Images of refugees
I came across this painting last week, when I was searching for images to illustrate a lecture on the late Ottoman refugee crises. It’s the first proper lecture in an honours module I’m teaching on refugees and statelessness in world history, c.1900–1951. That ‘c.’ allows a lot of wiggle room: in this lecture I briefly go back as far as the Russian annexation of the Crimea—the first time round, that is—in 1783. But most of the lecture treats the fifty years or so from the consolidation of Russian rule in the Caucasus in the 1860s to the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913: a half-century when millions of Muslims left the Russian imperial borderlands, and the new Christian nation-states that had broken away from the Ottoman empire, and sought refuge in the empire’s truncated (but still extensive) territories. This painting is by Pyotr Nikolayevich #Gruzinsky, a prince of the Georgian royal family, and therefore a member of the Russian imperial aristocracy, in the mid-nineteenth century. It surprised me somewhat for its sympathetic depiction of Muslim refugees being forced out of the Caucasus in the decades when Russia’s grip on the mountains was consolidated.
▻https://singularthings.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/images-of-refugees
#peinture #art #réfugiés #Empire_ottoman #histoire #asile #migrations #Russie #Caucase #réfugiés_musulmans
cc @reka