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The Bashkirs ( , ) or Bashkorts (, ; , ) are a Turkic peoples ethnic group indigenous to Russia. They are concentrated in Bashkortostan, a republic of the Russian Federation and in the broader historical region of Badzhgard, which spans both sides of the Ural Mountains, where Eastern Europe meets North Asia. Smaller communities of Bashkirs also live in the Tatarstan, Perm Krai the oblasts of Chelyabinsk, Orenburg Oblast, Tyumen Oblast, Sverdlovsk, Kurgan Oblast and other regions in Russia; sizeable minorities exist in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Most Bashkirs speak the Bashkir language, which is similar to the Tatar language, Kazakh language and Kyrgyz language languages.The Bashkir language belongs to the Kipchak branch of Turkic languages; they share historical and cultural affinities with the broader Turkic peoples. Bashkirs are mainly Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school madhhab, or school of jurisprudence, and follow the Jadid doctrine. Previously nomadic and fiercely independent, the Bashkirs gradually came under Russian rule beginning in the 16th century; they have since played a major role through the history of Russia, culminating in their autonomous status within the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
The name Bashqurt has been known since the 10th century, most researchers etymologize the name as "main/leader/head" ( bash) + "wolf" ( qurt being an archaic name for the animal), thus " wolf-leader" (from the totemic hero ancestor).
This prevailing folk etymology relates to a legend regarding the migration of the first seven Bashkir tribes from the Syr Darya valley to the Volga-Ural region. The legend relates that the Bashkirs were given a green and fertile land by the fertility goddess of Tengrism Umay (known locally also as Umay-əsə), protected by the legendary Ural mountains (in alignment with the famous Bashkir epic poem "Ural-Batyr"). A wolf was sent to guide these tribes to their promised land, hence bash-qurt, "leading wolf". The ethnographers V. N. Tatishchev, P. I. Richkov, and Johann Gottlieb Georgi provided similar etymologies in the 18th century.
Although this is the prevailing theory for an etymology of the term bashqurt, other theories have been formulated:
The migration to the valley of the Southern Urals took place between the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 10th century, in parallel to the Kipchak migration to the north.
In the 7th century, Bashkirs were also mentioned in the Armenian Ashkharatsuyts.
However, these mentions may refer to the precursors of the Kipchaks Bashkir tribes who travelled in the Aral-Syr Darya region before the migration. The Book of Sui may have mentioned "Bashkirs" when the Turkic peoples were still travelling through South Siberia
In the 9th century, during the migration of the Bashkirs to the Volga-Ural region, the first Arabic and Persian language-written reports about Bashkirs are attested. These include reports by Sallam al-Tardjuman who around 850 travelled to the Bashkir territories and outlined their borders.
In the 10th century, the Persian historian and polymath Abu Zayd al-Balkhi described Bashkirs as a people divided into two groups: one inhabiting the Southern Urals, the other living on the Wallachian Plain–Danubian Plain near the boundaries of Byzantium.These sources may have confused Bashkirs with Hungarians, since the area of Modern Bashkortostan is often referred as "Magna Hungaria", the zone where the Magyar tribes dwelled before their migration to Europe; it is believed that Bashkirs may have come into contact with these Magyar tribes, since some of the Northern Tribes of the modern Bashkirs do have genetic correspondence with Hungarians Ibn Rustah, a contemporary of Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, observed that Bashkirs were an independent people occupying territories on both sides of the Ural Mountains ridge between Volga River, Kama River, and and upstream of the Ural River.
Ahmad ibn Fadlan, ambassador of the Baghdad Caliph Al-Muqtadir to the governor of Volga Bulgaria, wrote the first ethnographic description of the Bashkir in 922. The Bashkirs, according to Ibn Fadlan, were a warlike and powerful people, which he and his companions (a total of five thousand people, including military protection) "bewared... with the greatest threat". They were described as engaged in cattle breeding. According to ibn Fadlan, the Bashkirs worshipped twelve gods: winter, summer, rain, wind, trees, people, horses, water, night, day, death, heaven and earth, and the most prominent, the sky god. Apparently, Islam had already begun to spread among the Bashkirs, as one of the ambassadors was a Muslim Bashkir. According to the testimony of Ibn Fadlan, the Bashkirs were Turkic peoples, living on the southern slopes of the Ural Mountains, and occupying a vast territory up to the river Volga River. They were bordered by Oghuz Turks on the south, Pechenegs to the south-east and Bulgars on the west.
