Tatar saber for discussion

[ariel]

For personal reasons I went to this topic and just have to add something.
The Crimean Tatar swords are rare because all weapons in Crimea were confiscated and armorer workshops closed when the Russians annexed Crimea in 1783. That was one of the earliest actions of Prince Grigoryj Potemkin, who reigned over the newly acquired territory.
Polish-Lithuanian Tatars constituted just a minority of the Crimean population that moved up north and settled within the borders of the Great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Over there they gradually were exposed to the European weapons and their old ones largely were lost to posterity.
I managed to get an old (1925) article about Crimean Tamgas by a great Crimean Tatar writer, translator, polyglot, calligrapher, historian and ethnographer Osman Akchokrakly. He managed to collect ~400 tamgas and freely admitted that at least 400 more must have existed. When a son got married, he left his father’s home and established his own , he then usually took his father’s tamga and modified it a bit, and so on. Thus, there are clan tamgas and many sub-clan tamgas.
Akchokrakly was fired from the university where he taught languages and history in 1934, went into hiding with his sister in Baku, but the NKVD ( earlier name for KGB) found him there, accused him of being a spy and executed him. He was only 47.
Crimean Tatars were rounded up in 1944 and their entire population was exiled by Stalin to Central Asia. Only few managed to survive and go back to Crimea in 1967. In the 1990s about 260,000 came back. But they neither got their lands/homes back, nor compensated for the losses. Another tragic page of Soviet history. Now there are only few Russian historians trying to research Crimean history. God bless them!