Jvari-Khati

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A Khevsur climbs to a shoulder of his mountain and points, and the thing he points at has three shapes at once. There is the walled ground of stone before him — low altars, a standing shrine-building or two, an old oak that no axe has touched, the horns of former offerings whitening along the wall. There is the being seated on that ground, a khvtishvili, a “child of God,” who holds the valley and everyone born into it. And there is the cross-topped banner set into the masonry, brought out and carried through the crowd when the festival comes. He names all three with one word. Among the Khevsurs it is jvari, “cross”; among the Pshavs it is khati, “icon” or “image”; everywhere it is salotsavi, the “place of prayer.” The word is not loose across the god, his house, and his flag. It is exact in each, because in the religion of the northeastern Georgian highlands the three are one thing, named once.

That single term is the hinge of a whole order. Khati denotes the person — one of the deified hero-sons whom the highland theology sets between the remote high god and the human world. It denotes the precinct — the built and consecrated ground on its height that is the seat, the earthly house, of that person. And it denotes the likeness — the drosha, the icon-banner, that is his image carried in procession. God, house, and emblem under one noun; and around that noun a system runs. There is a priest who alone may stand at the altar, an oracle through whom the seated power speaks, appointed stewards who brew the sacred beer and bake the offering-breads, a banner-bearer, a calendar of feasts, and a fixed order of obligation that binds each community to its shrine. What follows is that working order — the machinery a jvari-khati is, over and above the god it names.

Three registers of the record

The order reaches us along three lines that must be kept apart, because each can bear a different weight. The first and primary authority is the living tradition itself: the shrines still tended, the festivals still climbed to each summer, the families who leave the plain in July to return to a gorge their grandparents were moved out of. The Khevsurs and the Pshavs are Georgian Orthodox communities whose shrine service and church membership run together, and the system is described here in the present tense.

The second is the record — the early-twentieth-century ethnography that caught the tradition while it was still generating oaths and oracles and offerings. The Georgian ethnographer Sergi Makalatia (1893–1974) climbed the provinces one by one and published Pshavi in 1934 and Khevsureti in 1935, part of a series of provincial monographs. Vera Bardavelidze (1899–1970) compiled the fullest inventory of the sacred sites themselves — a three-volume illustrated catalog of the shrines, altars, and niches of Pshavi, Khevsureti, and Tusheti, several hundred pages of descriptions, photographs, and measured drawings, issued after her death. The third is the scholarship that set the material into a system: Mikheil Chikovani and, most fully, Zurab Kiknadze, whose Kartuli Mitologia I: Jvari da Saqmo — “Georgian Mythology I: The Shrine and Its People” (Kutaisi: Gelati Academy of Sciences, 1996) — takes its very title from this entry’s subject, the jvari and the saqmo, the shrine and the community it holds; Georges Charachidzé’s structural Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne (Paris: Maspéro, 1968), prefaced by Georges Dumézil, built expressly on the two neighboring peoples, the Pshav and the Khevsur; and the English-language fieldwork of Kevin Tuite.

Two matters that the shrines raise are argued out elsewhere and are not reopened here. The theology of the khvtishvili — how the children-of-God stand under the high god who orders the sky, and whether the whole system preserves an archaic pre-Christian stratum or is substantially a medieval and later development — is the business of the Ghmerti entry, and one marked line will have to stand for it. The individual houses — the demon-conqueror’s sanctuary at Khakhmati, the war-god’s cross at the Lashari shrine with its province of twelve communities — keep their own cycles, their own patrons, and their own festivals. What is held in common, the order that every such house shares, is the matter here.

The precinct and its grades

A jvari-khati is, before it is anything else, a piece of ground. The precinct is a nishi — a walled or open enclosure on a height above the village, sometimes no more than a low platform of altars, sometimes a complex of standing schist-roofed shrine-buildings, a treasury for donated goods (a kvrivi), and in the wealthier houses a small belfry (a sazare) for the bell rung in the observances. Around and within it stands a sacred grove whose trees no one may cut: the great oaks and ashes belong to the khati and not to the men below, and in the highland tellings not even a lord could fell them. On the walls hang the horns of the beasts given up in former years, so that the shrine wears the memory of its own sacrifices in bone.

