Abstract:

It may be possible to rise to the roots of a community’s identity, only by revealing the places of the living and the dead. Thus, the ways in which the community identifies its own identity take a visible status in the relationships that it has established with the place. In the context of the place and identity relationship, it can be assured that death and the rituals surrounding it also contain various clues about the identity’s outwardness. From this point of view, the ritual place of death, one of the transitional periods, tombs and tombs play a role in the process of building cultural identity. Therefore, in this article, the forms of identity building that the people who describe themselves as Cherkes and live in Kayseri make the place of death visible in the tombs and cemetery. Since many Çerkes villages are located in Uzunyayla, which runs between Kayseri and Sivas, this is considered one of the areas where the Çerkes in Turkey are settled with an intense population. Even though the Uzunyayla region has no similarities with the Caucasus in terms of its geographical characteristics, it is called "Little Caucasus" for reasons such as the preservation and preservation of the Caucasus traditions by the Cerkes who live in Kayseri. The purpose of this article is to reveal the role of the people who define themselves as the Church and live in Kayseri in living the identity of the community through the dead body and the place (the cemetery).

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