Let Our Fame Be Great

by Oliver Bullough

  On their return to Urusbiye, they were heroes. Much of Freshfield’s book Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan is a complex account of precise routes he took and gripes against the inaccuracy of the Russian map, but occasionally he allows himself to talk about the people he met. This was one of those times.

  ‘Several minutes passed before the story was fully understood: our burnt faces, and the partially-blinded eyes of the two men who had accompanied us, were visible signs that we had in truth spent many hours on the snowfields, and the circumstantial account and description of the summit given by the porters seemed to create a general belief in the reality of the ascent,’ he wrote with pride.

  ‘The scene was most entertaining. The whole male population of the place crowded round us to shake hands, each of our companions found himself a centre of attraction, and the air rang with “Allah”seasoned phrases of exclamation and astonishment, mingled, as each newcomer entered, and required to hear the tale afresh, with constant reiterations of “Minghi-Tau!” – a familiar name, which sounds far more grateful to the ear than the heavy-syllabled Elbruz.’

  The villagers, he assured his readers, said no one had ever scaled Elbrus before so British people everywhere could take pride that here was yet another natural obstacle ground under an English-made hobnail boot. It was a triumph for the empire that was delving into the unknown hearts of all the continents on earth.

  The only trouble with his glorious achievement is that it was not true. He was not the first man to stand on that peak and exult over the view. A local man had beaten him to it almost four decades earlier as part of a Russian expedition to the lands of the Turkic herders in 1829.

  The mission was led by the Russian General Georgy Emanuel, commander of the Caucasus Line, who was desperately trying to prevent an uprising by the tribesmen of the central part of the mountain range. Russia was locked in the war with Turkey that would eventually win it the Black Sea fortress of Anapa, but at the time the result was not certain.

  Emanuel feared that if the Turkic mountaineers in the central Caucasus rose up, they would connect the warring Circassians to the warring Chechens and threaten Russian control over the whole of its southern frontier.

  Short of troops, but determined to prevent such a disaster for the tsar’s army, the general had a great idea. He would take a scientific expedition to Elbrus – collect animals, gather a few rocks, measure some heights and distances, march about – and thereby show the local tribesmen the Russian flag.

  He set off, according to a contemporary biographer, from Pyatigorsk in late June. Arriving at a bridge over the river Malka, which is about halfway to the mountain, his small force of soldiers and scientists was met by a deputation of tribesmen. Ostensibly here to show respect, the elders – the biographer said – were in reality concerned that the Russians would destroy their homes in retaliation for destruction caused in the war against Turkey.

  The tribesmen had fortified their villages, and retreated into the heights with their weapons, while the delegates worriedly sought to find out the general’s intentions. The general was apparently quite a politician and assured them they had nothing to worry about.

  ‘Since they had already sworn allegiance to Russia, then he counted them Russian subjects, and he would have to answer before the Emperor if he even thought of doing them any harm; on the contrary, they, with their kind bearing and humility for all this time, had earned the right of friendship and protection from the Russians; his arrival with a few scientists only showed a desire to know their country, collect plants, stones, animals, and that he, taking advantage of the kind disposition of the Karachais, wanted only to come to Elbrus, which no one had yet reached, and would not even step into their houses,’ Emanuel’s biographer wrote.

  A few presents cemented the good impression, and instead of being greeted with war, the Russian expedition gained many new members who decided to come and have a look at the mountain as well. A week of bad weather delayed their plans, but eventually, on 9 July, the expedition was encamped at the very foot of Elbrus and the assembled Cossacks and ‘Circassians’ (this word is likely to have meant ‘highlanders’, rather than people who were necessarily ethnic Circassians) were told that he who arrived on the summit first would receive the princely reward of 400 roubles.

  The group of academicians and their guides reached the edges of the snows in the afternoon of that day and settled down to sleep on the mountainside. They started out the next day at three in the morning, and toiled further upwards. But they started to suffer great discomfort, as is hardly surprising since they can hardly have been in condition for scaling a 5,642-metre mountain and lacked climbing equipment of any kind.

