The question of how diaspora communities maintain ethnic identity across generations remains one of the central concerns of diaspora studies. While much scholarly attention has been devoted to large and politically visible diasporas, smaller and geographically isolated communities offer equally revealing and often overlooked case studies. Altay village in the Ulukışla district of Niğde province, Turkey, represents precisely such a case. It is the only settlement in Turkey populated exclusively by Kazakhs, located in a region far removed from major urban centres [1].

The origins of the community lie in one of the least documented mass migrations of the twentieth century. The ancestors of Altay’s current residents fled Xinjiang in the early 1950s, unwilling to submit to Chinese cultural assimilation, to abandon prayer, adopt Chinese customs, or cut their hair in the Chinese manner. Their elders gathered and resolved to seek a land of Islam, declaring that if they perished, they would die as martyrs, and if they survived, they would live as free Muslims. The journey that followed took them through the Himalayas, across Kashmir and Pakistan, and finally by sea to Turkey, arriving in 1954 [2]. Of approximately 5,000 Kazakhs who set out from Xinjiang, only around one third reached Turkey. On 7 May 1955, the first Kazakhs arrived at the site that would become Altay. Within a year, 165 homes had been constructed, housing around 800 residents. The Turkish state provided land, seeds, machinery, and financial support for construction [3]. The settlers named the village Altay after the Altai Mountains, the region from which their migration had originated. Residents still continue to wear national dress, play the dombra, and observe traditional ceremonies and rituals [1]. The older generation speaks a rich Kazakh, while younger members understand the language and can express themselves in it, though Turkish has become dominant in daily life. All homes visited were decorated with Kazakh ornamental textiles, which residents described as an expression of longing for their ancestral land [3].

The Kazakhs of Altay village belong to the Kerey tribe, whose ancestors had settled in the Altai region of what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Their migration to Turkey was not a sudden displacement but the culmination of decades of persecution, resistance, and ultimately a collective decision to abandon their ancestral lands rather than submit to forced assimilation [2].

The immediate trigger for the exodus was the consolidation of Chinese Communist rule in Xinjiang in the early 1950s. According to the testimony of community elders, Chinese authorities began compelling Kazakh women to cut their hair in the Chinese manner, to abandon daily prayer, and to relinquish their customary way of life. When pressure intensified, the community’s elders convened and reached a unanimous resolution: they would seek a Muslim land that would receive them. In the words recorded from one elder, they declared that those who perished on the journey would die as martyrs, and those who survived would live as free people [2]. The journey that followed was one of extraordinary suffering. The group numbering approximately 5,000 at departure crossed into the Himalayas, where altitude, cold, and starvation claimed lives continuously. Those who fell ill or could no longer walk were left at the roadside, seated against rocks, covered with a chapan, with a vessel of water placed beside them. The dead could not always be buried properly; in the frozen mountain terrain, fires were lit for days to thaw the ground sufficiently to dig graves. Of the approximately 5,000 who set out, only around one third survived to reach Turkey [3]. The route took the survivors through Tibet, where they faced armed conflict with Tibetan herdsmen before being rescued by Pakistani soldiers, and then into Kashmir, where they spent approximately a year recovering. From Kashmir they travelled by train to the Iraqi port of Basra and from there by sea a month-long voyage to the Turkish port of Tuzla. They arrived in 1954. When American representatives offered to resettle them in the United States, the community’s leader Sultanşarip refused, stating that they would go only to a Muslim country, to Turkey, to their blood brothers [2]. This framing of migration as an act of faith rather than mere survival became the foundational narrative of the Altay community and remains central to how residents understand their own history today.

The violence and loss of the migration were not forgotten with settlement. Oral accounts preserved in the community describe scenes of extraordinary trauma: families watching their members die one by one from unknown diseases that caused severe swelling; people driven to madness by grief and subsequently confined in pits in Kashmir so they would not harm themselves or others; children asking their grandmothers when they would see their grandfather again, not understanding that he had been buried in the frozen mountains [3]. These memories, transmitted across generations, constitute what this article argues is one of the primary mechanisms of ethnic persistence in Altay a collective archive of suffering that binds the community to a shared past and a shared identity.