The ground is not uniform in its holiness; it is graded, and the grades are spatial and strict. There is an outer congregation-ground that the community may enter, and there are inner courts that only the shrine’s own servants approach. Women do not enter the inner shrine. The same purity-order that fixes who may stand where is kept, at the edge of the settlements, by separate structures where women pass the days of childbirth and menstruation — the samrevlo — a custom recorded soberly by the ethnographers and named here at that same public-record distance, without gloss.

Charachidzé’s structural reading pressed the point about the ground itself further. In his analysis the highland land is divided in kind, not merely in use: there is the soil that belongs to the god, held by the khati as an institution and worked on the shrine’s behalf, and there is the ordinary land of the temi, the descent-community. The distinction is the beginning of the shrine’s standing as more than a holy spot. A jvari-khati owns property — fields, herds, sometimes vineyards far down in the lowlands whose wine or grain comes up for its festivals — and governs a community. It is at once a sacred person, a consecrated ground, and something very like a landed institution with its own treasury and its own subjects.

Brewing in Khevsureti — the double-fermented barley beer, the ludi, prepared for a shrine’s festival. Its making is the year’s chief charge of the dasturi, the appointed stewards, under the shrine-elder’s oversight. Surprizi, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The offices that work the order

The order is not run by the god alone but by named human offices, and the offices are as fixed as the ground. The first is the khevisberi — also called the khutsesi — the shrine-elder and priest. He is elected by the community, and the highlanders hold that the saint himself confirms the choice by a sign. Alone among the people he stands at the altar. He pronounces the invocations and the blessings, offers the sacrifice, blesses the ritual beer, heals and intercedes with the seated power on the community’s behalf, and keeps the shrine’s calendar and its treasury. He is the point at which the khati’s authority becomes speech and act; everything the sanctuary does in public, it does through him.

Through a second office the khati speaks in its own voice. The kadagi is the oracle — a person, woman or man, held to be chosen by the deity itself to announce its will, its demands and warnings, and the cause of its displeasure. The office joins the priest’s without replacing it: where the khevisberi addresses the god, the kadagi is addressed by the god. It is set out at length in its own place, and is named here only at the reporting distance the folklorists themselves kept, with no account of its calling (see Kadagi).

The daily labor of the shrine falls to the dasturi, the year’s appointed stewards. Under the elder’s oversight they brew the sacred beer in the shrine’s own brewhouse, bake the ritual breads, keep the fire, and prepare the offering; the office rotates, a term of service owed to the khati. The medroshe bears the drosha, the cross-topped banner that is the shrine’s image and before which the community is bound. Below these, in some houses of the far Khevsur valleys, stood the lowest rank of all: the khatis diasakhlisi, the “hostess of the shrine” — an older woman, past childbearing, who kept a house on the shrine’s ground, observed the same purity-prohibitions as the male servants, and baked the offering-breads, but was barred from the central acts of the rite. The gradation of the ground is answered by a gradation of persons: the whole community stands outside, its elected servants within, and the priest at the altar alone.

The beer, the offering, and the round

At the center of the shrine’s public life is a brew. The ludi is the sacred beer of the highland cult — a double-fermented ale of barley or wheat flour, boiled, filtered, worked with mountain herbs, and fermented a second time to a distinctive aromatic strength — and its making is the dasturi’s chief charge of the year. It is brewed in the shrine’s brewhouse, blessed by the khevisberi, and drunk by the assembled community at the festival. With it go the ritual breads, the kada, baked for the occasion, and the beasts consecrated for the altar — sheep and calves offered to the seated god. A beast marked for sacrifice wears a strip of white cloth bound between its horns; those horns, afterward, join the others on the wall.

The offering itself is rendered here at the distance the record keeps. That there is a sacrifice, that the beer is brewed and blessed and shared, that the men wheel in the perkhuli — the interlinked round-dance — before the precinct: this much is public and is the shape the festival wears to any who climb to it. What is done within the walls — the order of the sacrifice, the words spoken over the fire, the oath sworn at the banner — belongs to the closed life of a working sanctuary and is not set out. The meaning that concerns the jvari-khati as a system lies in the shape, not the operative detail: a community brings its god beer, bread, and blood, and takes back a blessing on its year.

