Gudanis Jvari

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Above the village of Gudani, on a shoulder of the mountain, the cross keeps its wealth in the open air. Silver worked into plaques and cups, the great banners furled on their staves, the bells hung in the belfry and rung across the valley at the festival, the drinking-horns of the sanctuary’s own table, the horns of sacrificed ibex and tur fixed to the shrine stones — all of it lies in stone niches and store-chambers on an unwalled height, under no lock and no watch but the sanctity of the power seated there. In a province whose people counted themselves the bondsmen of the cross, to set a hand on the property of the shrine was the gravest sacrilege the highland tradition knew, and no thief is remembered to have dared it. The hoard is the plain sign of what the place is. It is not a chapel but a lord’s house, and the lord is a warrior.

The cross above Gudani

Gudanis Jvari — “the Cross of Gudani” — is the paramount sanctuary of Khevsureti, the small, hard province of the northeastern Georgian mountains. It stands beside the village of Gudani on the Aragvi side of the country, in what the highlanders call Piraketa, the “hither” Khevsureti, a few kilometers up-valley from the district center at Barisakho, within the modern municipality of Dusheti in the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region. The gazetteer fixes the place without difficulty: Gudani sits near 42°32′ north and 44°57′ east, at some 1,720 meters, roughly seventy-five kilometers by road from the town of Dusheti, a compact settlement strung along the road with its school and its clinic, and above it, on the mountain, the walled precinct of the cross.

What the tradition means by a “cross” is not a crucifix but a place and a power together. In the living shrine religion of Khevsureti, Pshavi, and Tusheti a sanctuary is a jvari (“cross”), a khati (“icon”), or a salotsavi (“place of prayer”), and each such name covers the whole of it at once: a walled enclosure on a height, a treasury of donated goods, a stretch of country under a power’s guard, and the earthly seat of a khvtishvili, one of the “children of God” who stand between the remote high god Morige Ghmerti and the human world below. The working of that order as a whole — the graded court of shrine-deities, the offices that serve them, the map of sacred jurisdictions nested inside the human ones — belongs to the account of the jvari-khati religion; what concerns Gudani is that among all these seats it is reckoned the greatest of Khevsureti, the one cross to which the whole province belongs.

The power seated there is a fighting one. In the shrine’s own invocatory texts it is addressed as Baaduri — “the divine beri (elder, monk) Baaduri” — and named a warrior-cross, a khati of war. The name belongs to the family of Caucasian hero-names descended from bahadur, “brave one,” the title that runs across the mountains and the steppe; its exact standing among the ranks of the khvtishvili is a matter internal to the folklore record and is not adjudicated here. None of this reaches us from antiquity. The classical geographers who noticed the peoples of the eastern Caucasus say nothing of the Gudani cross, and the figure is reconstructed entirely from the modern-era highland cult — from the oral praise-poetry of the Khevsurs and from the folklorists who climbed the valleys to write it down. The ethnographer Sergi Makalatia set much of it in his Khevsureti of 1935; Vera Bardavelidze (1899–1970) placed the sanctuaries within a reconstructed highland pantheon and compiled, in a three-volume illustrated catalog of the shrines of Pshavi, Khevsureti, and Tusheti published from 1974, the fullest inventory of precincts like this one; Zurab Kiknadze systematized the shrine mythology in his Kartuli Mitologia I (1996); and Kevin Tuite has read the cult comparatively out of long fieldwork among the Pshav-Khevsur sanctuaries. Whether their system preserves an archaic pre-Christian stratum or took its shape in medieval and later centuries is a question argued among these same scholars and treated in full in the account of Ghmerti; it is marked here and not reopened.

