[1] The diaspora was largely the result of the destruction of their social and economic life as a consequence of integration into the Russian Empire.
It was centered on the towns of Bender and Çatal Osman, and considered semi-independent (only controlled by Ottoman Pasha in Rusçuk).
Crimean Tatar ruling class (mirzas) and mullahs sought asylum within the North Caucasian people, fearing persecution.
According to ancient Crimean Tatar traditions, marriage between relatives (e.g. cousins), even very distant ones, has always been strictly prohibited, unlike the local population of Anatolia.
The ones who lived in a concentrated manner in adjacent villages, such as the ones around Eskişehir region, were able to maintain their ethnic identity and language intact almost up until the 1970s.
The Crimean Tatar diaspora identity emerged over this period in the form of predominantly oral cultural traditions in stories, songs, poems, myths, and legends about the loss of the "homeland" and the miseries of immigration.
An excerpt from Crimean Tatar exile literature is as follows: Eskender Fazıl, from his poem Stand Up With the shrinking of the Ottoman Empire in the last quarter of the 19th century, once again the majority of the Crimean Tatars in Dobrudja migrated to Anatolia, and sometimes re-migrated several times more within Anatolia.
On May 18, 1944, the Soviet government deported the Crimean Tatars who were left in Crimea to Central Asia and Urals.
The Crimean Tatars in the United States are the highest number of the diaspora in the Western hemisphere; they are composed of refugees from Crimea, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.
As in other diasporas, Crimean Tatars also suffered from problems stemming from the differentiation of their identities over time due to their acculturation into various host-societies.