The earliest source to give a geographical description of Bashkir territory, Mahmud al-Kashgari's Divanu Lugat'it Turk (1072–1074), includes a map with a charted region called Fiyafi Bashqyrt (the Bashkir steppes). Despite a lack of much geographic detail, the sketch map does indicate that the Bashkirs inhabited a territory bordering on the Caspian Sea and the Volga River valley in the west, the Ural Mountains in the north-west, and the Irtysh River valley in the east, thus giving a rough outline of the area.
Said Al-Andalusi and Muhammad al-Idrisi mention the Bashkir in the 12th century. The 13th-century authors Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi, Yaqut al-Hamawi and Qazvini and the 14th-century authors Al-Dimashqi and Abu'l-Fida also wrote about Bashkirs.
The first European sources to mention the Bashkirs were the works of Joannes de Plano Carpini and William of Rubruquis of the 13th century.
By 1226, Genghis Khan had incorporated the lands of Bashkortostan into his empire. During the 13th and 14th centuries, all of Bashkortostan was a component of the Golden Horde. The brother of Batu Khan, Sheibani, received the Bashkir lands east of the Ural Mountains.
After the disintegration of the Mongol Empire, the Bashkirs were divided among the Nogai Horde, the Khanate of Kazan and the Khanate of Sibir, founded in the 15th century.
During the Russian Imperial period, Russians and Tatars began to migrate to Bashkortostan which led to eventual demographic changes in the region. The recruitment of Bashkirs into the Russian army and having to pay steep taxes pressured many Bashkirs to adopt a more settled lifestyle and to slowly abandon their ancient nomadic pastoralist past.
In the late 16th and early 19th centuries, Bashkirs occupied the territory from the river Sylva River in the north, to the river heads of Tobol in the east, the mid-stream of the river Ural River (Ural) in the south; in the Middle and Southern Urals, the Cis-Urals including Volga territory and Trans-Uralsto, and the eastern bank of the Volga River on the south-west.
At the founding of Orenburg Oblast in 1735, the fourth insurrection occurred in 1735 and lasted six years.Акманов И. Г. Башкирские восстания XVII–XVIII вв. Феномен в истории народов Евразии. – Уфа: Китап, 2016 Ivan Kirillov formed a plan to build the fort to be called Orenburg at Orsk at the confluence of the Or River and the Ural River, south-east of the Urals where the Bashkir, Kalmyk and Kazakh lands met. Work on Fort Orenburg commenced at Orsk in 1735. However, by 1743 the site of Orenburg was moved a further 250 km west to its current location. The next planned construction was to be a fort on the Aral Sea. The consequence of the Aral Sea fort would involve crossing Bashkir and the Kazakh Lesser Horde lands, some of whom had recently offered a nominal submission to the Russian Crown.
The southern side of Bashkiria was partitioned by the Orenburg Line of forts. The forts ran from Samara on the Volga east as far as the Samara River headwaters. It then crossed to the middle of the Ural River and following the river course east and then north on the eastern side of the Urals. It then went east along the Uy River to Ust-Uisk on the Tobol River where it connected to the ill-defined 'Siberian Line' along the forest-steppe boundary.
In 1774, the Bashkirs, under the leadership of Salawat Yulayev, supported Pugachev's Rebellion. In 1786, the Bashkirs achieved tax-free status; and in 1798 Russia formed an irregular Bashkir army from among them.
Northwest group: Baylar, Balyksy, Bulyar, Gaina, Gere, Duvaney, Elan, Adyak, Adey, Irekte, Kanly, Karshin, Kirghiz, Taz, Tanyp, Uvanysh, Un, Uran, Jurmi.
South-eastern group: Burzyan, Kypsak, Tamyan, Tangaur, Usergan, Jurmaty.
Southwest group: Ming.
In some specific regions and clans of ethnic Bashkir, the North Asian and Eastern Siberian haplogroup (N3) range from moderate to high frequencies (29 to 90%).
Archaeogenetic analyses show a similarity between historical Hungarians, whose homeland is around the Ural Mountains, and Bashkirs; analysis of haplogroup N3a4-Z1936 which is still found in very rare frequencies in modern Hungarians, and showed that Hungarian "sub-clade N-B539/Y13850 splits from its sister-branch N3a4-B535, frequent today among Northeast European Uralic speakers, 4000–5000 ya, which is in the time-frame of the proposed divergence of Ugric languages", while on N-B539/Y13850+ sub-clade level confirmed shared paternal lineages with modern Ugric (Mansis and Khantys via N-B540/L1034) and Turkic speakers (Bashkirs and Volga Tatars via N-B540/L1034 and N-B545/Y24365); these suggest that the Bashkirs are mixture of Turkic, Ugric and Indo-European contributions.
