What these tables are

The tables “Population of Ahıska, 1869–1926” were reprinted by a Turkish magazine about our people. For each village in five districts they give two population figures — from the 1869 count and the 1926 census — and a breakdown by people: Turks, Georgians, Kurds, Terekeme, Armenians, others. The tables draw on two sources: summary population data of the Tiflis Governorate (Tiflis, 1870) and the 1926 census of the Georgian SSR by district and village (Tiflis, 1930). The historian Arif Yunusov brought them together in his book “Meskhetian Turks: a people deported twice” (Baku, 2000).

Totals by district

  • Ahıska (Akhaltsikhe) — 1869: 21,872 people, of them 8,233 Turks; 1926: 38,898, of them 17,221 Turks
  • Adigön (Adigeni) — 1869: 8,604 people, of them 7,493 Turks; 1926: 29,336, of them 19,664 Turks
  • Aspindza — 1869: 8,949 people, of them 5,534 Turks; 1926: 21,149, of them 7,995 Turks
  • Ahılkelek (Akhalkalaki) — 1869: 4,976 people, of them 1,322 Turks; 1926: 9,742, of them 3,566 Turks
  • Bogdanovka (Ninotsminda) — 1869: 2,073 people, of them 371 Turks; 1926: 3,285, of them 634 Turks
  • All five districts — 1869: 46,474 people, of them 22,953 Turks; 1926: 102,410, of them 49,080 Turks

The figures come from the total rows of the tables. We have not yet held the books of 1870, 1930 and 2000 in our hands, so these are figures “according to Yunusov’s tables”, not our own check against the originals.

What they show

  • The number of Turks more than doubled: about 23,000 in 1869 and about 49,000 in 1926 — in these five districts alone.
  • Adigön was the most “Turkish” district: two-thirds of its people in 1926 were Turks.
  • In the town of Ahıska itself, almost all residents in 1869 were recorded as “other” rather than Turks. The magazine that reprinted the tables explains that Russian sources of the time avoided writing the word “Turk” and recorded people under other names. So the numbers of Turks in the early counts are probably too low.
  • Eighteen years after the second census, in November 1944, all the Turks of these villages were deported.

How to read such figures

Censuses of the 19th and early 20th centuries sorted people by faith, language and how the census-taker wrote them down. The same families could land in different columns in different years. These are figures about villages and years, not about who a person should consider themselves to be: who we are is said by the people themselves.

Your own village

If you know how many houses your village had and what the elders called it, tell us in Looking for my people or record an elder’s voice: living memory corrects any table.