The Gagauz trace their origins to the Despotate of Dobruja, being a Turkic or Turkified Christian people which resisted the spread of Islam. Chased out of the Ottoman Empire, they were accepted by the Russian Empire, which settled them in Bessarabia and the Budjak; most of the latter was returned to Moldavia in 1856, together with its Gagauz, but re-annexed by Russia in 1878. Gagauzia first expressed aspirations of becoming an independent nation in the wake of the 1905 Revolution: a small republic, called "Gagauz Khalki" or "Comrat Republic", survived for two weeks in January 1906. Although cited as a precedent by later nationalists, this polity was mainly concerned with land reform, rather than ethnic self-determination.