A genetic study published in Scientific Reports in November 2019 examined the remains of 29 Hungarian conquerors of the Carpathian Basin. The majority of them (60%) carried Y-DNA of West Eurasian origin, but at least 40% of East Eurasian (N1a-M2004, N1a-Z1936, Q1a and R1a-Z2124). They carried a higher amount of West Eurasian paternal ancestry than West Eurasian maternal ancestry. Among modern populations, their paternal ancestry was the most similar to modern Bashkirs. Haplogroup I2a1a2b was observed among several conquerors of particularly high rank. This haplogroup is of European origin and is today particularly common among South Slavs. A wide variety of were observed, with several individuals having blond hair and blue eyes, but also East Asian traits. The study also analyzed three Hunnic samples from the Carpathian Basin in the 5th century, and these displayed genetic similarities to the conquerors. The Hungarian conquerors appeared to be a recently assembled heterogenous group incorporating both European, Asian and Eurasian elements. A group of Bashkirs from the Burzyansky and Abzelilovsky districts of the Republic of Bashkortostan in the Idel-Ural region who belong to the R1a subclade R1a-SUR51 are the closest kin to the Hungarian Árpád dynasty, from which they got separated 2000 years ago.
A genetic study by Yunusbayev et al. 2015 found that the Bashkirs display a significant amount of East Eurasian-derived ancestry (c. 40%), of which roughly the half can be associated with Siberian ancestry maximized in modern-day Nganasan people, and the other half with Ancient Northeast Asians. The remainder of the Bashkirs ancestry was linked to West Eurasian, primarily European sources. The results point to admixture between local Indo-European-speakers, Uralic-speakers and Turkic-speakers. The admixture event dates to the 13th century, according to an analysis of the identical-by-descent segments. According to the authors, the admixture thus occurred after the presumed migrations of the ancestral Kipchaks from the Irtysh and Ob regions in the 11th century. "For example, the present-day Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyz span from the Volga basin to the Tien-Shan Mountains in Central Asia, yet (Fig 5) showed evidence of recent admixture ranging from the 13th to the 14th centuries. These peoples speak Turkic languages of the Kipchak-Karluk branch and their admixture ages postdate the presumed migrations of the ancestral Kipchak Turks from the Irtysh and Ob regions in the 11th century 37."
A full genome study by Triska et al. 2017 found that the Bashkir genepool is best described as a multi-layered amalgamation of Turkic, Uralic, and Indo-European contributions. They further argue that "this disparity between cultural and genetic affinities of Tatar and Bashkir can be attributed to a phenomenon of cultural dominance: the population ancestral to Bashkir adopted the Turkic language during Turkic expansion from the east (language replacement event)".
A genetic analysis on genetic data of Hun, Avar and Magyar conqueror samples by Maroti et al. 2022, revealed high genetic affinity between Magyar conquerors and modern day Bashkirs. They can be modeled as ~50% Mansi people, ~35% Sarmatians, and ~15% Huns. The admixture event is suggested to have taken place in the Southern Ural region at 643–431 BC.
The Russian census of 2010 recorded 1,152,404 Bashkir speakers in the Russian Federation. The Bashkir language is native to 1,133,339 Bashkirs (71.7% of the total number of Bashkirs, reporting mother tongue). The Tatar language was reported as the native tongue of 230,846 Bashkirs (14.6%), and Russian language as the native tongue of 216,066 Bashkirs (13.7%). Most Bashkirs are Multilingualism in Bashkir language and Russian language.
The first appearance of a "Bashkir" language is dated back to the 9th century AD, in the form of stone inscription using a Runic alphabet, most likely, this alphabet derives from the Yenisey variant of the old Turkic runic script. This archaic version of a Bashkir language would be more or less a dialect of the proto-Kipchak language, however, since then, the Bashkir language has been through a series of vowel and consonant shifts, which are a result of a common literary history shared with the Tatar language language since the formation of the Cumania, when the Volga Bulgaria started to receive Kipchaks influence and became the Tatars, most likely between the 10th and 11th centuries.