The mountain country around Gudani in Dusheti Municipality, on the “hither” Aragvi side of Khevsureti, where the Cross of Gudani keeps its precinct above the village. Jelger Groeneveld, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The lord and the law

The rank of Gudanis Jvari is stated in the plainest terms the record has. It is the religious and public center of the whole of Khevsureti — the cross that unites the province as the Cross of Lashari unites Pshavi, the two of them paired in the highland imagination as the supreme warrior-khati of the eastern mountains. But a highland cross is not only a place of prayer; it is a lord that holds land and a court that renders judgment, and Gudani was both at the largest scale the country knew. In the reading Tuite draws from the political symbolism of the mid-summer festival, the great shrine functions as the sovereign of its province, the community its household and vassalage; and at Gudani that sovereignty carried a working jurisdiction. Here, according to the record of the sacred places of Khevsureti, the customary law of the highlands — the rjuli, the “faith” that was also the code — was formulated and proclaimed, and from the cross of Gudani it spread across the province. Here the common affairs of Khevsureti were debated, and the difficult cases that touched the whole country were brought to be decided.

And here the year itself was consulted. Every New Year an oracle was set at the cross to speak the fortune of the season to come, so that the community entered its calendar having heard from the seated power what lay ahead. The office that made such speech possible is the kadagi, the oracle through whom a khati utters its own words — its demands, its warnings, its foretellings — an institution described here at the distance of public record and treated in its own right under kadagi. At Gudani the oracle stood not only over the turning of the year but over the going-out to war, and it is in war that the character of the cross shows plainest.

The relation between the cross and its people was one of belonging in the fullest sense. The Khevsurs did not merely worship at Gudani; they held themselves to be the khati’s own — its bondsmen, in the tradition’s word, a whole province in the service of a single seated lord, bound to it as retainers to the power over them. To be a Khevsur of the Aragvi side was to stand under the cross of Gudani, to bring it its dues, and to look to it for the ordering of the affairs a lord orders: war and peace, law and judgment, the fortune of the year. The precinct that gathered all this was the ordinary highland kind — a walled enclosure on a height above the village, its grove of trees uncut because the wood belonged to the khati and not to any man, its chapel and altars and its store-buildings set within — but the office it held was the largest in the country, and the community that answered to it was not a clan or a gorge but the whole of Khevsureti.

The house of arms

Preparing for battle, the Khevsurs gathered at Gudani. The campaign banner was brought out from the shrine, and the oracle was set before the cross to foretell the outcome of the fight the men were about to enter, so that no host marched from the province without first learning from its lord whether the venture stood under his favor. The tradition holds that the cross did more than bless the departure. As the highland account of the sacred places of Pshav-Khevsureti records it, in the hour of battle the Gudani cross itself was held to reveal to its host, appearing upon a white horse and increasing the strength of its warriors — the seated power riding out with the men who fought under its banner, present on the field it had sent them to. This is the same imagination that gives Lashari his winged horse across the Pshav border, the warrior-khati leading his people in arms; at Gudani it fastens on the white horse and the multiplied strength, and it is the core of what the Khevsurs held about the power above their principal village.

What made the shrine a force in the living world, though, was not its warfare alone but its wealth, for the khati’s house was a treasury. Bardavelidze’s catalog records the building-types of these sanctuaries — the hall (darbazi), the belfry (sazare) that houses the bell, the store-chamber (kvrivi), and the niches and small closed towers that hold the shrine’s goods — and at a great cross like Gudani the treasury of the khati held the votive metalwork of centuries. Silver, the great banners (drosha), the bells (rung at the festivals and understood in the highland cult as instruments of revelation and as a means of driving off the evil pressing up from below), and the drinking-horns and vessels of the sanctuary’s own table lay in its niches and store-chambers, with the horns of sacrificed ibex and tur fixed to the stones. In a world where the mountaineers reckoned themselves the serfs of the cross, this hoard sat on an open mountain, guarded by nothing but the certainty that to touch it was to profane the tradition’s most sacred thing.

