Khakhmati

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An anvil and a hammer. A sieve, a hand-bell, a panduri with its three strings, a set of scales. These are among the things the Cross of Khakhmati is said to have carried up out of Kajeti — the underworld kingdom of the kajis, a race of demon-smiths of matchless skill — and to have shared out, one useful object at a time, among the gods of the Georgian highlands. In the telling the shrine keeps of itself, the raid on the demon-realm was not a plunder for gold but for the equipment of ordinary life: the tools that let a people forge iron, sift grain, weigh a load, ring a summons, and make music. The loot of that raid is civilization itself, taken back from the powers who had kept it below ground. And the shrine that took it stands at the edge of the last inhabited village on the road to the Bear-Cross pass, where the highland world tips over the watershed and looks north into Chechen country.

The last village under the Bear-Cross

Khakhmati is a small stone village in the upper valley of the Pshavis Aragvi, in Khevsureti — the historical highland district of eastern Georgia that lies today in Dusheti Municipality of the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region. It sits at roughly 1,940 meters, in the string of hamlets that make up the Gudani community: after Gudani come Ghuli, Biso, and Khakhmati, about 4.5 kilometers east of Gudani and a kilometer from Biso. Beyond it the track climbs to the Datvisjvari pass — datvis jvari, the “Bear-Cross” — at some 2,676 meters, the saddle that has always divided the two halves of Khevsureti and marks the drainage divide: south of it the water runs down the Aragvi toward the Mtkvari and the lowlands of Kartli; north of it the Argun carries the same mountains down into Chechnya. Khakhmati is the last settlement before that hinge. It is a place emptying out. Where the district counted thousands in the nineteenth century, the whole of Khevsureti fell to a few hundred by the 2014 census, and Khakhmati now holds only a handful of people through the winter, its towers standing half-abandoned above the road.

At the edge of the houses, where the track leaves the settlement, lies the reason the village is remembered. There an extensive sacred enclosure — a nishi of altars, standing shrines, and consecrated trees — surrounds the master-sanctuary of the place: the Khakhmatis Jvari, “the Cross of Khakhmati,” known also as Giorgi Nagvarmshvenieri, Giorgi “the cross-adorned.” In the living religion of these mountains this is a jvari-khati. The Khevsurs call their sanctuaries jvari (“cross”), khati (“icon”), or salotsavi (“place of prayer”), and each is the earthly seat of a khvtishvili, a “child of god” — one of the deified hero-sons who stand between the remote high god Ghmerti and the human world. The child seated at Khakhmati is Giorgi, the Khevsur-Pshav form of St George. To call the site a “church” would misname it; it is a precinct, a holy ground with its stone altars and its trees, tended not by a priest of the diocese but by the community’s own shrine-elder.

Khakhmati reaches the record along three lines kept carefully apart. It comes down first through the living tradition and the Georgian folklorists who climbed the valleys to record it — Vera Bardavelidze, whose illustrated catalog of the highland shrines runs to three volumes; Mikheil Chikovani and Zurab Kiknadze, who set the shrine mythology into a system; and, for the comparative frame, the ethnographer Kevin Tuite. It comes down second through the shrine’s own oral myth-cycle, the story of the raid on Kajeti that the sanctuary tells about its own origin. And it comes down third, most prosaically, through the geographers’ gazetteer, which fixes the village at 42°31′ N, 45°00′ E and files it among the hamlets of the Gudani community. The three registers do not always agree, and the disagreements are part of the record.

Khakhmati, the last inhabited village on the road toward the Datvisjvari pass, its stone houses standing largely empty above the track. Aleksey Muhranoff, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The house of the demon-conqueror

Among the sanctuaries of Khevsureti, Khakhmatis Jvari is one of the great powers. It was worshiped not by its own villagers alone but across community lines — by Pshavians from over the ridge, by the people of the Gudamakari gorge, and by Chechen neighbors from the northern slope of the pass. Its authority reaches beyond the district because its patron is a conqueror, and the shrine is, in the plainest sense the tradition gives it, a demon-conqueror’s house.

