embroidered multi-color black floral English net is trimmed in a vintage style gold leaf motif trim and includes a sewn-in clip to hold it in place! Originally published in German in 1775. [41], Pseudoscientific explanations for fair skin, Brookes, Douglas Scott (2010). Greece was on the publics mind at the time, especially the minds of romantics and idealists, for the country had fought a successful war of independence from the Ottoman Empire from 1821 to 1830. A circa 1900 albumen photograph (3 7/8 in. However, it seems that "Zalumma Agra" was probably a local girl hired by the show, as were later "Circassians". But can we really choose to give up such a term, one that is so intertwined with our history and collective ways of seeing that some of us still use the label Caucasian as a way of identifying ourselves and others, even when we know, or at least ought to know, that it is a fantasy? Racial theories of the mid 19th century held that the people living in the Circassian mountains near the Black Sea were examples of the purest stock of the Caucasian race. It is a testimony to the influence of Blumenbach that we still use the term Caucasian to signify white people, and of course the color scheme of white, yellow, brown, black, and red still has currency, too, although in altered forms. It is a cruelly ironic twist of history that the Circassian Lady became an invented trope of circus spectacle in the United States at precisely the time that the actual Circassians were suffering ethnic cleansing in their homelandby some estimates, over six hundred thousandCircassians died in the Russian campaign to expel them from the region. Pronunciation clear help? Galilee Area - portrait. From personal experience of travelling to many countries in the Caucasus, they tend to be very very beautiful. See more ideas about people, costumes, picture. [20], In parts of Europe and North America where blond hair was more common, the pairing of extremely white skin with very dark hair also present among some Circassians was exalted, even in Russia which was at war with the Circassians; Semyon Bronevskii exalted Circassian women for having light skin, dark brown hair, dark eyes and "the lineaments of the face of the Ancient Greek". Had decked her out in all the hues of heaven. It is not merely arbitrary to compare theCircassian hairstyle and the Afro. Perhaps it will take an event as revolting and traumatic as the Marathon bombing to finally uncouple the name Caucasian from whiteness and lay it to rest. The legend of the Circassian woman involved a provocative component for white Americans: the idea that the Circassians were the most primordial form of the white race, and therefore also the purest and most beautiful exemplars of whiteness, especially their women; yet at the same time, these Circassian women were subject to the slave trade of the Ottoman Empire. History of Circassian Beauties 9,242 views Jun 8, 2021 When I discovered a weird picture in a photo album i was sent down the rabbit hole of research covering everything from the. Obermller and Kern, Miss Millie La Mar, Mind Reader, cabinet card (circa 1890), collection of the author. And that, in turn, would suggest that the white American lady was, at bottom, in her unadorned, uncultured nature, no different from the Circassianand so no different from the African. The portrayal of a white woman as a rescued slave at the time of the American Civil War played on the racial connotations of slavery at the time. Measures about 58 X 23 inches. The Circassians were finally defeated in 1864, and the Russians brutally dispersed hundreds of thousands of them from their native land. Of course, individuals may make that choice in the waythey use everyday language, but that choice is made more difficult to the extent that government officials still employ Caucasian as a legitimate identifying label, as Shaila Dewan has pointed out in a recent essay,Has Caucasian Lost Its Meaning?,in the New York Times:Justice Anthony M. Kennedy saw fit to use the term in the pivotal affirmative action decision, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin; on the very first page, in the statement of facts, Justice Kennedy describes Abigail NoelFisher, who sued the university for discrimination, as the Petitioner, who is Caucasian . "Not to be denied his harem slave, Barnum hired a frizzy-haired local woman, put her in a Turkish costume and dubbed her Zalumma Agra, Star of the EastThe Circassian beauty was an instant success, soon to be followed by a succession of imported beauties with an enigmatic letter Z figuring prominently in all their names. Emily Jean "Emma" Stone was born on November 6, 1988 in Scottsdale, Arizona to Krista Jean Stone (ne Yeager), a homemaker & Jeffrey Charles "Jeff" Stone, a contracting company founder and CEO. African women were routinely portrayed as sexually lascivious, and therefore in some sense willing and complicit in their sexual exploitation. Jun 24, 2015 - Portrait of a Circassian girl, in traditional garb. Day of mourning for the Circassians. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. Dated 19th Century RM 2HEH22X - Regency woman and child in mourning dress. The legend of Circassian women was also repeated by legal theorist Gustav Hugo, who wrote that "Even beauty is more likely to be found in a Circassian slave girl than in a beggar girl", referring to the fact that even a slave has some security and safety, but a "free" beggar has none. The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in US Popular Culture, 18501877. Circassian girls are beautiful especially the older generation , but this is not specific to them , Caucasus girls are . Double click the images to enlarge and view them in original size. So now we are in a better position to answer our question: Why Circassian Ladies but not Circassian Gentlemen? All of these women were local girls, most of whom were encouraged to wash their hair in beer and then tease it out for that exotic Circassian do. Here is the full context from Blumenbachs On the Natural Variety of Mankind: Blumenbach adds this footnote to the word Georgian in the passage above: From a cloud of eye-witnesses it is enough to quote a classical one, Jo. Barnum's Circassian beauties were young women with tall, teased hairstyles, rather like the Afro style of the 1970s. Charles Eisenmann, Zumiya the Egyptian, Age 20, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1870s), collection of Greg French. The fact is that the Circassian Lady or the Circassian Beauty was a staple of nineteenth-century sideshows, but not the Circassian Gentleman. With the occasional exception of a Circassian child (see illustration below), all the photographs we find of sideshow Circassians are of women. Photographic reproductions of Bells statue circulated onstereoview cards in the United States (see below), which allowed viewers to get a three-dimensional sense of the figure. What fair one but must yield implicit faith, when she has the honour of the Countess De fairly pledged, that all sepacious [sic] impurities will be at once removed by this wonder-working nostrum. p. 46, Delaware Gazette and State Journal, 2 February 1815. Whatever we might say about the complexities of their particular relationship, mass rape was a defining feature of the history of slavery in the United States. Greenwood found no one worth exhibiting, and Barnum instructed him via letter to instead look for "a beautiful Circassian girl if you can get one". Each is canceled with a stamp that reads Barnums Museum and dated April 26, 1866 (left) and December 5, 1865 (right). "[30] Another anthropologist, William Guthrie, distinguished the Caucasian race and the "Circassians who are admired for their beauty" in particular by their oval form of their head, straight nose, thin lips, vertically-placed teeth, facial angle from 80 to 90 degrees that he calls the most developed one, and their regular features overall, which "causes them to be considered as the most handsome and agreeable". It has been argued that the distinctive hairstyle affiliates the side-show Circassian with African identity, and thus, resonates oddly yet resoundingly with the rest of her identifying significations: her racial purity, her sexual enslavement, her position as colonial subject; her beauty. They also often performed in pseudo-oriental costume. After 1854, almost all Ottoman harem concubines were of Circassian origin; the Circassians had been expelled from Russian lands in the 1860s and the improverished refugee parents sold their daughters in a trade that was formally banned, but tolerated.[5]. This rule applies to Great Britain and Ireland, to the Germans, Danes, Swedes, and Circassians; but going to the eastward in the same latitude, as we depart from the ocean or the Black Sea, having more dry land to the windward, by which the air is charged with sun-dry exhalations, the skin changes its colour; it ceases to be perfectly fair.