A great shrine’s wealth, moreover, did not end at its treasury. Like the wealthiest of the highland crosses, Gudani was a holder of land and of herds, endowed over generations by the community and its kings, and worked on its behalf by the servants of the cross; the metalwork in the niches was the visible face of an estate that reached out across the fields and pastures around the village. The bells in the belfry gave that estate its voice. Cast in bronze and hung in the sazare, they were rung to open the festival and were understood in the cult as instruments of God’s revealing and as a means of putting the powers of the lower world to flight — so that the sound carried across the valley was at once a summons to the assembled province and a defense of the sacred ground it climbed to.

Mount Tsakhale rising above the valley at Gudani — the high pastoral country of the Aragvi-side Khevsurs, whose principal shrine stands at the village. Yasuhiro Kojima, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The offices and the feast

A shrine of this rank is served by living hands, and its offices are the ones the outside record can name at a distance. At the head stands the khevisberi, also called the khutsesi — the shrine-elder who keeps the altar, pronounces the invocations and blessings, and speaks for the seated god. Below him the dasturi are the servants of the cross: they cultivate the shrine’s lands, brew and tend its ritual beer, the ludi, prepare the sacrificial cakes and the offerings, and keep the order of the festival; the medroshe bears the banner in procession. It is a household staff for a divine householder — a priest at the altar, servants in the fields and the brewhouse, a bearer for the flag — and at the great feast every office is in motion at once.

That feast is the khatoba, and at the paramount shrine of Khevsureti it falls in high summer. It is a movable feast, reckoned each year from the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul, and it draws the province up to the cross in July. The Khevsurs assemble on the mountain; the dasturi brew the beer they have tended through the year; livestock are slaughtered and the ritual breads and the mountain dumplings prepared; the banner comes out, and the bells are rung. The whole of it is described here at the public distance the folklorists kept — the shape of the gathering, not the closed words spoken over the fire or the order of its rites, which belong to the living life of a served cult and are not set out. What the outside record can say is that the khatoba is the moment the province makes itself visible around its lord, each summer, at the seat that unites it.

The Gudani cross wears the syncretism of the whole highland religion openly. It is a house of the jvari-khati order — older than the Georgian conversion and never displaced by it — that became Orthodox in name without being unseated, its warrior-khati standing now under the sign of the Cross and its calendar fixed to the church’s, so that the shrine’s own great feast is reckoned from a Christian one. When the eastern Georgian kingdom took Christianity as its faith in the fourth century, the mountains received the new religion but kept the old cult beside it, and in the shrines of Khevsureti the two orders did not cancel but fused. The seat of Baaduri is a place where a warrior-god of the older world and the faith of the church are held together in a single “cross,” and the community that keeps it is a Georgian Orthodox one.

The tradition tested, and kept

The twentieth century pressed on the whole of this. Through the Soviet decades the shrine religion was thinned and pushed toward silence, and the pressure fell on Khevsureti with a particular weight: in 1951 the Soviet authorities began an obligatory resettlement that carried much of the population of the high Argun-gorge villages down to the plain, and many of the far-side settlements were left deserted. The fuller history of that removal and its aftermath belongs to the account of the Khevsurs and of the fortified villages of the gorge — Shatili among them — and is not retold here. What concerns Gudani is that the cross on the Aragvi side outlasted the pressure, and that its keeping never entirely stopped.

For Gudani and its Khevsurs are a living community, not an extinct one. The village holds a small resident population still, and the seat of the cross is still served. Each July the khatoba is kept, the beer is brewed on the mountain, the banner is brought out, and the families who left the high valleys for the towns and the lowland come back to the cross for its feast — the province reassembling, for the days of the festival, around the lord it has always belonged to. The religion that Makalatia recorded, that Bardavelidze cataloged and Kiknadze systematized, that Tuite has followed in the field, and that the Pshav poet Vazha-Pshavela (1861–1915) carried out of the mountains and into modern Georgian literature, is thinner than it was and pressed on every side. It is also, on the shoulder of the mountain above Gudani, a served cult with its treasury still in its niches and its warrior still seated over the province he unites.

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