More than four hundred thousand Circassians, as…

More than four hundred thousand Circassians, as well as two hundred thousand Abkhazians and Ajars, have fled to Turkey by the end of the Russian resettlement of the northwestern Caucasian peoples.

The term Çerkes, "Circassians", becomes the blanket term for them in Turkey because the majority are Adyghe.

The expulsion has resulted in the depopulation of vast swaths of the Western Caucasus, specifically the fertile Pontic littoral near Sochi.

The Tsarist government is so alarmed by the resulting decline in the regional economy that in 1867 it bans emigration with the exception of "isolated exceptional cases".

Nevertheless, a large number of households will later manage to leave Russia when they go on the hajj to Mecca and remain with their relatives in Turkey, as the Russian embassy in İstanbul will often report.