The story it tells of itself is a raid on the world below. In the first days, the Cross of Khakhmati is said to have ridden against Kajeti — Kajaveti — the underground realm of the kajis. The kajis are, in the highland mythology, a wealthy demon-race of unmatched smiths, “magic-wielding, demonic metal-workers” who hold in their fortress the whole apparatus of craft. Giorgi broke their army and took their goods. In the fullest scholarly account, the one the ethnographer Kevin Tuite assembled from the Khevsur shrine-legends, Giorgi “takes possession of their metalworking equipment, their treasures, a one-horned cow, and the daughters of the king of the Kajes” — and these he divided among the khvtishvili, the children of god of Pshav-Khevsureti, so that the tools of the demons became the endowment of the shrines. The signature objects the tradition names — the anvil and hammer, the sieve, the bell, the panduri, the scales — are the useful arts themselves, wrested from below and parceled out above. In this the Cross of Khakhmati does not stand alone. The raid on the impregnable kaji fortress is a joint campaign of the highland gods, and the demon-war belongs above all to Kopala, the mace-bearing demon-slayer whose iron weapons were forged by the smith-god Pirkusha and who, with his companion Iakhsar, drove the ogre-devi underground. Kopala’s own principal seats lie elsewhere, at Karati and Udzilaurta; Khakhmati’s dedication is to Giorgi. But the two are the same kind of power. As Tuite puts it, the cult of Giorgi the ogre-killer “considerably overlaps” that of Kopala, and the Khevsur St George is a demon-slayer before he is anything a diocese would recognize.

From that raid the shrine also received a goddess. Among the kaji king’s daughters carried back to the middle world was Samdzimari — the name, from the Georgian mdzivi, “bead,” reads as “the necklace-wearer,” and is thought to be an epithet rather than an original name. At a shrine she was converted from her demon birth, and, in the tradition’s own phrase, “Samdzimari is made Giorgi’s sister-spouse and is thereafter regarded as a deity.” Her seat is Khakhmati. She is described as a beautiful woman with long blond hair, gold ornaments, and gold slippers, a shape-shifter and a patroness of untamed places whose particular office is oracular: she restores to the shrine-priest his lost connection with the gods. Tuite set her beside Dali, the golden-haired huntress of the Svan mountains far to the west — the two goddesses share the long fair hair, the gold, the dominion over the wild, the ambivalent traffic between the human and the more-than-human. Samdzimari’s companions in the raid are named in the highland tellings — Mzeqali, Asheqali, Tamarqali, sister-goddesses made oracle-priestesses of other shrines — though the number and names vary from valley to valley, and the careful sources fix only Samdzimari herself with certainty. To her the people of the shrine still pray, and what they ask of her is not victory but increase: children, safe birth, the health of women.

So the shrine holds together the two faces the highland powers wear. There is the war-face — Giorgi and Kopala, the breakers of the demons, the protectors against the devi and the souls the demons steal — and there is the fertility-face, and at Khakhmati it is the second that the ordinary supplicant comes for.

Giver of increase

For all its demon-war genealogy, Khakhmatis Jvari is worshiped, day to day, as a giver of life. It is a protector of tillage, of cattle, and of offspring: the patron of the fields and the herds and, above all, of women and their children. The childless came to it asking a son. The horsemen came asking that their mares throw strong foals. The record of the district names the Khakhmati Cross precisely among the shrines venerated as guardians of agriculture, of cattle-breeding, and of fertility — and this is the office Samdzimari, the demon-born goddess turned patroness of childbirth, embodies at its altar. The house that took the tools of civilization from the underworld gives back the increase that civilization lives on.

Its authority runs through two offices that the tradition holds sacred and that the outside record can name only from a distance. The first is the khevisberi, the shrine-elder — chosen by the community and, the highlanders hold, confirmed by the saint’s own sign. Alone among the people he stands at the altar. He offers the sacrifice, brews and blesses the ritual beer, the ludi, heals and intercedes, and speaks for the seated god. The second is the drosha, the sacred banner — the cross-topped standard of the Khevsur shrine, borne by its keeper, the medroshe, before which oaths are sworn and the community bound to its word. What is actually done within the precinct — the order of the sacrifice, the blessing of the beer, the oath at the banner, the taboos that hedge the holy ground and the hunt — belongs to the closed life of a working sanctuary, and is set down here only at the folklorist’s distance, as public record and not as instruction. The point that concerns the meaning of Khakhmati can be stated plainly and without intrusion: this is a place people go to be given something — a child, a calf, a foal, a healing, a settled oath — and the giving is the shrine’s whole reputation.

