Abazin

The Abazins, or Abaza, are a Northwest Caucasian people whose language is closest to Abkhaz. Their earliest home lay in Abkhazia and along the coast around modern Sochi, where their ancestors made up the Abazg principality and the Abkhazian kingdom of the eighth century.

From the seventh and eighth centuries small groups crossed the Caucasian range, and a large migration in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries carried them onto the northern slopes into the Kuban valleys. They split into two divisions, the Tapanta of the upper Kuban and the Ashkharua of the high mountains.

Through contact with Nogais and Muslim merchants from the sixteenth century they gradually adopted Sunni Islam. As the Russian Empire pushed beyond the Kuban in the early nineteenth century, the Abazins joined the Circassian and Abkhaz resistance in the Caucasian War; an Abazin-Circassian assault on Stavropol was reported in 1835.