Iakhsari

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For three years the water held him. He had gone into Lake Abudelauri after a fleeing devi and killed it there, in the cold green water under the Chaukhi wall — but the demon bled as it died, fouling the whole lake with its blood, and the killer could not climb back out of what he had cleansed. He stayed in it three winters. The people of Shuapkho, counseled by their diviner, brought at last a ram from the village of Blo that had four ears and four horns and gave it to the water, and only then did Iakhsar rise from the lake and fly up to settle on the peak of Karat’e above Likoki, where his shrine stands to this day. It is a scene the highlands give to Iakhsar and to no other of their heroes: the demon-slayer made unclean by his own killing, held captive in the place of his victory, and recovered from the poisoned water only by a sacrifice the whole community must find and bring.

The name and how it reaches the record

Iakhsar (Georgian იახსარი; in prose commonly Iakhsar) is one of the khvtishvili — the “children of god,” the deified hero-sons who stand between the supreme god and the human world in the sacred order of the northeastern Georgian highlands. Above them all sits Ghmerti, invoked here as Morige Ghmerti, “God the Director,” who orders the world from the ninth sky and is too remote to be addressed except through his children; between the summit and the shrines the tradition sets Kviria, the mediator who carries divine justice down from the high god to the powers below. The khvtishvili are the ones a community actually turns to — a host of shrine-deities, each with a name, an office, and a stretch of country to guard, whose common work is to protect people, secure the herds and the harvests, and make war on the devi, the many-headed ogres who live in families of nine brothers and press up into the middle world from beneath the earth. Iakhsar is a war-maker among them, named with Kopala as the strongest of the children of god and, in the highland telling, his sworn brother and companion in the war that cleared the land of the devi.

His genealogy is told the way Kopala’s is. In the folklore the Georgian ethnographers recorded, Iakhsar was not born a god. He had been a mortal man — in the mountain telling a devout worshiper of God, a saintly figure — to whom Morige Ghmerti granted supernatural power, arms, and a station among the divine so that he might fight and destroy the devi who were devouring people; so blessed, he became one of the human-born khvtishvili, a man raised to the pitch of a war-leader and seated in a shrine. The two heroes are paired throughout the tradition but never merged: the children of god are said to have declared their war of conquest under Kopala and Iakhsar together, and it is the pair who drive the surviving demons down below the ground. What Kopala’s own account carries — the doubled boulder cast across the valley, the strongest of the ogres, the paired niches that set the two demon-slayers side by side in stone — belongs there; what comes to the record from Iakhsar’s own side is a separate cycle and a separate cult, his own weapon, his own pursuit, his own shrines and his own festival.

None of this reaches us from an ancient text. No classical geographer names Iakhsar; there is no inscription, no medieval chronicle. The figure is reconstructed wholly from the modern-era highland religion — from the living shrine practice of Pshavi and Khevsureti and from the folklorists who climbed the valleys to record it. The foundational inventory is Vera Bardavelidze’s three-volume illustrated catalog of the shrines of Pshavi, Khevsureti, and Tusheti, the fullest register of the sanctuaries in which powers like Iakhsar are seated; Zurab Kiknadze (1933–2022), in Kartuli Mitologia I: Jvari da Saqmo (1996), set the shrine-and-commune system into its most sustained modern analysis; and Georges Charachidzé, in Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne (Maspero, 1968, with a preface by Georges Dumézil), read the highland demon-war as a structure, tracing the logic that runs from valley to valley beneath the local variants. The ethnographer Kevin Tuite has carried the Khevsur material — the storm read as the heroes’ warfare, the sacrifice, the shrine-oracle — into the Western literature. Whether the system they describe preserves an archaic pre-Christian stratum or took its present shape in medieval and later centuries is the question that runs under the whole highland religion, argued out at length in the account of Ghmerti and not reopened here.

The whip and the finished war

Where Kopala is the mace, Iakhsar is the whip. The distinction is exact in the tradition and it is more than a matter of arms. The divine smith Pirkusha forged Kopala’s mace and iron bow for the breaking of many-headed skulls at close quarters and the hunting of demons at reach; Iakhsar’s implement is the lash, the instrument of a pursuit carried to its end, and it is the whip that his cult still hangs upon his icon-flag. His signature deed is not a trial of strength across a valley but a hunt run down to the last of the quarry — the exterminating chase that finishes the war the two heroes declare together.