  ‘The thawing snow, the stones and cliffs which were impossible to avoid, and the sun rays reflected off the snow, made continuation for the academicians difficult at a height of 14,000 feet and even impossible; they had, they thought, still 1400 feet till the very top,’ the biographer’s account relates. They were very much mistaken. 14,000 feet is equivalent to almost 4,300 metres. If their height measurement was correct, they were still more than a kilometre below the summit, rather than the 400-odd metres they calculated.

  One academician called Lents, together with two ‘Circassians’ and a Cossack resolved to go still higher, but they too halted before the summit, resolving to turn back. This left one man, identified as just Killar, to push on alone.

  It is he, and not Freshfield, who can claim to have first set foot on the mountain’s summit.

  ‘At 11 a.m. he found himself on the very peak of Elbrus. General Emanuel, watching from the camp with his telescope, first saw Killar, standing on the summit of Elbrus, and all those around confirmed it with their own eyes. Cannon fire alerted the whole camp. While Mr Lents, who did not have the strength to go further, collapsed from tiredness, Killar managed to return from the summit, and arrived in the camp a whole hour before the academicians,’ the book claims.

  Brave Killar received his 400 roubles from the general, plus some fine cloth for a new tunic and the honour of the first champagne toast at luncheon. The mountain was, it would seem, already conquered before Freshfield came near.

  Killar’s claim of glory has been much mocked, mainly by British writers, but it is essentially believable. The length of time it took Killar to climb from the night’s rest spot to the summit – eight hours – is similar to the time taken by Freshfield, although whether the conditions were really sufficiently clear to allow Emanuel to see a lone man on the summit is a different matter.

  But the controversy does not stop there. Emanuel’s biographer, Prince Golitsyn, identifies Killar specifically as a Circassian from the region of Kabarda, but this has not stopped Turkic tribesmen claiming him as ethnically one of their own. He is variously identified as Chilar Khashirov (if he was a Circassian) or Khilar Khachirov (if he was a Turkic tribesman), or even Kilar Heshire (by Circassian historians in exile who dislike the Russified surnames used in the Caucasus today).

  It is hard to blame Freshfield for overlooking his claim. The account quoted above is from an obscure volume called Life-Sketches of Cavalry General Emanuel and was published in Russian seventeen years before the Englishman visited the Caucasus. Besides, the event does not appear to have remained in local memories, since he does not report anyone mentioning it.

  However, there is a twist in both Killar’s and Freshfield’s achievements, which is that Elbrus has two summits. Freshfield, we know, ascended the eastern peak, which is lower than its western brother by just twenty-one metres.

  The account of Killar’s ascent does not specify which peak he climbed but later in the book it records that one of the expedition’s achievements was fixing the height of Elbrus’s eastern peak at 15,420 feet. Had the western peak been visible, they would have measured its height as well. And if the western peak was not visible, the general could not have seen Killar ascend it. It would seem, therefore, that Killar also only managed to scale the slightly smaller eastern
summit of the two-headed mountain.

  Incidentally, the height the book gives for the eastern peak is too low, but does chime with the climbers’ estimate that their altitude when they stopped was 14,000 feet, and that the amount they had left to climb was 1,400 feet. They may have been using faulty equipment which miscalculated their height by 900 metres, and, if so, Academician Lents reached a heartbreaking 5,200 metres before turning back.

  Anyway, be that as it may, both conquerors of Elbrus climbed the smaller summit, so the mountain was still, even after the Freshfield expedition, technically undefeated. And it would remain so for another six years. Fortunately, therefore, for Freshfield, he did not allow himself to relax but continued exploring the region and taking notes. He blazed the trail for the eventual conquest of Elbrus, and was the first Westerner to visit the valleys to the east of Elbrus, home of the Turkic nation later to be dubbed the Balkars.