[27]. And the most telling feature of all: the big hair. Victorian postmortem photos did exist, no one denies that, however, they were never taken in a standing pose using a stand. It offered the viewer an opportunity to view, and stare at, a sexualized white woman and to imagine her possible fate as a slave were she not spared it by appearing in the sideshow. Barnum had written to John Greenwood, his agent in Europe, asking him to purchase a beautiful Circassian girl to exhibit, or at least to hire a girl who could "pass for" one. Watch. Europeans had sympathized with Greece not only for its being the font of Western civilization and its ideal of freedom but also for its resistance as a Christian nation against the Muslim Ottomans. But when the offer went beyond, they knew Here the majority of the women were Circassian, who without any doubt are much more distinguished in appearance. kbals (honoured lady consorts) of Circassian descent were also numerous, most notable of them being Cevherriz II, Ceylanyar II, Dilfirib I, Nalandil III, and Nergis IV in addition to Gzdes (favourite lady consorts), including Drdane I, Hsnicenan III, Safderun IV, amongst others. In the case of The Greek Slave, he meant to portray a whiteChristian woman facing a terrible fate with faith, modesty, and fortitude. Symbolic and only barely covert sexualization seems to have thrived in the liminal space of the sideshow freaks, as in this portrait of a snake charmer: The mystical symbolism of a freakish whiteness seems to have been even more accentuated in the case of some albinos, the whitest persons of all, who adopted the cachet of mysterious powers, such as mind reading, as a feature of their sideshow acts: This comes full circle in the portrait below of Aggie Zolutia, representing the highest possible pitch of a fetishized whiteness: an albino Circassian. And yet, at the same time, because the Circassian was thought to be the purest, most primordial exemplar of the white race, that may have led the white viewer to yet another thought: that the sexual fate and the sexual proclivities of the Circassian Lady (no true lady by Victorian standards because of these very proclivities) might just as well be those of any given American Lady, who must be, after all, the racial descendant of the woman on exhibit. Already in his 1775 text, Blumenbach specifically identified the Circassian women among the peoples of the Caucasus as the single most beautiful representatives of this pure and primordial "Caucasian" type: "Take, of all who bear the name of man, a man and a woman most widely different from each other; let the one be a most beautiful Circassian This extraordinary hairdo was entirely Barnums invention, but it stuck as one of the defining markers of the Circassian woman, no matter what circus or sideshow put a Circassian performer on the stage: a huge mass of hair, washed in beer and teased to a frizzy cloud resembling what might remind someone today of an Afro from the 1960s or 1970s. "I still have faith in a beautiful Circassian girl if you can get one very beautiful. But there was no mistaking the meaning of that fate, even then: as a slave, her body would be at the disposal of her buyer, and it was precisely this fact that would be staring the statues viewers in the face as they stared, in turn, at her white granite bodyor the many photographic reproductions of that body. The Colonial Contexts for the Harem Representation", "XLIV. Barnum exhibited women he claimed to be from Circassia. They used a concoction supposedly extracted from a vegetable native to Circassia. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. "This delicate as well as fragrant composition has been long celebrated as the summit of cosmetics by all the Circassian and Georgian women in the seraglio of the Grand Sultan". Circassian beauties, or "Moss-haired girls" as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. Not that I am the first to learn about these portraits of women like Zublia; scholars such as Linda Frost have cleared the path to make sense of them in a much broader nineteenth-century context of gender and racial representation. Said that the Circassian beauties with the hair "Massimi as moss" captivate with their beauty and are much in demand in the harems of Oriental sovereigns. white slavery. My father was of course never forgiven the fact that he had chosen his favourite children Sharfe and Choleboth by Circassian mothers, Sharfe even being blue-eyedfrom the hateful race of "cats". All actresses are 100% of European descent. The Most Beautiful Girl Beautiful Actresses Red Beard Celebrity Style Formal Dresses Long Elegant Arzu Yanarda, erkes oyuncu ve manken, Circassian actress and model from Turkey Unusual Design Portrait Color Mixing Nefise Karatay (Circassian women from Turkey) F FALCON MULTIMEDIA Circassian beauties Top Model Business Women Music Videos In 1802 "the Balm of Mecca" was also marketed as being used by Circassians: What do Chechen and Circassian girls generally look like? First of all, we have to take into account that the myth of the Circassian included several