The tradition gives him his own campaign. Ordered by Morige Ghmerti to leave no devi alive, Iakhsar made his way secretly to a place called Saparavi Qeli on the Khashari ridge and lay in wait there for the dev Muza; he killed him, and then went down to Khashari itself to destroy the demons seated in it. Chasing another devi out of Pshavi and over the ridge into Khevsureti, he overtook it at Roshka and cast his whip; the demon ducked behind a great boulder, and the lash struck the stone and split it clean in two. The split rock still stands above Roshka, counted among the natural monuments of the district, the mark of his weapon left on the ground the way the toponyms of these mountains everywhere carry the war down into the visible world.

The deepest scene of the cycle is the lake. Pursuing a devi into Lake Abudelauri — one of the high glacial lakes below the Chaukhi massif near Roshka — Iakhsar killed it in the water, but the demon shed so much fouling blood as it died that the hero was trapped in the bloodied lake and could not come out. He lay in it three years. The people of Shuapkho, when their shrine went silent, set a diviner to learn what was wanted; the diviner told them to reclaim the lake, and, after the three years, a seer counseled the sacrifice of a ram from the village of Blo that bore four ears and four horns. When the four-horned ram was given, Iakhsar rose from the water and flew up to the peak of Karat’e above the village of Likoki, and there the people raised his shrine — a bell-tower on the height where the exterminator came at last to rest. This is the structural signature Charachidzé and Kiknadze read across the highland demon-war, and it is Iakhsar who carries it most starkly: the hero who purifies the land is made unclean by the killing itself, held in the very water he cleared, and must be recovered from it by a rite the whole community performs. The four-eared, four-horned ram is the price of his return — a beast marked out as extraordinary for an extraordinary release.

The Green Lake of Abudelauri below the Chaukhi wall, near Roshka in Khevsureti — the highland tradition’s water into which Iakhsar chased a devi and in which, fouled by the demon’s blood, he lay three winters until a four-horned ram from Blo set him free. Paata Vardanashvili, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

His office follows from the deed. Iakhsar is the specialist of the war brought to a close — the khvtishvili whose jurisdiction is the extermination that makes the middle world habitable, and whose story is not a single victory but a march, from the Pshav gorges over the watershed into the remotest Khevsur country. His other powers are the ordinary powers of a seated khati raised to a war-leader’s pitch: he guards the communes that hold him, secures their cattle and their crops, and protects the stranger who asks his aid. The storm over these ridges is read, here as with his brother, as the heroes’ warfare still going on overhead — the frame Tuite sets out in his study of lightning, sacrifice, and possession in the traditional religions of the Caucasus, where the lightning-stroke, the demon-war, and the trance of the shrine-oracle belong to one field of meaning. The whip that split the Roshka stone is heard again in every crack of thunder over the gorges.

The shrines and the road they mark

Iakhsar’s chief seat lies on a precipitous, grassy spur above the village of Shuapkho, the center of Pshavi proper. The precinct is a fenced enclosure holding an altar among several half-ruined stone buildings — chief among them a bell-tower, which the Georgians call sazare (საზარე), and a long, low hall, the darbazi (დარბაზი), in which the shrine’s ritual beer was once brewed and stored and in which its cult objects are kept: the sacred flag, the candlesticks, the bowls, and the knife for the offerings. Other structures stand among the trees behind the altar — a granary among them — the remains of a cult once larger and more complex than the one the twentieth century left. Iakhsar is not the deity of Shuapkho alone; he is the clanic power of the wider Kistauri commune, and other shrines to him stand across the highland districts, in Khevsureti and as far as Dartlo in Tusheti.

His second great seat carries the cult to the far edge of the Georgian world. At the village of Amgha, in Arkhoti — the remotest district of Khevsureti, north of the main Caucasus watershed in the border country toward Ingushetia — stands a shrine of Iakhsar known as Iakhsar Descended-as-a-Pillar, set beside the supreme cross of that valley. Arkhoti opens toward the Vainakh world of the Argun and Assa gorges, and the shrine order of this border zone was shared across community lines, the sanctuaries honored by neighboring highland peoples on both sides of the divide — a country of raid and of sworn brotherhood at once, held here without taking a side. That the same power seats himself at the sheltered spur above Shuapkho and again at Amgha in the high border land is the map of his story written into stone: the two poles of a campaign route that runs the length of the demon-war, from the Pshav gorges where it began to the last Khevsur valley under the ridge.

