In May of this year, I traveled with photographer Alison Cartwright through Crimea, gathering stories and songs that told of the Crimean Tatars’ decades-long struggle to return to their motherland. The Tatars were forcibly relocated by Stalin in 1944; only in the past two decades have they begun to resettle this verdant peninsula jutting out from southern Ukraine into the Black Sea. Our interviews with these families, conducted over countless rounds of strong Turkish coffee in villages and cities throughout Crimea, reveal how the Tatars’ memory of exile and their uncertain prospects for the future shape their daily lives.



In a kitchen in Marino, outside Simferopol, a Crimean Tatar woman named Milara leaned over the table and spoke emphatically into my microphone: “There is nowhere else for us to go. We have no other home.” In the idyllic hillside hamlet of Ay Serez, we heard: “We are Crimean Tatars, we have nowhere else to go.” In a crumbling Soviet high-rise in the western resort city of Yevpatoria: “We didn’t have any choice, this was the only place for us, and we always knew we would be here.” In Alupka: “What do I need America for, if my homeland is Crimea!” I began to think of the variations on this theme as an improvised incantation demonstrating the potency of an inherited place in the world.

Our travels began during a time of celebration and ended on a day of mourning. The first week of May brought us numerous invitations to attend Qidirlez, the day when Tatars celebrate the beginning of spring and the anniversary of the meeting of two Muslim prophets, with tests of strength, beauty, and strategy. We left soon after May 18, the Day of Deportation, when Tatars from all corners of Crimea—now an autonomous republic under Ukrainian jurisdiction—convene in Simferopol’s Lenin Square to remember and mourn the brutal exile.

Their banishment is a testament to the destructive strength of Stalin’s Red Army. Accused of betraying the Soviet Union by conspiring with the Nazis, the entire population of Crimean Tatars—approximately 200,000 people at the time—was forced onto cattle cars and carted thousands of miles to be resettled among other Turkic-speaking Muslim groups. One of Stalin’s lieutenants, Lavrenti Beria, advised him that, “taking into account the treacherous activities of the Crimean Tatars and...the undesirability of Crimean Tatars further residing in the border zone of the Soviet Union,” there was no option but deportation. The official Soviet line was that a “humanitarian procedure” had been conducted to bring Tatars closer to their “brothers” in Central Asia and the Urals. Between 20 and 40 percent of the total population died en route to what is now Uzbekistan and other remote parts of the Soviet Union, where 150,000 Tatars remain to this day.

After the Tatars were deported, their homes were given to ethnic Russian and Ukrainian Soviet citizens; the peninsula, with its strategic Black Sea port, was occupied. For Slavic settlers, the temptation to relocate was understandable: In this mythologized Eden of the empire, settlers were guaranteed homes, sometimes with beds already made and last summer’s apricot preserves and canned tomatoes waiting in the pantry. In a fiendishly simple semantic maneuver that bears repercussions to this day, the modifier “Crimean” was dropped from the Tatars’ passports, making them indistinguishable from a multitude of other Turkic Muslims throughout the Soviet Union. Those who survived the deportation were placed in “Special Settlement Camps,” where they were held for over a decade. Then, in 1954, on the three-hundredth anniversary of a short-lived treaty between the Russian czar and the Ukrainian Cossack freedom fighters, Nikita Khrushchev offered Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a token of friendship.

Immediately after being released from the settlement camps in the 1960s, Crimean Tatars began agitating for an end to their exile. In the early days of this struggle, the samizdat Crimean Tatar magazine Emel testified, “Deep in his heart, no Crimean Tatar, [whether he was once] a KGB agent or a movement provocateur, ever betrayed his desire to return home.” After Stalin’s death and Khruschev’s anemic apology for the atrocities carried out under his rule, Crimean Tatars were allowed to move freely around Central Asia and the Urals, but they were forbidden from returning to Crimea.


Finally, in 1987, with the entire nation approaching collapse, Mikhail Gorbachev granted Crimean Tatars the right to return home. Families, many of which had only ever heard stories of Crimea, immediately began gathering their belongings and making travel arrangements. Today, there are an estimated 300,000 Crimean Tatars in Crimea—less than 15 percent of the total Crimean population. In exile, keys to homes abandoned in 1944 became cherished symbols of the Tatars’ insistence on returning to Crimea. Those who returned tell stories of arriving in Crimea after half a century, holding the same keys they had used to lock their doors for the last time. The keys still fit the locks, but their owners had no right to open the doors.


When Milara uttered her version of the ubiquitous line, we were having coffee and cookies at her friend Gulnara’s home in Marino, a former squatter’s settlement on the outskirts of Simferopol. Milara and Gulnara met on the picket line in Moscow in 1987 and migrated to Crimea with their families soon after. Gulnara and her four children operate a tiny convenience shop for their neighborhood; whenever they have additional funds, they use them to improve the house, a typical home in these settlements: tin roof, earth floor, sandy spackle over yellow brick walls. Gulnara’s husband fought for the rights of Tatars throughout the 1970s and ’80s but has since succumbed to alcoholism and was living in a dilapidated burnt-orange wagon outside of the family’s house. Gulnara shook her head when I asked about him, saying simply, “Where there was a man, now there is no man.”

Like so many of the settlements where Crimean Tatars began squatting in the 1990s, Marino is a patchwork of houses in various stages of becoming homes. Diminutive ten-by-ten-foot brick structures litter the lots between towering facades of unfinished buildings, some of which mask meticulously constructed family rooms. These are would-be dream homes awaiting cash flow. Kerpichi, the pale yellow Crimean bricks resembling desiccated coral, are piled up in most lots—the stuff of next summer’s bedroom, chimney, or bathroom. Down the road is a three-story palace that has been completed for a decade yet still lacks running water and gas.

Such jarring contradictions between surfaces and interiors are the legacy of a repatriation process that has stretched over two decades, a period punctuated by the economic instability and heightened political corruption that followed Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Many of those who returned to Crimea are the children or grandchildren of the Tatars deported in 1944; their memory of Crimea is not firsthand, but the product of story and song. Yet that does nothing to diminish the unwavering conviction that this is their natural home.

So here is the lumbering question: What really motivated the Crimean Tatars to return? What convinced them to uproot themselves once more, abandon the homes built over four decades in exile, leave the careers they had established? Was it opportunism on a grand scale, as many opponents of the Tatar cause argue? The drive to reclaim a debt owed to ancestors? Or simply the momentum of a culture so deeply connected to a place that there were no options other than returning to it, as the songs of exile have reminded each subsequent generation?

For a person as uprooted as myself—an American daughter of Ukrainian refugees who was raised bilingual, a New Yorker who has carted her cardboard boxes full of books and used furniture to seven different apartments in the past five years, and, most recently, an ethnomusicologist doing fieldwork for her dissertation in Crimea—this conviction about one’s place in the world is foreign, even a little unnerving. Staking such a strong claim to a place implies a desire for stability, community, and continuity—all of which strike me as retrograde. Like many others, I am personally moved by the idea of home, but the truth is I am living out the American immigrant’s inheritance: the impossibility of locating home, much less recovering it.

There are few superficial similarities between the image of home cultivated by the transient New Yorker and the one harbored by Crimean Tatars working to reclaim the territory to which they have returned. But the poetic and practical, the nostalgic and concrete dimensions of home, are universal. Among the forsaken squats and luxurious dream homes, the one-bedroom apartments inhabited by families of five or more, and the dusty mattresses dragged out onto future yards where children play while parents build, various narratives of home emerge. From impassioned convictions about an abstract ideal to the practical realities of building a shelter, these stories animate the idea of home.

John Berger has cautioned that “approach[ing] experience...is not like approaching a house.” But in the case of the Crimean Tatars, the house is the most instructive, heuristic symbol of the collective experience. The houses built, bought, and dreamed of by the Crimean Tatars contain the stories of ancestors, the aspirations and disappointments of returnees, and the obligations imposed by history. The stories and songs that follow lend insight into the experience of home by a people whose ethos has centered on the quest to re-create it. For people deprived of a voice for over half a century, stories told to friends and family were the only way to challenge a history that denied their basic identity, to remember events that were erased from public memory. “If every event which occurred could be given a name,” Berger writes, “there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary. A word is missing and so the story has to be told.”

—Maria Sonevytsky