Two hours southwest of Tbilisi, a journey into the highlands of the Lesser Caucasus takes you to a high plateau where the trees thin out and the wind never stops. On this windswept plateau stands a small district called Tsalka. In some of the villages here, the language spoken in the church courtyard is neither Georgian nor Russian. The elderly address each other in Turkish; yet their prayers follow the Orthodox ritual. This community is called the Urum.
What does "Urum" mean?
The word comes from the Arabic term rûm. Rûm was first used to mean Roman, then Byzantine, and finally Orthodox Christian. In Turkic languages, the word took the form Urum with the addition of a "u" sound at the beginning. So the name literally means "Rum." Indeed, the Urums consider themselves of Rum origin; in Greek, this community is called Tsalkalidhes, or "people of Tsalka."
Here begins a contradiction that puzzles many readers: why does a community of Rum origin and Orthodox Christian faith speak Turkish instead of Greek in their daily lives?
A migration from Anatolia to the Caucasus
The answer lies in the battle maps of the 19th century. During the 1828-1829 Ottoman-Russian War, the Russian army entered a region of eastern Anatolia. When the war ended, the armies withdrew; however, Christian families who had made contact with the Russian side feared reprisals if they remained. The Russian administration gave these families permission to settle on their territory.
Thus, hundreds of Orthodox families from the areas around Erzurum, Gümüşhane, Artvin, Kars, and Ardahan set out northward. Some settled in Crimea, while others established themselves on the Tsalka Plateau in what is now southern Georgia. The migration intensified in 1829-1830 and continued in waves throughout the century.
These families brought not only their faith from Anatolia but also the language they spoke. After centuries of living in Ottoman lands, these Orthodox communities had long since switched to Turkish as their everyday language. Although Greek or Karamanlian texts were read in the church, the language at home, in the fields, and in the marketplace was Turkish. When they migrated, they carried this language on their backs.
What kind of Turkish do they speak?
The dialect spoken by the Tsalka Urums is distinctive enough to warrant separate treatment by linguists. It closely resembles the dialects of eastern Anatolia — particularly the speech of the Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin regions. The similarity between this dialect and that of the Ahiska Turks from the same region is striking. The language of the Urums in Crimea, by contrast, is closer to Crimean Tatar; for they lived in a different cultural environment for centuries.
So "Urum Turkish" is not a single language but two separate dialects spoken by two separate communities bearing the same name. This distinction is one of the most frequently overlooked points when studying this topic.
Another feature of the language is that it remained unwritten for a long time. The Urum dialect is primarily a spoken language; church and official affairs were conducted in other languages. This has made it a treasure trove of archaic forms, relatively protected from outside influences.
More than twenty villages in the Soviet period
During the Soviet Union years, Urums were scattered across more than twenty villages in the Tsalka, Dmanisi, Tetritskaro, Marneuli, and Ahiska (Akhaltsikhe) regions of Georgia. Tsalka was the center of this settlement and its population was largely composed of Urums.
Throughout their history, they remained an isolated cultural group. They did not settle much in towns inhabited by Greek-speaking Rum communities (Romeians); despite sharing a common Greek heritage, the two communities maintained their everyday distance. The language difference functioned like an invisible border separating two groups that shared the same faith.
What remains today?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tsalka's population rapidly declined. Economic collapse and uncertainty drove a large portion of the Urums to migrate to Greece and Russia. Those who went to Greece encountered an irony: they were accepted as being of Rum origin, but were called "Turks" because they did not speak Greek. This is a textbook example of how identity can be determined more by others' perceptions of you than by who you actually are.
Today, the Urum population remaining in Tsalka is far below its peak. Other communities have settled in the abandoned villages. Abandoned stone houses, cemeteries overgrown with grass, and churches with locked doors are among the most striking images of the plateau.
Yet the language has not completely died out. The older generation still speaks Turkish at home; in some villages, wedding songs, lullabies, and idioms continue to be passed down from generation to generation. For linguists, the Tsalka dialect is an area of urgent field research.
The Crimean Urums: same name, different story
The second community bearing the name Urum lived in Crimea. They too were Orthodox Christians and spoke Turkish; but their language was close to Crimean Tatar and their history took a completely different course.
In 1778, the Russian administration relocated the Christian population of Crimea to the shores of the Sea of Azov. With this migration, the Urums settled near Mariupol in present-day Ukraine and established dozens of villages there. They lived side by side with Greek-speaking Rums; the two communities attended the same church but spoke in different languages.
This is why it is necessary to specify which community one is referring to when mentioning the Urums. The Tsalka Urums speak with the dialect of eastern Anatolia, while the Mariupol Urums speak a dialect close to Crimean Tatar. What they share is a name, a faith, and the dual identity of being Turkish-speaking Christians.
A race to record
In recent years, dialect studies have been conducted on both the Urum dialects of Georgia and those of Ukraine. Oral histories, songs, and everyday speech samples have been archived. The urgency of these efforts is clear: the generation that speaks the language as their mother tongue is aging, while the younger generation has shifted to the language of the country they live in.
The war in Ukraine directly impacted the Urum villages around Mariupol. This has made uncertain both the future of the community and the future of the documentation efforts.
Why is this an important "trace"?
The Urums show that Turkish traces in the world were not always left through conquest, architecture, or the state. Sometimes a trace is a language carried on a community's tongue. Not a fortress or a mosque; just Turkish spoken in a plateau, in a church courtyard.
This trace has another value: it undermines simplistic equations about identity. The Urums are Christian but speak Turkish. They are of Rum origin but do not speak Greek. They are Georgian citizens but speak with an Anatolian dialect. It reminds us that the triplet of religion, language, and origin does not always point in the same direction.
If your path takes you to Tsalka, there is something worth listening to beyond the mountain views: in the wind, in a place you would least expect it, you will hear a familiar Turkish.
