Moscow Assyrians are a dispersed ethnic group living in our capital. The diaspora, whose history in Moscow dates back to the end of the first quarter of the XX century, organically joined the urban multinational environment and played a significant role in the urban culture of Moscow (now, unfortunately, this role is almost completely lost). The history and culture of the Moscow Assyrian diaspora - one of the largest in the former USSR - has not yet been studied .
The purpose of the article is to try to tell about Kunaya, a local group of Moscow Assyrians, on the basis of field material. For this purpose, we used the stories of old-timers both about their Moscow life and about places of traditional residence, information about which they received in their time from older generations. The difficulty in collecting field information and writing this work was the complete absence of any sources (other than field sources) concerning this group, with the exception of a brief mention in the article published in 1931. Skorobogatov's "Icebergs in the USSR" 2 , in which kunaya is called "konai".
Information about the Moscow Assyrians-Kunaya was mainly collected by the author with the help of representatives of this group Mikhail (Shebovich) Avdysho (born in 1930) and Nina (Barutovna) Zavzu (born in 1931), who at one time received information from the generation of Kunai, who came to Russia from places of traditional residence. The article also uses the results of a study of the history of the Moscow Assyrian community, conducted by the author in 1992-1993.
Kunaya (along with Jilvaya, Diznaya, and Gyavarnaya) is one of the most numerous Assyrian groups that settled in the capital by the mid-1920s. This group is a unique case (apart from the small local village group Shaveta, which numbered only two dozen families in 1914), when all the inhabitants of the same village who survived the exodus from Turkey settled in one city, and did not disperse to different regions of the count ...
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