Anatori

← Encyclopedia

Someone who had felt the fever settle in did not, in the worst years, wait for it in the house. They gathered what little they would need, stepped out past the last hearth of the village, and walked north down the gorge — along the track that follows the Arghuni to where the river takes in the water of the Ardoti — to a cluster of low stone houses standing near the mouth of the two waters. There they lay down among the dead. The houses were built for exactly this: not tombs raised over the dead by the living, but rooms the dying entered on their own feet, so that the sickness in them would end where they lay and not follow them home. This is what the Khevsurs remember about Anatori, and the crypts at the bend of the river are what is left to remember it by. A village of that name once stood here. Its people are gone; the houses of its dead outlasted them.

A place-name outliving its people

Anatori reaches the record as a place emptied of the people it was named for. It lies a short way down the Arghuni — the Argun — gorge from Shatili, the fortified tower-village at the head of Upper Khevsureti, near the point where the river turns and takes in the Ardoti, roughly three kilometers to the north and close under what is now the Georgia–Chechnya border. The necropolis is mapped at about 42.671° north, 45.180° east, a little above and east of the ground where the vanished village stood, at a spot the highlanders call Meidani. Shatili itself sits at 42°39′30″N, 45°09′25″E, so the distance from the towers to the crypts is small — a couple of kilometers down the track that carries on toward Mutso and the pass.

What stands there is a cluster of low houses of dry slate, laid up in the same gray stone as everything else in the gorge and roofed flat in the local way. In Georgian such a structure is an akldama — a word carried in, through Christian literature, from Akeldama, the “field of blood” of the Gospels: the ground bought with the returned silver and given over to the burial of strangers. The name marks what the building is. Not a grave dug for one, but an ossuary-house, a room made to take the dead of a whole neighborhood. Inside, the dead were laid out on shelves of the same slate, ranged in two or three tiers along the walls. Excavation of the vaults has turned up the ordinary furniture of the dead — wooden utensils, ornaments, arrowheads, and silver coins — the goods that went in beside them. The type was old before the plague made this particular use of it. The akldama, the record holds, had been built in antiquity and had largely fallen out of use in the mountains; the epidemic that emptied the village called the ancient form back into service.

How the crypts came to hold the dead of the whole neighborhood is carried chiefly in the living oral tradition of the Khevsur communes and the guides who keep it, and set within the wider written record of the province — above all the ethnography of Sergi Makalatia, whose Khevsureti (1935) remains the foundational portrait of the highland and its customs. The tradition is exact about the thing that matters. When the plague — zhami in Georgian — came into the gorge, those who felt the sickness on them walked the road out of the village of their own will and lay down among the dead, on the shelves inside, so that the fever would die with them and not pass to the households they had left. One telling names its arrival on a single unlucky man: a merchant who carried the disease unknowing into Anatori, and set the dying in motion. What the tradition holds constant, through every version, is the walk — the sick going out to the crypt rather than the crypt being brought to them.

The date the tradition attaches to that dying is not fixed by the record, and the crypts themselves are undated in the strict sense. Some accounts set it in the late-medieval Black Death era: the Radio Free Europe report on the site places the outbreak in the second half of the fourteenth century, when the pestilence that was emptying Europe was moving through the Caucasus as well. Others attach it to a far later epidemic. Travel and heritage accounts of the vaults name an outbreak of 1850 in the Ardoti gorge, in which the whole Sisauri clan is said to have died but for a single boy who was up in the mountains with the livestock. The plague is well attested in the Caucasus in 1812; of a mid-century outbreak little is known for certain. No firm scholarly or heritage date has settled the matter, and the honest description leaves it open — a mortuary ground whose fabric, setting, and remembered use are documentary, and whose year is not.

Even the fabric holds a question. The narrow window-slots by which the vaults are known today are, on some accounts, no part of the original building: the houses are said to have been raised without doors or windows at all, sealed rooms into which the openings now visible were cut only later. Whether the slots belong to the first fabric or to a later refit is not settled, and it is worth marking rather than asserting — the seam where the documentary record thins and the guide’s telling takes over. What is not in question is the setting and the memory: a mortuary ground at a river-mouth on the outer edge of Khevsureti, and a custom of self-removal remembered as the thing the dying did for the living.

The Anatori crypt-houses on their spur above the Arghuni gorge below Shatili — low buildings of dry slate at the river-mouth, roofed flat in the manner of the whole gorge. Jelger Groeneveld, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The custom that ran from the hearth

Within the shrine world of the Pshav-Khevsur highlands, Anatori is not a sanctuary but its grave counterpart. The country is governed by the jvari and khati — the icon-shrines that seat a khvtishvili, one of the children of god, over each temi, the commune, and carry its oaths and harvests upward toward the remote high god who orders the sky. The working of that order — the offices that serve the shrines, the festivals that gather them — is the matter of the jvari-khati system and is not restated here. What Anatori shows is the other edge of the same binding custom, the ts’esi: the ground where it ran not toward the altar but away from the hearth. A shrine draws the commune in, up the slope, to the seat of its protecting power. The crypt sends the afflicted out, down the gorge, to the seat of nothing but the dead. Both movements are the custom doing its work; they simply point in opposite directions.

The building itself makes the point in stone. A Khevsur village is a work of the koshki, the tower-houses stacked and fused for defense, raised so that a family and a whole commune could hold their ground against a raid; the settlement is a machine for keeping people alive and together. The akldama at the river-mouth is the low, doorless inverse of that. Where the koshki gathers the living upward into one defended body, the crypt receives them, one at a time, into an undefended one — a house with no fighting-floor and no hearth, whose whole purpose is to hold what the village must let go. The two forms belong to the same masonry and the same gorge, the same dry slate laid up without mortar, and they divide the work of the settlement between them: the towers for the years when a community fought to keep every life, the crypt for the years when keeping the community meant surrendering some.