The Nogai language and Karachay-Balkar languages are most likely the closest-sounding extant languages to the extinct Proto-Kipchak Bashkir language.
From an arc of time of roughly 900 years, the Bashkir language and Idel Tatar language, previously being completely different languages, "melded" into a series of dialects of a common Volga Turki language. The Idel Tatars and Bashkirs are and always were two peoples of completely different origins, cultures and identities, but because of a shared common literary history in an arc of 900 years, the two languages ended up in a common language, spoken in different dialects with features depending on the people which spoke them.
For example, the dialects spoken by Bashkirs, tend to have an accent which mostly resembles other Kipchak languages, like Kyrgyz language, Kazakh language, Nogai language, Karakalpak, and many other languages of the Kipchak sub-group, while the dialects spoken by Idel Tatars, have accents more resembling the original Volga Bulgaria spoken before the Cumans.
At the start of the 20th century, particularly during the Russian Revolution, Bashkortostan and Tatarstan emerged as separate republics, leading to the recognition of Bashkir and Tatar as distinct literary languages. Each was based on the most prominent dialects of the Volga Kipchak language spoken by the Bashkir and Kazan Tatar peoples.
The Cyrillic alphabet is the official script used to write Bashkir.
Traditional Bashkir dish bishbarmaq is prepared from boiled meat and halma (a type of noodle), sprinkled with herbs and flavored with onions and some nocat=yes (young dry cheese). Dairy is another notable feature of the Bashkir cuisine: dishes are often served with dairy products, and few celebrations occur without the serving of qorot or nocat=yes (sour cream).
The Bashkir poems, like the epic creations of other peoples, find origin in the ancient Turkic mythology, in fact the Bashkir epic tale culture can be considered a more developed and expanded version of old Turkic epic culture. Majority of the poems of Bashkir mythology have been written down and published as books at the beginning of the 20th century, these poems compose a great part of the literature of the Bashkir people and are important examples of further-developed Turkic culture.
Some of these poems became important on a continental level, for example the epic poem the "Ural-batyr", which tells the tale of the legendary hero Ural, is the origin of the name of the Ural Mountains. Other poems constitute a great part of the Bashkir national identity, other tales apart from the Ural Batyr include "Akbuzat", "Qara yurga", "Aqhaq qola", "Kongur buga", and "Uzaq Tuzaq".
People live on the earth, the best of whom pledge honor and respect to the existence of nature. The third world is the underground world, where the Devas (also singular Deva or Div) live, incarnated as a snake, the incarnation of the dark forces, who live underground. Through the actions and divisions of the world related in the Ural Batyr, the Bashkirs express a manichaean view of good and evil. The legendary hero Ural, possessing titanic power, overcoming incredible difficulties, destroys the deva, and obtains "living water" (the idea of water in nature, in the pre-Islamic Bashkir pantheon of the Turkic mythology, is considered a spirit of life).
Ural thus obtains the "living water" in order to defeat death in the name of the eternal existence of man and nature. Ural does not drink the "living water" to live eternally. Instead, he decides to sparkle it around himself, to die and donate eternity to the world, the withered earth turning green. Ural dies and from his body emerge the Ural Mountains; the name of the Ural mountain range comes from this poem.
Bashkirs began converting to Islam in the 10th century.Shirin Akiner, " Islamic Peoples Of The Soviet Union", Second edition, 1986 Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan in 921 met some of the Bashkirs, who were already Muslims.Allen J. Frank, " Islamic Historiography and "Bulghar" Identity Among the Tatars and Bashkirs", Brill, 1998 The final assertion of Islam among the Bashkirs occurred in the 1320s and 1330s during the Golden Horde period. The Mausoleum of Hussein-Bek, burial place of the first Imam of historical Bashkortostan, is preserved in contemporary Bashkortostan. The mausoleum is a 14th-century building. Catherine the Great established the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly in 1788 in Ufa, which was the first Muslim administrative center in Russia.
Religious revival among the Bashkirs began in the early 1990s.Jeffrey E. Cole, " Ethnic Groups of Europe: An Encyclopedia", Greenwood publishing group According to Talgat Tadzhuddin there were more than 1,000 mosques in Bashkortostan in 2010. Интерфакс. Говорить о притеснении ислама в России кощунственно, считает Талгат Таджуддин // Interfax, 17 December 2010
The Bashkirs are predominantly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi madhhab." Bashkortostan and Bashkirs", Encyclopedia.com
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