Bashkirs

The Bashkirs, who call themselves Bashkort, are a Turkic people whose homeland straddles the southern Ural Mountains, where Europe meets Asia. Most live in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, with communities in neighbouring regions and in Kazakhstan. Once semi-nomadic herders known for their independence, they came under Russian rule from the sixteenth century, rose against it several times, and today number about 1.6 million in Russia.

Historians trace the Bashkirs to Turkic tribes from southern Siberia and Central Asia who spent a long period in the steppes around the Aral Sea and the Syr Darya, mixing with Pecheneg, Oghuz and Kipchak groups, before moving into the southern Urals between the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The name Bashqurt is recorded from the tenth century. The most popular explanation reads it as "head wolf", tied to a legend in which a wolf led the first seven Bashkir tribes to a fertile land guarded by the Urals; scholars have proposed many other derivations, none settled.

Arabic and Persian writers give the earliest firm accounts. Sallam the Interpreter is said to have visited Bashkir lands around 850. In 922 Ahmad ibn Fadlan, travelling as an envoy of the caliph al-Muqtadir in Baghdad to Volga Bulgaria, described the Bashkirs as warlike cattle-breeders who honoured a number of gods, the sky god above all, and noted that at least one Bashkir in his party was already Muslim. Ibn Rustah placed them on both sides of the Urals between the Volga, Kama and Tobol rivers.

By 1226 the Bashkir lands had been brought into the empire of Genghis Khan, and through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they formed part of the Golden Horde, during which Islam became firmly established. When Mongol power broke up, the Bashkirs were divided between the Nogai Horde, the Khanate of Kazan and the Khanate of Sibir. From the mid-sixteenth century the Tsardom of Russia gradually absorbed them. Russian and Tatar settlers followed, and taxes and military service pushed many Bashkirs towards settled farming.

Bashkirs rose in a series of uprisings, including those of 1662–64, 1681–84 and 1704–11. The building of Orenburg and a line of forts across their southern lands from 1735 set off a rebellion that lasted six years. In 1774 Bashkirs under Salavat Yulayev joined Pugachev's Rebellion. Later in the eighteenth century the Bashkirs won freedom from taxes in exchange for military service, and Bashkir cavalry fought against Napoleon, fighting at Paris and serving in the occupation of France that followed.

After the Russian Revolution, a Bashkir regional council proclaimed a Bashkir republic on 15 November 1917, and a Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic followed in March 1919. In 1990 the republic's Supreme Council declared state sovereignty, and in 1992 Bashkortostan signed a treaty with Moscow setting out its powers within the Russian Federation.

Bashkir is a Kipchak Turkic language, close to Tatar, Kazakh and Nogai, with three main dialects. In the 2010 census about 72 per cent of Bashkirs gave it as their mother tongue, and most also speak Russian. Bashkirs are mostly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, though older beliefs drawing on Tengrism survive in folklore. Their best-known epic, Ural-Batyr, tells of a hero whose body became the Ural Mountains. Traditional livelihoods included herding, farming and wild-hive beekeeping, still practised in the Burzyansky district. The kurai, an end-blown flute, is the national instrument. The 2021 census counted 1,571,879 Bashkirs in Russia, about 1.27 million of them in Bashkortostan, where they make up some 31.5 per cent of the population.

Our 800 map draws the Bashkirs on both sides of the southern Urals, beside the Volga Bulgars to the west and the Permians (Komi) to the north. The outline is approximate, and by most accounts the Bashkirs settled in the Urals around a century later.