The establishment of Altay village in 1955 marked the end of a journey and the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Kazakh diaspora in Turkey. The Turkish state’s reception of the settlers was, by all accounts preserved in community memory, generous and practically oriented. Land, construction materials, seeds, agricultural machinery, and financial support were provided to enable the newcomers to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Within a single year, 165 homes had been built constructed by the settlers themselves with state funding and the village took its permanent shape. The naming of the settlement was itself an act of collective memory. Turkish authorities had initially designated the village “Ural,” but the community’s elders petitioned for a change, arguing that they had come not from the Urals but from the Altai. The petition was granted, and the village was renamed Altay a deliberate inscription of geographical origin into the landscape of the new homeland [3]. The name functioned from the outset as a statement of identity: we are people of the Altai, and we carry that with us.

At its demographic peak the village housed approximately 800 residents, and the surrounding land some 20,000 hectares in total was allocated to the community for farming, pasture, and orchards. Each resident received approximately 30 hectares; a family of five would thus have had access to 150 hectares of land. The economic foundation of the community rested on livestock herding, cereal cultivation, and leather craft occupations continuous with the pastoral and artisanal traditions the settlers had brought from Xinjiang. The production of leather goods, particularly sheepskin coats, became a significant source of income and would later follow community members to Istanbul and European cities as they emigrated [3]. Self-governance was built into the community’s structure from an early stage. Altay is described by its residents as the only village in Turkey whose entire administration is elected exclusively from among local Kazakhs [3].

Cultural life in the early decades was rich and deliberately maintained. Women continued to produce traditional felt textiles with Kazakh ornamental patterns, which they exchanged for livestock or sold for cash [2]. National dress was worn as a matter of course. The dombra was played and songs were composed including, notably, a song written by a later village elder about the journey his ancestors had made from the Altai, performed on an instrument he described as sacred. Weddings and traditional ceremonies were conducted according to Kazakh custom. The mosque served not only as a place of worship but as a social centre, and the observance of daily prayer the very practice the community had fled China to preserve became a marker of collective identity as much as individual faith [3].

What Altay demonstrates, ultimately, is that the survival of a diaspora community is not simply a function of numbers. It is a function of the depth of the mechanisms memorial, religious, material, social through which identity is reproduced. The community that arrived in Turkey in 1954 with nothing but its language, its faith, and its memory of the mountains it had crossed built a village, named it after its homeland, and transmitted its identity across four generations against considerable odds. That achievement, whatever the future holds, is itself a significant chapter in the history of the Kazakh diaspora. It is a story of persistence of a small community that has maintained a recognisably distinct identity across four generations, in a remote valley in central Anatolia, far from any institutional support from its nominal homeland.

References:

1. Iskakova D. Photoreport from the Turkish village of Altay, where only Kazakhs live // Kazinform. — 2024. — URL: https://www.inform.kz/ru/fotoreportazh-iz-turetskogo-sela-altay-gde-prozhivayut-tolko-kazahi-5e756f (accessed: 10.06.2026).
2. Rakhim R. Kazakhs in Turkey: we survived under fire and found a second homeland // Islam.kz. — URL: https://islam.kz/ru/articles/istoriya-i-biografiya/kazahi-v-turtsii-my-vyjili-pod-vystrelami-i-obreli-vtoruyu-rodinu-1339/ (accessed: 10.06.2026).
3. Rakhim R. Kazakhs in Turkey: the pain of memories, the triumph of life // 365info.kz. — 2017. — URL: https://365info.kz/2017/03/kazahi-v-turtsii-bol-vospominanij-triumf-zhizni (accessed: 10.06.2026).