Mankurt
From Free net encyclopedia
The term mankurt comes from a Turkic myth popularized by Chinghiz Aitmatov in his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years ("И дольше века длится день"), a philosophical tale about what can happen to people if they forget their motherland, language, and history.
The Kirghiz legend mentioned in the novel is about a cruel way of making a mankurt, a man that forgets everything but basic activities and thus becomes an ideal slave. A fresh raw camel hide would be put as a cap on thoroughly shaven head of a captive. The slave with his hands tied and with a large wooden stock around his neck preventing him from touching his head would be left in desert for several days. Once the hide would start drying it would shrink and bind to the head, thus making a hoop and "squeezing" all sanity out of the man. If the man happens to survive the torture, he would be recuperated and become like a dog to his master, not remembering anything from his past, even his own name nor his own mother. What is worse, the hair would grow through the camel's hide (called "mankurt's cap"), thus making it impossible to take it off without excruciating pain. The legend says a mankurt is panically afraid of removing his mankurt's cap.
The mankurt legend and the story around it is of symbolic nature in Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, the first unpublished version of which was called "The Hoop".
Today this word is often used by many nationals of republics of the former Soviet Union of Turkic kinship (Uzbekistan, Tatarstan, Kazakhstan, etc.), with respect to their fellow citizens who don't care enough about the native language and native culture; e.g., speak only Russian.