Emigrations from the Crimea to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War (Kirimli, 2008)

A peer reviewed article in Middle Eastern Studies by historian Hakan Kirimli of Bilkent University, examining documentary evidence for Crimean Tatar emigration to the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War. Based on the documentary evidence he examined, Kirimli concludes the number of Crimean Tatars who emigrated during 1855 to 1856, and probably into 1857, must have been between 20,000 and 25,000 persons, distinct from the much larger wave of emigration Kirimli and other historians document following Russia's earlier 1783 annexation of the Crimean Khanate and the later, larger postwar exodus of the 1860s. Its strength is a named historian's own documentary count for the war years specifically, separating this narrower figure from the larger multi decade Crimean Tatar diaspora. Its limit is that it is itself an estimate built from surviving Ottoman and Russian administrative records rather than a contemporary census.