Our Notes & References

Impressive and important album of the first Circassian charity event, organised by the local Circassian nobility and intelligentsia. Most likely created individually for a select few members of the Circassian Charity Society and the event’s organisers and sponsors.

Very rare: we couldn’t trace any other example outside Russia. In Russia, we could confirm three holdings in museums: the National Museum of the Republic of Adygea, the Museum of the History of Sochi, and the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera, which belongs to the Russian Academy of Science’s Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and whose digital catalogue contains only a handful of photographs. According to Zukhra Kub, there is one more copy at the Krasnodar Felitsyn Historical and Archaeological Museum.

The charity evening for the Circassian people was held on January 18, 1908, in Ekaterinodar (modern-day Krasnodar) following a flood of the Kuban River on December 29–30, 1907, which affected several Circassian settlements. In response, the local Circassian intelligentsia established a special “Committee for Collecting Donations in Favour of the Flood Victims,” led by Sultan Dovlet-Girei, Kaspolet Ulagai, and Gamid Trakhov. Among the organisers were Batyrbek Shardanov, who later became the first chairman of the Circassian Charity Society, and the prominent Ekaterinodar philanthropist Liu Trakhov. Local newspapers reported the event as a success, raising a notable sum of 2,000 rubles (Bitokova, our translation here and elsewhere).

The local photographer Semen Shavlovskii documented the event, creating this album in commemoration of the occasion. “In these photographs, we see the faces of people who made a significant contribution to the history of the Adyghe people and were forgotten for many years” (Shovgenova, quoted by Orlov). The cultural programme, shown in our album’s first photograph, featured a series of ethnographic “Living Pictures” performed by a group of Circassian nobles, including Sultan Davlet-Girei himself.

Other participants and contributors to the event included Prince Atazhukin, Sultan Magomet-Girei, Murat Du, Kaloubat Shootykov, Iliias Khantsokov, and Nanu Kimcheriokov. Among the women involved were Princesses Karamurzina, Gusarova, and Atazhukina, as well as young Princess Gusarova and Mademoiselles Sheretlukova, Brzegakova, Shagaeva, and Khantzova.

The “Living Pictures” illustrated key themes from Circassian history and culture, including “Seeing Off to War – A toast and farewell from the girls to the soldiers”; “A Mother’s Farewell – A mother mourns her son who has fallen in battle, saying, ‘If to have sons, only such heroes'”, and other such scenes, not all documented in the album (as noted by Karpov). Beyond these staged scenes, the album also contains individual portraits of young women, warriors with their weaponry, and two group portraits of all the actors alongside the event’s principal sponsors.

The scarcity of the album and the lack of information or detailed collation makes it difficult to understand fully, while we noted differences between the extant copies. Two of the few other examples we could find have very similar bindings, but each one differs in the typeface used for the titles and shows a different layout. We could find only one fully scanned example, possibly from Krasnodar: it contains only 19 photographs instead of 20 here — lacking one group portrait with sponsors. Additionally, one of its standing portraits features a Circassian warrior in a slightly different pose compared to the corresponding image in our album. The Kunstkamera album also includes a more casual photograph from the same session that does not appear in ours, seemingly without having more pictures overall.

These variations suggest that each album may have been customised at their owners’ request in Shavlovskii’s shop, and might therefore be unique.

Bringing together leading Circassian activists and philanthropists, the 1908 charity event encouraged the eventual formation of the Circassian Charity Society in Ekaterinodar, officially established in 1912. Its mission was “to combine the efforts and financial resources of the national intelligentsia […] to work together for the benefit and in the interests of their people” (Bitokova). The Society went on to organise a second charity event on January 2, 1914, with funds directed toward the development of school education and culture in Ekaterinodar. The National Museum of Adygea received in 1926 both the 1908 and 1914 albums “from one of the last chairmen of the Circassian Charity Society, A. Bzhasso” (Orlov). Decades later, in 2016, the Madina Saralp Art Centre in Nalchik (Kabardino-Balkaria) held an exhibition of photographs from both albums, courtesy of the Adygea Museum. In 2019, the Sochi Museum also exhibited photographs from its copies of the 1908 and 1914 albums.

Bibliography

Karpov Iu. “Obraz voina v kulturno-istoricheskom nasledii gortsev Kavkaza” // Narody Kavkaza: muzeinye kollektsii, issledovaniia obektov i iavlenii traditsionnoi i sovremennoi kultury / Otv. red. Iu. Karpov; RAN. MAE im. Petra Velikogo (Kunstkamera), 2015, pp. 168–226; Bitokova, Marina. “V den pamiati Adygov. Ozhivshii albom” // Madina Saralp, 22 May 2016; Orlov, Boris. “Foto blagotvoritelnykh vecherov nachala XX veka «ozhili» na vystavke v Nalchike” // Iuzhnaia sluzhba novostei, 15 January 2023; Kub, Zukhra. “Kak sotniu let nazad na Kubani blagotvoritelnost pomogala reshat vazhnye sotsialnye zadachi” // Iug Times, 17 May 2024.