intersecting elements of overwhelming interest, if not fixation, for nineteenth-century white Americans: race, slavery, and ideals of feminine virtue, beauty, and sexuality. At Bet il Sahel there was much more luxury and grand style than at Bet il Mtoni. Emma Stone. For one Circassian, a sweet girl, were given, The writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has emphasized the potential vulnerability of such constructed concepts in an essay, Good People, Racist People: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. A similar yet smaller literature also exists for Circassian men, who were thought to be especially handsome. Today. Pinterest. [20], According to the feminist Harriet Martineau, Circassians were the only saving virtue of the Egyptian harem where these Circassian mothers produced the finest children and if they were to be excluded from the harem, the upper class in Egypt would be doomed. Powers was an American sculptor who worked in Florence, and his depiction of a white woman, stripped naked with only chains covering her genitals, about to be sold in a Turkish slave market, created a sensation as well as a tremendous controversy because of her nudity, which Powers intended as an ideal form, a symbol of her pure Christian virtue in the face of heathen subjugation. [37] As the original fad faded, the "Circassians" started to add to their appeal by performing traditional circus tricks such as sword swallowing. 16 Barnum, in his autobiography, says little about what followed, except that Greenwood disguised himself as a slave-buyer and saw "a large number of Circassian girls and women" in . For an American audience both morbidly fascinatedand panicked by the prospect of race mixing, transgression of the taboo could go only so far before being sealed with disaster. Most Beautiful Caucasian Actresses Top 100. The Circassians are a North Caucasian ethnic group native to Circassia. *Updated April 19, 2013, adding everything after But dont we now have a choice? Minor corrections made on May 22, 2013. x 5 1/2 in.) Maker unknown, inscribed on reverse Zoe Meleke, Circassian Lady, Born in Asia Minor, carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of Greg French. Add to this the fact that the Circassian Ladies were no Circassians at all but ordinary women costumed and frizzed to pass for a purely invented Circassian type, and the ambiguities rise to an even greater height: these transgressive women were not the Other at all but the white viewers own kind. The supposedly scientifically established purity of the Circassian Ladies whiteness played on a white audiences need for reassurance about its identity in a world where octoroons like Zoe might dare to cross the color line. E. & H. T. Anthony, Zaluma Agra, The Star of the East, Now on exhibition at Barnums Museum cartes-de-visite, front and reverse, collection of Greg French (left) and the author (right). Not to be denied his harem slave, Barnum hired a frizzy-haired local woman, put her in . Furthermore, white viewers would have had one very striking point of comparison for supposedly outlandish frizzy hair: this was the hair texture they would attribute to black people. 1. R. S. Reynolds, subject unknown (snake charmer), carte-de-visite, front and reverse (circa 1865), collection of the author; this image is a composite, formed from a photograph and ink drawing, and rephotographed for reproduction and sale; note the combination of exotic, tropical location with a lady clothed in the (rather out-of-place!) Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the young womans abstracted gaze with the absurdly wild mass of hair flaming around her head. Observations on the Hypothesis of some modern Writers, that America has been peopled by a distinct Race of Men and Animals; with some Proofs arising from the Natural History and Appearances of the new Continent in favour of the Mosaic Account of the Deluge", "Horrible Traffic in Circassian WomenInfanticide in Turkey", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Circassian_beauty&oldid=1141901272, Natalia Krlikowska-Jedlinska. It is worth underlining this use of hair as a marker of forbidden sexuality, for it turns up again with the Circassian Ladies, but in a more subtle form. Circassian beauties is a term used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northern Caucasus.A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines.This reputation dates back to the Ottoman Empire when Circassian women living in . Jul 31, 2017 - Explore lynda heath's board "circassian women" on Pinterest. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited, and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines.