The honour of another people: remembering Zaur Naloev

Fourteen years after his death on 5 July, we remember the folklorist, poet and man of conscience who founded the modern study of Circassian oral tradition, stood with Abkhazia in its hardest years, and wore the Order of Leon.

Zaur Naloev died in Nalchik on 5 July 2012 and was buried in the city where he had done his life's work. He was eighty-three. Fourteen years on, the tributes in Kabardino-Balkaria remember a folklorist, a poet, a scholar who all but rebuilt the study of Circassian oral tradition. The tributes in Abkhazia remember something more particular. They remember a brother.

Fourteen years before his death, in Sukhum, Abkhazia gave Naloev its highest state honour. He received the Order of Leon on 14 December 1998. A photograph from that year shows him beside President Vladislav Ardzinba, the two men standing together in the recovering capital of a republic that had come through its war five years earlier. Abkhazia does not give the Order of Leon lightly. It gave it to a Kabardian.

He came to that honour from a life that began far from any capital. Naloev was born on 15 July 1928 in the village of Stary Urukh, known in Kabardian as Khatuey, in the Urvan district. He started work at fourteen, a blacksmith in the Sheker collective farm, and in 1945 he was decorated for his labour through the war years. He graduated from the Kabardian Pedagogical Institute in 1952, joined the research institute in Nalchik in 1954, and earned his doctorate in philology from Tbilisi State University in 1971. The philologist Zera Bakova notes that the Naloev line was of Digor origin, having crossed from Digoria into Kabarda in the mid-nineteenth century. Kabarda claimed him all the same, and he claimed Kabarda. Kabardian was his mother tongue and his life's material.

What he did with that material changed a field. The bibliography compiled by his colleagues at the Institute for Humanities Research in Nalchik lists more than two hundred works and some fifteen monographs and essay collections, though Bakova's tribute counts seven. The number matters less than what sat inside it. Naloev recovered the dzheguako, the professional bards of old Circassia, and set them where they belonged. He read them alongside the Russian skomorokhi, the Turkic akyns, the French jongleurs, the German spielmänner, the Spanish juglares, and he argued that the Adyghe singer held the licence they held: a freedom of speech and a personal inviolability that even the princes could not shake. "I remained forever a captive of the dzheguako," he said in one interview. The capture was mutual. He carried them out of local folklore and into the comparative study of world culture, and in doing so he founded the modern school of Circassian folklore studies in the republic and trained the generation that carried it on.

It is the honour of another people, given to a man they had decided was not another people at all.

He also gave a nation back one of its poets. Ismail Klishbiev wrote in secret and died in 1974 without a single poem in print. Power hunted him from the 1920s, arrested him in 1942, sentenced him to the camps, and cleared him only in 1981, seven years after his death. His manuscripts were seized and never returned. Naloev went after the erasure. He reconstructed the life, argued the case, and put the name back into the record. Bakova, who later taught Klishbiev's story to students in Nalchik and to audiences in Istanbul, frames the act plainly: to return a great poet to a people is to hand back a treasure the nation is incomplete without.

The list of what he built runs long. Essays on the History of Kabardian Literature. Folk Songs and Instrumental Tunes of the Adyghe, in three volumes. The Legends of Zhabaghi Kazanoko, which he assembled across the languages of the North Caucasus. The Adab of the Baksan Cultural Movement, in 1991. The Anthology of Early Adyghe-Language Literature, in 2010, which students at Kabardino-Balkarian State University still use as a textbook. He conceived an anthology of Kabardian children's literature and paid for much of it himself. His novella collection The Lonely Crane became a landmark of Kabardian prose. And in 1974, when Soviet atheism ruled the academy, he wrote an essay called "On the Eastern Cultural Channel," arguing that Muslim culture had shaped the Circassians as deeply as any Russian project. The researcher Naima Neflyasheva has described reading it as a student and finding her whole course of work set by it.

Scholarship did not keep him at his desk when the region turned. In the years around 1990, Naloev moved into public life with the same refusal to defer that marked his writing. He led Adyghe Khase as its Thamada. He sat in the Supreme Council of Kabardino-Balkaria from 1990 to 1993. In 1991 he joined the meeting of the Adyghe world in the Netherlands that called the International Circassian Congress to Nalchik, he helped found the International Circassian Association that same year, and he served on its council until 1993. He was a member of the Congress of the Kabardian People. Bakova writes that men like Naloev were loved and found impossible in equal measure, because they bowed to no authority except the one a person earns through honest work.

All of this pointed him toward Abkhazia. The kinship is old and real. Abkhaz and the Circassian languages belong to the same small family in the north-west Caucasus, close cousins parted in deep time, and the two peoples have read each other's fortunes as their own for as long as either can remember. When Abkhazia fought for its survival in 1992 and 1993, in what Abkhazia calls the Patriotic War of the People of Abkhazia, the North Caucasus did not watch. It came. The Abkhaz poet and national-movement figure Gennady Alamia has named Naloev among those who stood with Abkhazia in that fight, alongside Yusup Soslambekov and Musa Shanibov. That places him not at the edge of the solidarity but near its head, among the men who turned kinship into a movement.

The friendships were personal. A photograph keeps Naloev beside Bagrat Shinkuba, the poet who stood at the summit of Abkhaz letters and did for the memory of the Ubykh what Naloev did for the dzheguako. He knew the Abkhaz leadership, and the leadership knew him. He wrote about Abkhazia directly, not as a distant subject but as family. His essay "Our North Caucasian Brothers," on Abkhazia, appeared in the Sukhum journal Vozrozhdenie in 2002.

Abkhazia answered in kind. It named him an Honoured Worker of Culture of the Republic of Abkhazia in 1995. It marked his seventieth birthday on its own soil that December, and one Abkhaz writer gave her account of the jubilee evening a headline that says everything: a man whose roots are one with ours. Then came the Order of Leon. His own republic honoured him too, as a Distinguished Scientist in 1986 and a People's Writer in 2009, and in 2019 a memorial plaque went up on his house on Gorky Street in Nalchik. The Order of Leon sits apart from all of it. It is the honour of another people, given to a man they had decided was not another people at all.

When Naloev died in 2012, Abkhazia mourned him as its own. Its leadership sent condolences, President Alexander Ankvab and the speaker Valeri Bgazhba among them, and Abkhazia held that it would keep his memory as an outstanding son of the Circassian nation.

That decision outlived him. Each year the Abkhaz and Adyghe worlds meet at Lake Ritsa for a literary festival, "Rhymes on Ritsa," held under the patronage of Abkhazia's Ministry of Culture and dedicated to his memory. In 2023 the festival marked what would have been his ninety-fifth birthday. Poets from Sukhum and Nalchik read to each other beside the water, in two languages that were one language once, and the bridge Naloev spent his life building held.

He left a line that reads now like his own epitaph, and it belongs to both shores. A nation is strong not by its numbers, but by its undying soul.