Karachay

The Karachays are a Turkic-speaking mountain people of the central Caucasus, grazing herds beneath Mount Elbrus. They share a language and origin with the Balkars: local people of the ancient Koban culture, with an admixture of Alans and of Kipchak soldiers who fled into the mountains after Timur's campaigns around 1395 destroyed the Alanian kingdom of Maghas.

Their society is built on some thirty clans, the tukums, and they call themselves mountaineers. They kept their Kipchak tongue and adopted Islam only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the Qadiri Sufi order taking root among them.

At the Battle of Khasauka on 20 October 1828 General Georgy Emanuel's troops broke their resistance, and the elders of Kart-Dzhurt accepted the tsar's rule, keeping their own officials, courts and Sharia law. From 1831, however, Karachay fighters joined the wider mountain war against Russian garrisons.