The road from Roshka toward Arkhoti, the remotest Khevsur district north of the watershed, where a shrine of Iakhsar stands at Amgha in the border land toward Ingushetia — the far end of the route his cult remembers. Jelger Groeneveld, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Each of these precincts is one of the jvari-khati — the sanctuaries of the shrine-and-commune order that organizes the whole religious life of these mountains, and whose working system is set out in full under jvari-khati. What is done within Iakhsar’s enclosures — the sacrifices, the blessing of the beer, the oaths sworn before the flag, the taboos that hedge the holy ground — belongs to the closed life of a living cult, and is set down here only at the folklorist’s distance, as public record and not as instruction. The point that concerns Iakhsar is plainer: his shrines mark not a single spot where a demon fell but the ends of a whole march, and the community that keeps them keeps a route.

Iakhsroba

That route is walked again once a year. The festival of Iakhsroba is kept in July at the Shuapkho shrine — the 2015 edition fell on Saturday, 18 July — and the observance re-enacts the war it commemorates. The community raises the icon’s flag with the whip hung upon it, the very lash with which the hero killed the demon, and processes out of Pshavi toward Khevsureti along the road Iakhsar took against the devi. The Khevsur kin over the ridge answer the procession in their own part, brewing the beer and bringing the four-horned, four-eared ram of the story, so that the sacrifice that once freed Iakhsar from the lake is offered again in its season. The feast belongs to the great highland summer of the shrines, the roving cycle of khatoba that runs from sanctuary to sanctuary through July and August; and what it does, year on year, is to hold the whole shape of the campaign in a single day’s walking — the flag, the whip, the road, the ram — so that the tradition is not merely told but retraced across the country it happened in.

Under the Cross, and the keeping of it

Iakhsar’s cult runs, like the whole jvari-khati order, alongside Georgian Orthodoxy rather than against it. The Pshavs and the Khevsurs are Georgian Orthodox communities who have kept the shrine practice of the mountains beside the church — nominally Christian in frame, the khvtishvili holding their precincts under the saints’ names, the two grown together over the long centuries since the eastern-Georgian highlands turned to Christianity. The syncretism itself is treated in the account of the jvari-khati order and in the neighboring shrine entries; here it is enough to mark that a hero who chased a demon into a lake and was raised again by a four-horned ram keeps his festival in a Christian province, in a July that also belongs to the church’s calendar, without the one dissolving the other.

The tradition that carries him is a living one, and it has been tested. The Soviet decades pressed hard on the highland religion, thinning the shrine practice and driving much of it out of the open, and Arkhoti and the high Khevsur valleys emptied as their people were resettled or drawn down to the lowlands. What might have been lost was in large part saved on the page — by the record of Sergi Makalatia and the folklore collections, by Bardavelidze’s shrine-catalog, by Charachidzé’s structural reading and Kiknadze’s analysis of the shrine-and-commune system, by Tuite’s fieldwork on the storm and the sacrifice and the oracle. Yet the cult is not only a documented one. Iakhsroba is still kept above Shuapkho, the flag still raised with the whip on it, the road still walked toward Khevsureti by Pshav and Khevsur families who return to the precinct each summer to tend it. Iakhsar belongs to the temi, the sworn commune of the Pshavs, and it is the commune that keeps him.

The war Kopala is remembered for leading, Iakhsar is remembered for finishing. Where the mace-bearer’s shrines stand at single points of victory, his mark the length of a hunt run to its end — up out of the Pshav gorges, over the ridge at Roshka where the whip split the stone, down through the Khevsur valleys, and on to Amgha in the border country beyond the watershed. He is the second hero of a war more often told from the first’s side, and the specialist of the part of it no one else finishes: the pursuit that does not stop while a single demon still breathes, and the sacrifice that brings the hunter himself back out of the water he had to foul to win.

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