ABSTRACT

Before 1990, not many people in Turkey were aware of the Gagauz people, the Orthodox Christian community of Turkish descent living in southern Moldavia. Their ethnogenesis lies with the tribes that inhabited the plains of Central Asia, and they speak pure Balkan Turkish. Under the dominion of the Byzantines, the Seljuks, the Ottomans, the Bulgarians, the Romanians, and the Russians, throughout history they were forced to live with linguistic, religious, and cultural ostracism. In the last decade of the twentieth century, with radical changes in Eastern European regimes, they again experienced waves of migration and their knowledge of the Turkish language created an opportunity for their women to nd illegal jobs in Turkey as maidservants. Nowadays they live scattered over a large area, including Moldavia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Greece, Romania, Macedonia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and even Argentina, but the majority of the Gagauz people live in a region in southern Moldavia called Gagauzia. At the beginning of 2005, nearly every family from southern Moldavian cities like Komrat Cadyr Lunga or Vulkanesthy had one female member working illegally in Istanbul.