THREAD: Afro-Abkhazians

Afro-Abkhazians or Abkhazians of African descent were a small group of people in #Abkhazia. The ethnic origin of the AfroAbkhazian descent and how Africans arrived in Abkhazia is still a matter of dispute among experts.

📷The Baltimore Sun. Feb. 10, 1935 According to Sergey Arutyunov, in the late 18th-early 19th century an Ottoman ship travelling wrecked near the Abkhazian coast with slaves -probably from Sudan or Somalia- who were brought up for sale.

#Circassians who saved Jewish children | 1942

In August 1942, a group of trucks appeared near the #Besleney aul [village] [Khabez region, Karachay-Cherkessia], and the residents assumed that it was a retreating Red Army unit. But they quickly discovered that the trucks contained not soldiers but more than 100 orphans who had succeeded in escaping the Leningrad blockade but were now at the edge of death.

The children, who had been in trains and trucks for many months were starving and ill.