That exchange gathers, above all, into the shrine’s own feast. Khatoba — the festival of the khati — is a movable one, reckoned from the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul at the end of June and falling through July, kept at Gudanis Jvari, the principal cross of Khevsureti, at the Pshav sanctuaries of Lashari and Iakhsari, and at the shrine of nearly every highland village in its turn. It belongs to the wider summer cycle the mountains call Atengenoba — Atnigenoba in Tusheti — which opens about a hundred days after Easter and carries an odd fragment of church history up into the high country: the name is that of St Athenogenes of Sebasteia, a fourth-century martyr whose feast fixed itself, and little else of whose story followed, to the great highland summer of the shrines. For its days the banners come out, the beer is brewed and drunk, the sacrifice is made, and the round is danced before the walls.

Ts’esi and the binding of the commune

What holds a community to its shrine, year after year, is not sentiment but ts’esi — the fixed order of obligation. Each descent-community, each temi, owes its khati a set thing: the offerings due, the festivals that must be attended, the calendar that must be kept, the term of service as dasturi when the rotation comes round. The population of Pshavi is reckoned in twelve temi, each bound to its own sanctuary and all of them, above their local crosses, to the one great shrine of the province; the arrangement reads, in the plainest terms the tradition itself uses, as a kind of lordship, the khati a sovereign and the commune its subjects. To be born into a temi is to be born a vassal of its cross, and ts’esi is the schedule of what that vassalage costs.

The obligation runs both ways. In return for the offerings and the attendance, the khati holds the country: it protects the fields and the herds, guards against the evils that press up from below, renders justice at its festival, and stands surety for the oaths sworn at its banner. The shrine is thus the axis of the social order as much as the religious one — the point at which a scattered highland people becomes, for the space of a feast, a single body with a single lord. The daily working of that order, the way the obligation shapes life in the Argun and Aragvi gorges through the year, belongs to the accounts of the Khevsurs and the Pshavs themselves; what the jvari-khati contributes is the frame — the shrine as the institution that owns the land, keeps the calendar, and collects the obligation that makes a commune out of kin.

The church, the Soviet century, and the keeping

The whole order runs alongside the Church, not against it, and has for many centuries. When Kartli — the Caucasian Iberia, wholly unrelated to the Iberia of the Spanish peninsula — took Christianity as its state faith around 337 CE, the lowlands turned first and the high valleys followed on their own terms, folding the new faith into the old precinct rather than trading one for the other. St George stands over many a khati as the Khevsur-Pshav Giorgi; Christian saints’ names sit on older powers; khatoba keeps a Christian calendar over a rite of sacrifice. The shrine religion did not survive Christianization as a holdout against it but absorbed it, so that a jvari-khati today is at once a pre-Christian seat and a Christian one, and the men who serve it are members of the Georgian Orthodox Church.

That the order can be described at all in such detail is owed to the record. The ethnography of Makalatia and the catalog of Bardavelidze fixed the offices — down to the khatis diasakhlisi, the lowest of the shrine’s servants — and the calendar and the sacred topography while the tradition was still breathing. The twentieth century then pressed hard on the thing they had recorded. Soviet hostility to religion thinned the shrine practice and drove much of it out of the open; the forced resettlement of Khevsur villages down to the plain in 1951 emptied whole gorges, and the census of a district that had counted some six thousand souls in 1873 fell away across the century. Yet the order held and returns. Khatoba is kept across the shrines each July, the banners brought out and the beer brewed as before; and Shatiloba, the festival of the fortress-village of Shatili, gathers the returning families and the diaspora on a weekend in September for horse-racing, wrestling, and feasting beneath the towers.

The scholarship that reconstructed the system — Charachidzé’s structural analysis, Bardavelidze’s pantheon and shrine work, Kiknadze’s Jvari da Saqmo, and Tuite’s fieldwork on the oracle, on lightning and sacrifice, and on the shrine’s “feudal” order — also framed the one large question the jvari-khati leaves unsettled: whether the system carries an archaic pre-Christian layer up out of deep antiquity, or is substantially a medieval and later creation. That debate is argued in full where the theology of the children-of-God is argued, and is not adjudicated here. What can be said without adjudication is narrower and concrete. A word that means god, house, and flag at once still names something living in the northeastern Georgian mountains: a walled ground on a height, a power seated on it, a banner in the wall, a priest at the altar and stewards at the fire, a beer brewed and a beast given and a round danced — and, binding all of it, the fixed obligation of a people to the cross that holds their valley.

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