Amman began to be resettled in 1878, when several hundred Muslim Circassian refugees arrived following their expulsion from the formerly Ottoman Balkans. Between 1878 and 1910, tens of thousands of Circassians had relocated to Ottoman Syria after being displaced by the Russian Empire during the events of the Russo-Circassian War. The Ottoman authorities directed the Circassian immigrants, who were mainly of peasant stock, to settle in Amman, and distributed arable land among them. Their settlement was a partial manifestation of the Ottoman statesman Kamil Pasha's project to establish a vilayet centered in Amman, which, along with other sites in its vicinity, would become Circassian-populated townships guaranteeing the security of the Damascus–Medina highway. The first Circassian settlers, who belonged to the Shapsug dialect group, lived near Amman's Roman theater and incorporated its stones into the houses they built. The English traveller Laurence Oliphant noted in his 1879 visit that most of the original Circassian settlers had left Amman by then, with about 150 remaining. They were joined by Circassians from the Kabardian and Abzakh groups in 1880–1892.