The teaching the place carries is held in a single act, and the act is rendered as duty rather than despair. To walk into the crypt while still able to walk was to choose the house of the dead so that the living could keep their own — to make of one’s own dying a last service to the commune, a quarantine of the self undertaken before there was any word for it but ts’esi. There is no heroism claimed in the telling and no horror dwelt on. The register is plain, because the thing itself was plain: a mortuary discipline, not a spectacle, and the bones at rest inside are owed the plainness of it. The Khevsurs did not build Anatori to be looked at. They built it to be walked into, once, by people who would not come out, and the dignity of the site is inseparable from that intention. What a household kept, when one of its own went down the gorge to the vaults, was its hearth and its remaining lives; what it gave up was the sick person’s death at home. The custom weighed the two and chose, and it taught the choosing as an obligation the dying owed the living.

The same river-mouth carries a stranger companion to the crypts. Near Shatili stood an Anatori jvari, a shrine, and it was honored across the border as much as within it. The Kists — the Chechen community long settled on the Georgian side of the watershed — brought sacrifice to the Anatori jvari, and Chechens of Maisti and Melkhista held it sacred, so that highlanders from both slopes of the ridge kept its festivals together until the frontier was closed against passage. The record names it a protector of hunters, in the register these mountains give to the golden huntress Dali and the powers of the wild game — a shrine of the living’s provision standing a short way from the houses of the dead. That one narrow ground should mark both a sanctuary shared over a frontier and a place where a community laid down its own is the reach of the ts’esi to its outer limit. The shrine order governs not only how a commune lives before its khati, in the good years, but how, in the worst ones, it consents to die.

Two ends of one custom

The self-removal is not Khevsur alone. It belongs to the whole Argun frontier, and the crypts on the far side of the watershed say so. Upstream, in the Chechen district of Malkhista — Melkhista, “the land of the sun” — stands the necropolis of Tsoi-Pede, its name glossed “the abode of the deity”: a city of the dead of some forty-two crypts, guarded at its entrance by two pillar-shrines and set about with two battle-towers, entered on a UNESCO tentative list and dated across the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. It carries the same tradition Anatori does — that the sick went there to die apart from the living. The two sites are two ends of one mortuary custom straddling the ridge, the Georgian akldama below the pass and the Nakh crypt-necropolis above it belonging to a single type of the death-house that the whole high frontier seems to have known. Which people first shaped it, and how much each borrowed from the other, is not a question this ground answers, and it is not one worth forcing an answer to.

The frontier the two necropolises straddle held more than one kind of history, and the record keeps both. Raiding ran across it in both directions, cattle and captives taken over the passes; and set against the raiding ran the institutions of sworn brotherhood, the formal bonds of peace and kinship that tied households on one slope to households on the other. The shared shrine and the shared death-house belong to the second history, the frontier as a place of common observance rather than only of the raid — but the raid was real too, and both histories belong equally to the two peoples whose border this was, and remains. What the crypts on either bank record is not enmity or amity but a common answer to a common terror: when the fever came, the sick went out to the houses of the dead, and the well were spared by the going.

Anatori sits between the fortified villages of Shatili and Mutso, both on Georgia’s built-heritage rolls — Shatili on the country’s UNESCO tentative list, Mutso restored on its crag above the same river, its own crypts a near echo of these. The whole gorge was pressed hard by the twentieth century. Khevsureti’s highland communes were resettled to the Kakhetian lowlands in the early 1950s, the state finding the high valleys too poor and too remote to leave peopled; and in the decades since, families have returned up the gorge to the villages their forebears raised. The Khevsurs remain a living Georgian Orthodox people, whose shrine practice runs alongside the church rather than against it, and whose returns to the Argun basin — seasonal for many, year-round for a few — are the present tense of this country. The fuller history of that people, its resettlement and its returns, belongs to the account of the Khevsurs; what concerns Anatori is only that the gorge it stands in is inhabited again, and that the crypts are kept by a community that never wholly left.

The scholarship that frames the shrine world around the crypts runs from Makalatia’s Khevsureti through the pantheon reconstructions of Vera Bardavelidze and Zurab Kiknadze to the Khevsureti fieldwork of Kevin Tuite. None of it dates the Anatori plague, and none of it needs to for the site’s meaning to hold: the ethnography records the custom as a custom, the memory as a memory, and leaves the year where the ground leaves it. Whether the highland shrine order those scholars describe preserves a pre-Christian stratum or is a later formation is the archaism-and-innovation question set out in the Ghmerti entry, and it is not the question Anatori poses. The question Anatori poses is nearer the bone: what a people owes the living when it is dying, and what it will do with its own body to pay the debt.

The vaults are kept today as a protected mortuary place and a stop for travelers who come up the gorge, and the discipline the site asks of its visitors is the same one it asked of the dying: plainness. The crypts are often handed to the shock-register — the mountain full of skulls, the ghost town of the dead — and the register is wrong for them. The dead here are at rest, not on display, and the sensational telling misses the only thing about the place that matters. What the houses at the river-mouth hold is not a horror but a decision, taken one person at a time on the road out of the village: to carry the sickness away from the living, and to lie down with it among the already gone, so that the hearths left behind could keep their fires.

The track leading on from Anatori toward the watershed and the Chechen slope beyond — the frontier over which the Anatori jvari was kept in common, and along which the same crypt-death custom is found on both banks. Jelger Groeneveld, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

→ Related: Kviria · Iakhsari · Adgilis Deda · Pirkusha · Shatili · Mutso · Gudanis Jvari · The Khevsurs · The Pshavs · Kadagi · Jvari Khati