A Kijk Folktale from North Ciscaucasia
By the final week of the wedding, Dukvakha and Nisakuj towered over the others in the village. They ate mutton and black bread and whortleberries and harbiz fo and adyga kwae.
The Kijk people of north Ciscaucasia,1 speakers of a minor Ubykh-Circassic dialect,2 have an unbroken tradition of oral epic poetry and no written language. They are known for their distinctive dyed wool vests, blindingly bright blue, and weeks-long burial and wedding rites. Long persecuted, they yearn to tend their sheep unmolested in an independent Kijk nation.
The Kijk elders tell a folktale about a shepherdess named Nisakuj,3 only child of the widower Xazači Chyzamyghwa, the unluckiest man in the village. Nisakuj tended her family’s sheep and spun and dyed wool. Her father was beset often by injuries and illnesses, and whenever she went to the village for sugar and salt she heard the old women whispering that he must be cursed. Then, on a cold winter day, when Nisakuj was 15 years old, the cart overturned on the way to market, and her father was crushed beneath it. Her father died, and she was alone.
Spring brought a Chechen man named Dukvakha to the village seeking a wife. The villagers offered him Nisakuj and began preparation for the weeks-long marriage rite.
The first week of the wedding Dukvakha and Nisakuj ate mutton and black bread and were paraded around the village in an ox cart painted white and red. With every trip around the village they grew taller.
The second week of the wedding Dukvakha and Nisakuj ate mutton and black bread and whortleberries and were carried on large wooden wedding chairs to the top of the mountain beside the village, where they joined hands and sang the old hymns. When they returned from the mountain, they had grown taller.
The third week of the wedding Dukvakha and Nisakuj ate mutton and black bread and whortleberries and harbiz fo. They walked from house to house in the village asking for a blessing and receiving a small gift. With each house they visited, they grew taller.
By the final week of the wedding, Dukvakha and Nisakuj towered over the others in the village. They ate mutton and black bread and whortleberries and harbiz fo and adyga kwae. The villagers rang the wedding bells and set fire to the wedding pole. After a brief ceremony and the exchanging of crowns, the new husband and wife went to the forest to find the marriage cabin where every Kijk marriage is consummated. By this time they were as tall as trees and shook the ground when they walked. They were never seen again.
Rarely mentioned by sources outside the region, the Kijks appear in youthful sketches and diary entries of Giovanni Antonio Canal, who traveled to the region in 1714.
“The Kijks are not Ubykhs!” Tevfik Esenç, the last native speaker of Ubykh, would remind me on our long walks through Istanbul. No man has relished coffee like Tevfik Esenç. I will tell you another time about how he saved my life. Like Ubykh, Kijk has 93 consonants but only two phonemically distinct vowels.
Incidentally, an exiled Kijk called Nisakuj Tarba is the founder of the nascent Doomer Optimism movement. After arriving in the United States and learning a peculiar but understandable sort of English by watching television, Tarba traveled the Ohio River Valley and Appalachia teaching her methods of gardening, raising sheep, and the natural dying of wool. Her followers adopted her approach to life and ecology—some even going so far as to learn how to recite Kijk poems in their original language—and eschewed political labels. After Tarba’s disappearance, some began to call themselves the Doomer Optimists. Although they do not publicly acknowledge Tarba’s role in their movement, her teachings are apparent in everything they do. At regional Doomer Optimist gatherings, you can tell the old followers of Tarba by their blue wool vests. Nisakuj Tarba wrote nothing, but Doomer Optimists in Uruguay distribute collections of notes and transcripts of her recorded lessons, though all the recordings are lost.