Crimean Tatars: Autochtonity of the Indigenous People of Ukraine. Historical Origins

Abstract

The study is devoted to substantiating the status of the Crimean Tatars as an indigenous people of Ukraine. The purpose of the article is to identify the phenomenon of historical continuity of the Crimean Tatars ethnogenesis on the territory of the Crimean Peninsula. The anthropological, population and genetic continuity of the autochthonous population existence on the territory of Crimea is argued. The direct genetic and cultural kinship of a series of basic ethnic groups of the peninsula (Tavrs, Scythians, Roksolans, Polovtsians, Crimean Tatars) is substantiated. The ability of the Crimean Tatar ethnic group to a high level of self-organization, including the formation of an independent state, has been proven. During the 13th-15th centuries, the process of political formation and self-determination of the Crimean Tatars took place. The landscape and climatic features of certain regions of the Crimean Peninsula contributed to the formation of several regional centers of ethnogenesis. It is with the flat part of its territory that the actual process of birth and formation of the Crimean Tatars as an ethnic group is connected. The southern coast and the mountainous part of Crimea, in the conditions of a peculiar natural isolation, and as a result, attractiveness for colonization expansions, had a peculiar trajectory of ethnic changes and transformations. And only with the emergence of the Crimean Khanate as an independent state, local ethnic groups and national groups were involved, through assimilation, in the further development of the Crimean Tatar people. The same applies to the population from the neighboring countries forcibly brought into the Crimean society, which became a kind of source of diversification of the gene pool and cultural borrowings for the Crimean Tatar ethnic group. The influence of Lithuanian Rus on the ethno-political formation of the Crimean Khanate is traced.