Circassian beauties admired for their abundant and luxuriant yellow hair and blue eyes

Blue-eyed Caucasian regiments today form the cream of the Sultan’s army. Circassian beauties are admired for their abundant and luxuriant yellow hair and blue eyes.

A Year among the Circassians

“….every way entitled to rank as a Circassian beauty. She had regular and pretty features, blue eyes, and fair complexion; her hair was of a light auburn colour, and hung in a profusion of braided tresses over her shoulders, from a bonnet of scarlet cloth, trimmed and crossed with broad silver lace, not unlike the Albanian skull-cap. She was tall, and well, though slightly, shaped; and held herself, like all Circassians, men or women, very erect.”

A Circassian beauty in Palermo

“Her mother was Circassian, blonde as your Northern girls. Treat her gently. If she is harmed, fifty ships will hunt you down.”

A Circassian blonde in play

A Circassian blonde

From the Memoirs of Princess Emily Ruete: Circassian women, favoured with an aristocratic appearance, were hated by other women who were envious of fair Circassian features. Circassians were called “cats” because of their blue eyes.

“At Bet il Sahel there was much more luxury and grand style than at Bet il Mtoni. + The handsome and graceful Circassian women were much more numerous than at Bet il Mtoni, where my mother and her lady friend Medîne were the only members of this race + . Here the majority of the women were Circassian, who without any doubt are much more distinguished in appearance than the Abyssinians, though among the latter also quite unusual beauties are to be found. This natural superiority was the cause of a good deal of illwill and envy. One Circassian woman, favoured with an aristocratic appearance, was avoided and even hated by the chocolate-coloured Abyssinian women through no fault of hers, but simply because she looked majestic. Under these circumstances it was bound to happen that occasionally a kind of ridiculous ‘racism’ broke out among my brothers and sisters. In spite of many good qualities, the Abyssinian + often is of a fiery and hot-tempered character + . Her passion, once roused, seldom knowns restraint, let alone decency. We, the children of Circassian women, were usually called ‘cats’ by those of our brothers and sisters who had Abyssinian blood in their veins, because some of us had the misfortune of possessing: blue eyes. Derisively they called us ‘Highness’, a proof of how annoyed they were about us having been born with + lighter + whiter skin. My father was of course never forgiven the fact that he had chosen his favourite children Sharîfe and Chole—both by Circassian mothers, Sharîfe even being blue-eyed—from the hateful race of ‘cats’.”

The daughter of a Circassian [Emily Ruete’s half-sister] was a dazzling beauty with the complexion of a German blonde.

“The daughter of a Circassian was a dazzling beauty with the complexion of a German blonde. Besides, she possessed a sharp intellect, which made her into a faithful advisor of my father’s.”

Circassian and Georgian women

By far the most frequently mentioned ethnicities or “races” of harem women were Circassian and Georgian associated with the Caucasus Mountains. Ranked above all other female harem inmates on the basis of their “white” (“Caucasian”) skin color, they became known to western commentators as the premium, most desired slaves who, because of their rarefied light skin or eyes, were most likely to be promoted within the harem to the rank of wife.

The characteristics of Circassian and Georgian women are articulated by the author Emma Reeve in 1839. She differentiates between the blond Circassians who are “indolent and graceful, their voices low and sweet” and what she slightly darker-skinned Georgians who are “more animated” and have more “intelligence and vivacity than their delicate rivals.” Similar descriptions of the Circassian harem women appear in Florence Nightingale’s travel journal, her only piece of writing not on the subject of nursing. She calls them “the most graceful, and the most sensual-looking creatures I ever saw (like dancers).” This (backhanded) compliment appears in the context of her overall judgement about the hellish nature of the harem, which she allegedly visited on her five-mounty sojourn to Egypt in 1849.

A related condemnation of the harem—and the opinion that the Circassians and Georgians are its only saving virtue—appears in the writing of the feminist-activist Harriet Martineau. Mothers from these two groups produce “the finest children,” and if they were to be excluded from the harem the upper class in Egypt would be doomed.