When a nation disappears
Some small countries, by luck or by pluck, have made it onto the world stage and are recognized as “bona fide nations”. You can think of such places as Uruguay, Surinam, Albania, Liechtenstein, Bhutan or Kiribati. Other peoples are not so lucky, for example, the Lakota and Dine of the USA, the Guna of Panama, the Kurds, Tibetans and the Tuvans. There is no reason that the second group are not independent nations while the first are. Of course, in the modern world, there is a question as to what “independence” really means and if nationalism in ever-decreasing circles is a good idea at all. But what of those nations who have almost disappeared entirely? They are perhaps countless especially in the Americas and Australia, but probably throughout the world over the millennia.
THE LAST OF THE DEPARTED is an interesting, but tragic novel about the fate of one such “vanished” nation, the Ubykhs of the Caucasus region. It is written by an Abkhaz author, a member of another small, but still very present nationality of the same area. He posits an Abkhaz linguistic researcher from Leningrad who comes to Turkey in 1940 to see if he can find any remaining Ubykhs. He locates only one, lonely centenarian in a remote Anatolian village who still speaks the language as well as Abkhazian. This researcher later dies in WW II and the author “finds” his manuscript at the home of his mother. Zaurkan Zolak, the 100 year old man, tells the story of his life and the expulsion of the Ubykhs from their homeland to the Ottoman Empire, where they died of thirst, starvation, disease, and war, where they never managed to fit in. Zaurkan is the last one of those who departed from the Black Sea shores in 1864. It is certainly a tragic tale which sticks close to historical reality. While it may not be great literature in the sense of psychological depth and complex plot, nor will the reader find much romance, it is well-worth reading (if you can find a copy) just to know events and conditions in a long-forgotten time and place. It is a straight-out narrative of a life story; the biography of a man who did not exist, but might have. You may learn a lot about the Ubykhs---their culture, their religion, and their general behavior.
As the book was written in the early 1980s, there was no way that the author could escape praising the Russian Revolution, heralding the rise of freedom and independence for all the peoples "blessed" by its arrival. To criticize its course and results would have meant the book never seeing light of day. I had to cringe a few times when the story reached that section, when Zaurkan was around 80 in any case, but I think we have to realize that the author had little choice.
While Shinkuba, the author, refers to Zaurkan as “the last”, in fact, the last Ubykh speaker died in 1992. Though a few people in Turkey are trying to revive the language, I don’t foresee great success. Ubykh had 82 consonants, the most extreme example of phonetic richness ever found, with only two vowels to accompany them! We are poorer for its loss.