Eighty-one years after being uprooted from their homeland in Georgia by the Soviet Union, Ahıska Turks living in the Ahlat district of Türkiye’s eastern Bitlis province continue to feel the sting of exile.
Families brought to Türkiye nine years ago under the directive of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were settled in the Ahlat district, where they continue to live in peace. Though they have started a new chapter, the memories of displacement remain vivid.
More than 100,000 Ahıska Turks, also known as Meskhetian Turks, including women, children and the elderly, were exiled from their ancestral lands in the Ahıska region of Georgia on Nov. 14, 1944, by Soviet leader Josef Stalin to remote corners of the Soviet Union.
The group faced discrimination and human rights abuses before and after the Soviet deportation. Most of the 90,000 to 117,000 Ahıska Turks who were unexpectedly ripped out of their homes and forced into trains died of disease and hunger while on the road.
Witnesses to the terror, although their numbers decrease day by day, preserve the memory of the exile for the coming generations.
Eighty-nine-year-old Bergüzel Hasan recalled her childhood during the exile. “They gathered us one night. They didn’t say ‘deportation,’ they just said ‘you will go back and forth for three days,’” she said.
Hasan described a harrowing 45-day journey in cold iron wagons, where sickness and death were rampant.
“If a child died, they threw it out the window; if an adult, they threw it out the door. They left some in Kyrgyzstan. We got off in Uzbekistan … there was no money, no bread. Then we went to Ukraine. We lived there for 32 years. May God grant us long life and may he live as long as the world endures. Our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Turkish people welcomed us with open arms.”
Eighty-four-year-old Kibriya Bekir, who was 3 at the time of the exile, said she grew up hearing stories of suffering from her family.
“My family would shed tears when they mentioned Türkiye. They didn’t get to see it, but I did. Many of our people were martyred. May God have mercy on them. Our flag is hanging on the door right now. I am very happy to live here.”
Murat Resuloğlu, the Ahlat representative of the World Union of Ahıska Turks (DATÜB), expressed the community’s gratitude.
“We are in the 81st year of the Ahıska Exile. After all these years, we are back in our homeland, under the red flag. The people of Ahlat accepted us with the Ansar approach. My father suffered greatly in exile. Then came the events in Uzbekistan … I was 15 or 16 years old at the time. We faced hardship in Ukraine, but we got back on our feet. We won’t go anywhere from here. Whatever we do will be carried on by our children and grandchildren.”
Currently, approximately 20,000 people live in the Meskhetian region of Georgia bordering Türkiye, though a very small number of the population are Ahıska Turks.
The majority of Ahıska Turks still live where they were exiled or in the countries they later migrated to.
According to reports from international organizations and other sources, 550,000-600,000 Ahıska Turks currently live far from their homeland.
Some have made their way to Türkiye while others are in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, the United States and Ukraine.
Due to the conflict that broke out between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army in eastern Ukraine in 2014, most Ahıska Turks were allowed to move to Türkiye and settled in the eastern province of Erzincan on President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s initiative.
