Collective Nostalgia and Imagined Homeland: Emotional Geographies of Akhaltsikhe Among Muslim Meskhetians

ABSTRACT

Collective nostalgia is a defining force in shaping the imagined homeland of Muslim Meskhetians, a community whose emotional attachment to Akhaltsikhe persists across borders, regimes, and generations. Based on multi‐sited qualitative research conducted in the United States (2012, 2014, and 2025) and Georgia (2017–2018), this article analyzes how Akhaltsikhe is remembered, felt, and symbolically inhabited by four generational cohorts who have experienced displacement differently. The findings show that the homeland functions not as a fixed geographical place but as an emotional and moral landscape sustained through inherited stories, ritual practices, domestic traditions, and embodied postmemory. Older generations evoke Akhaltsikhe as a site of rupture and dispossession; middle generations articulate it as an unfulfilled promise of return shaped by political exclusion; while younger generations relate to it as a symbolic point of origin they have never seen yet continue to protect through cultural practices and familial narratives.

A key contribution of this study is the comparative analysis of two groups rarely examined together: Muslim Meskhetians repatriated to Georgia and those resettled in the United States. While repatriated families often experience Akhaltsikhe as a painful proximity—“near yet unreachable” due to legal, social, and political barriers—U.S.‐based Meskhetians imagine it as an idealized, purified homeland free from conflict. These divergent emotional geographies reveal how the same place can generate contrasting affective meanings depending on structural conditions of belonging and exclusion.

By integrating theories of collective nostalgia, imagined communities, and cultural memory, the article argues that Akhaltsikhe endures as a moral anchor and a transgenerational emotional horizon. It remains a homeland carried in memory rather than lived in space—sustaining diasporic identity across time, distance, and political uncertainty, even when physical return remains limited, contested, or impossible.