  ‘[T]he natives of this and the upper valleys next to the east consider themselves a distinct race from the Tcherkesses [Circassians], who dwell on the verge of the steppes, and in the mountains to the westward. The people here claim to be the old inhabitants, and to have been dispossessed of their ancient supremacy when the hordes of Tcherkesses from the Crimea inundated the country. Their language is Tartar [Turkic], and their religion, as far they have any, is Mahommedan; the princes seemed, however, to be very broad and tolerant in their views,’ wrote Freshfield in Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan, now a mountaineering classic.

  He had certainly found a more challenging venue than Switzerland. Where Switzerland was close to the rich cities of western Europe, and thronged by visitors in summer, these high valleys and mighty peaks were completely unknown. And the peaks were truly enormous. Elbrus is 800 metres taller than Mont Blanc, the highest point in the Alps. It stands north of the main chain of the Caucasus and dominates the whole northern side. To the south, the peaks are scarcely less staggering and technically far harder to climb. They include Dykhtau, of 5,204 metres, and, further east, Kazbek of 5,033 metres.

  The valleys that burrow into this vast massif of rock are narrow and inaccessible, meaning their inhabitants were scarcely bothered by the outside world, despite having technically submitted to Russia in the year of Killar’s ascent of Elbrus thirty-nine years previously.

  ‘The imperial sway of Russia does not press hardly on these mountaineers, ’ wrote Freshfield, ‘who pay only a light house-tax, are exempt from conscription, and are too remote to be exposed to those petty restraints which a once-free people often find the hardest to bear.’

  Power was still in the hands of the traditional chiefs, and the communities seem to have shared the easy democracy of the mountain Circassians, rather than the more structured government of their neighbours on the plains.

  ‘Their local government has been generally described as feudal; it seemed to us that patriarchal would be the more fitting word. The princes are the recognised heads of the community; they live in a house four times the size of any other in the village, they are richest in flocks and herds, and on them falls the duty of entertaining strangers; but their word is not law, and they can only persuade, not compel, their poorer neighbours to carry out their wishes,’ said Freshfield, who had ample opportunity to see how these ‘princes’ – in reality, just headmen – behaved, since they welcomed him and his companions to their villages and gave them beds for the night.

  It is something of a mystery where these Turkic highlanders come from. As seen above, they themselves claim to be the original inhabitants of the country, and that the Circassians and others came from elsewhere and stole their best land.

  One old Balkar man I talked to on a visit of my own to the high Caucasus told me his people were the ancient Etruscans, who had spread from here to pre-Roman Italy without, mysteriously, leaving any traces in between of their passing. Another Balkar told me in all seriousness that Shangri-La or Shambala, the pure land of the Tibetan Buddhists, was at the foot of Elbrus and that the traditional Turkic religion had given rise to several of the faiths of Asia.

  The Karachai-Balkars are now Muslim, and proudly so, although Freshfield reported that substantial elements of folk beliefs clung on in their villages. He and his companions had to tell their welcoming committee, when they descended the mountain, that there was not, in fact, a ‘gigantic cock’ on top of Elbrus who welcomed the sunrise every day by crowing and flapping his wings, while guarding a treasure against all intruders. ‘We could not even pretend to have had an interview with the giants and genii believed to dwell in the clefts and caverns,’ he added.

  Turkic peoples are scattered all across the former Soviet Union, from the Tuvans of Siberia via the Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbeks and Turkmen of Central Asia, the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga, the Kumyks and Nogais of the plains north of the Caucasus, the Tatars of Crimea, and the Azeris and Meskhetians of the south Caucasus. Most of them, with the stark exception of the mountain-dwelling Kyrgyz horse-herders of Central Asia, lived traditionally on the plains and it is odd that Turkic tribesmen should have ended up as the owners of the highest portion of the Caucasus.

  It seems most likely that they were pushed into hills by war, or else followed their herds to the lush mountain meadows where there is plentiful grazing for cattle, sheep and horses in summer.