Mount Sachali above the Datviskhevi — the “Bear-gorge” — in the high Khevsur country toward the watershed pass beyond Khakhmati. Surprizi, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Qaqmatis-jvaroba

The shrine’s own great feast is Qaqmatis-jvaroba, “the festival of the Khakhmati Cross.” It is reckoned the first of the summer festivals of Khevsureti and among the most solemn in the province, running four or five days. It belongs to the season the highlanders call Atengenoba — Atnigenoba in the neighboring valleys of Tusheti — the roving cycle of shrine-feasts that opens about a hundred days after Easter and moves from sanctuary to sanctuary through the height of summer, mid-July into August. The name carries an odd bit of church history up into the mountains: Atengenoba is the feast of St Athenogenes, the fourth-century bishop of Sebasteia who was burned with his disciples under Diocletian — a distant Anatolian martyr whose name, and little else of his story, fixed itself to the great highland summer of the shrines.

The festival is the shrine at full strength. The banners come out; the community purifies itself; the khevisberi presides; sheep are offered to the seated god. A beast consecrated for the altar is marked with a strip of white cloth tied between its horns, and the horns of former offerings hang on the shrine-stones, so that the khati wears the memory of its sacrifices in bone. The ludi is brewed and drunk. These are the observances a Christian province keeps in mid-July for a warrior child-of-god who once raided hell for an anvil — Christian in the calendar and in the saint’s name, highland in everything the day actually does.

Under the sign of the Cross

The historical turn behind all this is the conversion of Kartli. The eastern-Georgian kingdom — Caucasian Iberia, whose capital was Mtskheta, and which shares nothing with the Iberia of the Spanish peninsula but a Greek geographer’s word — took Christianity as its state religion under King Mirian III and the missionary Nino, about 337 CE. The lowlands became Christian first; the high valleys followed in their own time and on their own terms. That fuller story belongs to the Caucasian Iberians; what matters at Khakhmati is the shape of the settlement the highlands made. They did not exchange their gods for the new faith so much as fold the new faith into the old order. St George did not replace the demon-slayer of the mountains; he became him. Giorgi the khvtishvili and Kopala the ogre-breaker are one kind of power, and the shrine that a modern map labels a sanctuary of St George is, in its own account, the house of the being who conquered Kajeti. The most sacred altar in Khevsureti is at once consecrated to a Christian saint and seated on the pre-Christian raider of the underworld.

How much of the older layer the shrine actually preserves is a real and unsettled question, and the scholarship divides on Samdzimari in particular. One reading takes the Samdzimari–Giorgi story as a highland recasting of familiar Orthodox material — St George and the dragon, the warrior-saint and the rescued princess, retold in Caucasian dress. Tuite argued the other way: that the figure of the demon-born goddess made a shrine-oracle, so like the Svan huntress Dali and so unlike anything in the hagiography, preserves an archaic Caucasian stratum the Christian legend cannot account for. The disagreement is not decorative. It is the whole problem of the highland religion in miniature — whether these shrines carry something genuinely ancient up out of the pre-Christian Caucasus, or whether the ancientness is an effect of medieval and later retelling — and it remains genuinely open.

The tradition that keeps Khakhmati is a living one, and it has been tested. It came through the Soviet century tended again as one of the chief houses of the jvari-khati religion, while the fuller account of how the highland shrine world survived belongs to the Svans. What can be said of Khakhmati is narrower and concrete. The sacred enclosure at the village edge is at once a functioning sanctuary and a documented monument of Khevsur heritage; the summer feast is kept; the banner still comes out. A village that empties a little more each winter holds, at its edge, the house of a god who once went down to the demons and came back with the tools by which people live — and the tools, in the telling, are still being handed round.

→ Related: Kopala · The Lashari Shrine · Ghmerti · Dali · Ochopintre · Armazi · Armaztsikhe Bagineti · Vani Sanctuary · The Svans · The Colchians · The Iberians Caucasus