“My family’s history is also the history of my people, and May 18, 1944, is one of the most painful dates for all of us.”

Lidia Tanatar is a physician living in Istanbul. Born and raised in Uzbekistan to a Crimean Tatar family, she later chose to emigrate to Turkey. An activist in an association that promotes Crimean Tatar culture and traditions among the diaspora, she recounts the 1944 deportation, when her grandmother was forced to leave her homeland together with her two young daughters.

“My parents were born in Alushta, a town on Crimea’s southern coast,” she explains. “Before the German army occupied the peninsula in 1941, all adult men had been drafted into the Soviet army and sent to the front, including my grandfather and his brother. In Crimea, only women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities remained. That night, Russian soldiers burst into my grandmother’s home. She was 34 years old at the time. They gave her fifteen minutes to gather her belongings and then took her and the children to a collection point. The next day they were on a train, packed into a freight wagon with another hundred people. Many of them, especially children and elderly women, died from hardship during the journey. After twenty-one days, the survivors discovered they had arrived in Fergana, Uzbekistan.”

The 1944 deportation left an indelible mark on the history of the Crimean Tatars. It is estimated that at least 200,000 people were forced to leave within just two days, while a policy of erasing traces of the Crimean Tatar presence was launched across the peninsula, from replacing the original names of towns and villages with Russian ones to destroying schools, libraries, and mosques.

“The Crimean Tatars were removed from their homeland under the pretext that they had collaborated with the Germans,” explains Filiz Tuktu Aydın, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Ankara Social Sciences University. “At the same time, Crimea was downgraded to an administrative region and placed under Soviet Ukrainian control to manage its economy. News of the deportation only emerged years later, but it was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union that Crimean Tatars could begin to think about returning to their homeland—a right that had been denied to them for forty-five years.”

An Ancient Diaspora

The connection between Crimean Tatar migration and Russian expansionist policies did not begin during the Second World War but nearly two centuries earlier, under the rule of Catherine II.

In 1783, the Crimean Khanate—which had emerged from the Turco-Mongol Golden Horde—was annexed by the Russian Empire. From that moment onward, economic and cultural pressures, including land confiscations and the destruction of mosques, prompted Crimean Tatars to leave the peninsula. Many settled in territories of the Ottoman Empire, first along the Black Sea coast and later in Anatolia, where the Turkish Republic would be founded in 1923.

A second major exodus occurred in the 1860s following the Crimean War, when another 300,000 Crimean Tatars—roughly one-third of the population—left the peninsula. Eventually, those who remained began resisting emigration and launched a modernization movement that embraced Muslim minorities throughout the Russian Empire.

The Presence in Turkey

When the Turkish Republic was proclaimed after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, one-tenth of the population consisted of Crimean Tatars. Alongside other Muslim ethnic groups such as Turkmens and Circassians, they played a fundamental role in shaping the identity of modern Turkey.

Today, between three and five million descendants of Crimean Tatars born in Turkey identify as members of the diaspora. They are concentrated primarily in the provinces of Ankara, Istanbul, Eskişehir, and Adana.

“I came to Turkey to reunite with relatives who had already migrated here,” recalls Lidia Tanatar, “after attempting to resettle in Crimea in 1992, when returning had finally become possible. My sister and brother-in-law went first. Nothing remained of the Tatars’ former properties; everyone was living in tents under terrible conditions. When I arrived, all I had was a small room in their shack. I began working as a doctor in the local hospital, but there was no transportation and salaries were rarely paid. During that period, many people began considering a move to Turkey, where there was already a large and long-established diaspora. I made the same choice.”

To this day, the largest Crimean Tatar community in the world is located in Turkey.

“Crimean Tatars are a Turkic-speaking people, so they have strong affinities with Turks,” explains Hakan Kırımlı, director of the Center for Russian Studies at Bilkent University in Ankara and author of National Movements and National Identity among the Crimean Tatars. “Although their history is different, the language is very similar, and they share the same religion.

“One could say that for every Crimean Tatar living in Crimea, there are ten or fifteen living in Turkey,” he continues. “This is an unusual situation, the result of the tragic history of the past two centuries, beginning with the Russian invasion of Crimea in 1783. Since then, there have been several waves of migration, large and small, and Crimean Tatars settled in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, including present-day Romania and Bulgaria, as well as parts of Syria. The diaspora in Turkey has sought to give a voice to the Tatars who remained inside the Soviet Union, and today to those living in eastern Ukraine and Crimea under Russian occupation.”

Diaspora Organizations

Turkey is home to more than forty organizations linked to the Crimean Tatar diaspora. These associations seek to build bridges between those who still live on the peninsula and those who have established lives abroad.

The largest center housing both the Crimean Tatar Foundation and the Crimean Tatar Association is located in Ankara. Built through contributions from the diaspora and the Turkish government, it serves as a hub for activism, cultural activities, and mutual support. Today, it includes not only a restaurant, gym, and music hall, but also accommodation for new immigrants who left Crimea after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

“We work to ensure that our linguistic, historical, cultural, and musical heritage is not lost despite the diaspora our people have experienced and continue to experience,” says Mükremin Sahin, president of the Crimean Tatar Association in Ankara. “The project we are currently focusing on is an online school that will expand educational opportunities for Crimean Tatars throughout the diaspora. Our role is also to support people who remain in Crimea and to provide information where propaganda is widespread.”

“We organize public events to explain what is happening to the Tatars who remain in Crimea, where they face discrimination and cannot speak out without risking arrest,” adds Tuncer Kalkay, president of the Crimean Tatar Foundation, the organization’s “sister” institution. While sharing the same headquarters and goals, the Foundation plays a more specific role in political representation abroad.

“Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we have repeatedly demonstrated outside the Russian embassy, and we continue to do so in support of the many political prisoners. We have also launched a solidarity campaign encouraging people to write letters, which we then manage to deliver to those imprisoned.”

Russia’s 2014 Annexation: The Prelude to a New Diaspora

How was Russia’s most recent annexation of Crimea, now twelve years ago, made possible? According to Professor Filiz Tuktu Aydın, the process involved years of preparation, beginning with the election of Viktor Yanukovych as President of Ukraine and the use of the Russian-speaking minority to draw Kyiv into a renewed Russian sphere of influence across the former Soviet space. At the same time, an “anti-Islamic” campaign was directed against the Crimean Tatars.

“The Russian narrative focused on the alleged popular will of the Russian majority,” says Tuktu Aydın. “The extensive use of propaganda, combined with pressure to facilitate an illegitimate referendum, did the rest. The only group that challenged Putin’s plan were the Crimean Tatars, but it was not enough. After the annexation, Moscow outlawed the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar representative assembly, which since 1991 had served as a link between the peninsula’s community and the Ukrainian government.”

Since 2014, Russia has pursued a policy of resettling nearly one million Russian citizens in Crimea. The peninsula has also become a vast military outpost central to the war against Ukraine. “The 2014 occupation was a severe blow to the returnees, who had fought for years for the right to return to their homeland and had rebuilt their lives from scratch there,” says Bulent Tanatar, editor-in-chief of Emel, the historic Crimean Tatar diaspora magazine founded in 1930. “They found themselves facing a choice: remain and lose their freedom, or flee and start over once again.”