  John F. Baddeley, a British traveller, journalist and entrepreneur whose knowledge of the Caucasus was unrivalled by any foreigner at the turn of the century, recorded a number of legends that give a possible explanation as to how the Turkic peoples came to be here. The prominent Aideboloff and Abayeff families were, he said, founded by two brothers who came from the east with the armies of Genghis Khan, but killed a prominent man and had to flee to the mountains. Misaka, the founder of the Misakoff family, meanwhile, had quarrelled with the Kumyk people of the plains of northern Dagestan and also fled.

  A more romantic story clung to the origins of the Balkarokoff family, which, we hear, was founded by a Circassian called Anfakho who settled in the Upper Baksan valley. His family lived there quietly until one descendant, called Akhtougan, got ideas above his station. He rode to the Dagestani town of Tarku, where a ruler called the Shamkhal enjoyed supreme power, and waited for a celebratory dance, from which he stole the Shamkhal’s daughter. Fleeing into the Baksan, he was unnoticed for two years. Eventually, however, the fruits of his victory began to pall and he wanted recognition of his royal connections.

  He returned to Tarku and, with commendable cockiness, sought reconciliation with his unwilling father-in-law. The Shamkhal was outraged, and ordered him seized. Akhtougan slew the guards sent to trap him and fled back into the Baksan, but he knew pursuit was close behind and that his hideaway must have been discovered. He called for Svan masons to come over the mountains and build him one of their traditional defensive towers. This they built in record time, by employing unusually agile oxen to carry stones on their horns along planks laid between the cliffs and the upper storeys.

  When the Shamkhal’s army arrived, Akhtougan was safe in his new tower and had his marksmen shoot all the invaders’ horses but leave the soldiers unharmed. This display of aggressive leniency rendered the Shamkhal helpless. He was forced to agree to a treaty and the marriage of his daughter to the arrogant thief.

  It is a nice story, and paints a picture of the Turkic valleys being a refuge from the rulers of the plains. Place names suggest the valleys were once more ethnically mixed, but they had certainly become entirely Turkic-speaking by the time of Freshfield’s visit.

  The climber, on conquering Elbrus, led his party to the fashionable spa resort of Pyatigorsk, where Lermontov was killed. He was not impressed by the luxury and dissipation of the holidaymakers, and his group rapidly left, passing south through the garrison town of Nalchik and up the gorge of the Cherek into the high valleys once again.

  Freshfield claims the honour of having been the first western European to visit the Cherek valley, and he probably was. It is an extraordinary gorge, guard
ed by cliffs a thousand metres or more high, and threaded by a stream that slams into the rocks with uncontrolled rage. When Freshfield entered it, the only passage was via a narrow path which rose and fell as it sought to find a way through the narrows. The gorge opened out eventually, extending its flanks into gentle slopes of grass and crops. Along the streams were villages, which this story will visit again. He called the main village Muchol, a name that had become Mukhol eighty years later, when the Soviet troops deported the highlanders from their valleys for their imagined treason, but otherwise was little changed.

  The houses were made of heavy stones, and may better be described as manmade caves. The back wall and floor were dug out of the hillside, while the front wall was made of heavy stones laid without mortar. Massive logs supported a roof of packed earth fully two feet thick, with grass growing on it lushly. From above, the houses looked like peculiar terraces, with wicker-work chimneys sticking out of them. From below, they looked above all like burrows. The people exploded out of their houses in wonder, however, when the party of mountaineers appeared. ‘The male population surrounded us in the street; the womankind, being the property of Moslem lords, were obliged to content themselves with what they could see from the house-roofs. Their dress consists of a loose crimson robe, with a cap, from which a row of coins hangs down over the forehead. There was certainly one pretty face amongst them, and there may have been more, but no second opportunity of seeing any of the beauties occurred during our stay,’ he wrote.

  Among the locals was a religious scholar who had been on the pilgrimage to Mecca and who affected Turkish dress. The villagers brought ample supplies of food and cake to the visitors, who had a room to themselves fitted out with the ‘brightly-painted trays in which Easterners delight, and pegs, on which hung sheepskins, swords and guns, with the other necessary equipments of a Caucasian when away from home’.