Kopala

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He weighed the first stone in his hand and let it fall. It was too light. The devi had thrown their boulder clean across the valley, from crag to opposite crag, and named the distance the measure of strength; a stone that light would never carry. So he found a second and pressed it against the first, the two locked together in his grip, and threw them as one. At the moment they left his hand the god Kviria struck the mass with his whip, and the doubled stone flew past the ogres’ cast and came down on the roof of their fortress at Tsikhetgori. This is how the highlands of Pshavi tell the strength of Kopala, and the telling is exact about the thing that matters: he is the being who out-throws the giants, and the weapon that decides it is not the boulder but the arm, and behind the arm the mace that gives him his name.

The mace that names him

Kopala (Georgian კოპალა) reaches the record as one of the khvtishvili — the “children of god,” the deified hero-sons who stand between the high 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 rules the ninth sky from a golden throne and is too remote to be addressed except through his children. The khvtishvili are the ones addressed: a host of shrine-deities, each with a name and an office and a stretch of country to guard, whose common work is to protect people, secure the crops and the herds, and make war on the powers pressing up from the world below. Kopala is the war-maker among them — the mightiest of the demon-slayers, the one to whom the others turn when a demon will yield to no one else.

His name is his weapon. The Georgian kopi is a mace, a war-club, and Kopala is the club made a person — the god who is his own bludgeon. The tradition is precise about how he came by it. In the telling the folklorists recorded, Kopala was not born a god but was once a mortal man, to whom Morige Ghmerti granted supernatural power, clothing, and arms; the oppressed community of the Khornauli was the first to sacrifice its lands and its oxen to him and beg his aid against the devi, and with that sacrifice his warfare began. His arms were divine work. His mace and an iron bow were forged for him by Pirkusha, the blacksmith of the gods — a Caucasian counterpart to the Ossetian smith-god Kurdalægon and the Circassian Tlepsh, the divine metalworker who arms the heroes of the whole Caucasus. To know Kopala’s genealogy is in large part to know his implements: the mace that names him and the iron bow of Pirkusha are not attributes hung on a finished god but the very means by which a strong man became the strongest of the children of god.

He does not fight alone. Kopala is paired, throughout the tradition, with Iakhsar — a fellow demon-slaying khvtishvili who has his own cult and his own shrines, and who is named beside Kopala as the other leader of the war on the ogres. In the folk epics the children of god declare their war of conquest under the two of them together, Kopala and Iakhsar, and it is the pair who drive the surviving demons underground. They must be held distinct even so: Iakhsar is a separate power with his own festival and his own sanctuaries, joined to Kopala in the story but not merged with him.

None of this comes from an ancient text. The classical geographers who noticed the eastern Caucasus are silent on Kopala; there is no Strabo passage, no inscription, no medieval chronicle that names him. The figure described here is reconstructed entirely from the modern-era highland cult — from the living oral tradition of Pshavi and Khevsureti and from the great Georgian folklorists who went up the valleys to record it. Chief among them is Vera Bardavelidze (1899–1970), whose three-volume illustrated catalog of the traditional shrines of Pshavi, Khevsureti, and Tusheti — running to some 500 pages of descriptions, photographs, and architectural drawings — remains the fullest inventory of the sanctuaries in which powers like Kopala are seated; and later Mikheil Chikovani and Zurab Kiknadze, who set the shrine mythology into a system. Alongside the ethnography stands the literary refraction of the Pshavian poet Vazha-Pshavela (1861–1915), whose verse — the tragic mountain-shrine world of “Aluda Ketelauri” and its kin — preserves the ethos of the highland warrior and his sanctuary from the inside. Kopala is thus a well-attested god of a peculiar kind: attested not from antiquity but from a tradition that was still being practiced when it was written down, and which for that reason can be described in unusual detail even as the depth of its roots stays a matter of scholarly argument.

The Aragvi valley of Pshavi near Chargali — the highland gorges where the storm was read as Kopala’s warfare, and above whose villages his sanctuaries mark the sites of his victories. Jelger Groeneveld, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The war on the devi

The enemy Kopala was made to fight are the devi (plural devebi) — the ogre-giants of the lower world, many-headed and monstrous, whose severed heads grow back if they are cut off, and who live in families of nine brothers in caverns and fortresses of stone. The strongest of them is named Bakbak-Devi. In the mythic geography they belong to the black world beneath the earth, and their crime in the story is that they had come up into the middle world, the red world of humankind, and seized it: preying on people, holding the good land, making settlement impossible. The war of the khvtishvili is a war of reconquest. Led by Kopala and Iakhsar, the children of god drove the devi out of the middle world and forced the survivors down below the ground, and only then could human beings take the land and live on it undisturbed. Kopala is, in the plainest terms the tradition uses, the reason the country is habitable — the being who cleared it of the monsters who had it first.

The boulder-throwing contest is the signature episode of that war, and it turns, tellingly, on judgment as much as force. Challenged by the devi to a trial of strength — a boulder hurled across the valley — Kopala did not simply throw harder. He assessed the first stone, found it too light for the distance, and answered the challenge by throwing two stones pressed together, so that the mass itself would carry. The decisive stroke was not his alone: Kviria, a hero and son of the gods who serves as mediator between Ghmerti and humankind and as the instrument of divine justice, struck the flying stone with his whip and drove it past the ogres’ throw and down onto their stronghold at Tsikhetgori. In the battle that followed, as the record has it, Kopala and Iakhsar broke the power of the devi and sent them underground. The episode is a compact statement of who Kopala is: stronger than the giants, shrewder than the giants, and backed by the order of heaven, which throws its weight — literally, through Kviria’s lash — behind him.

His weapons carry his meaning, and so does the weather. The mace of Pirkusha is not decoration; it is the instrument with which the many-headed skulls are broken, and the iron bow the reach with which the demons are hunted. And the storm over the Pshav-Khevsur peaks is read as the same war still in progress. When lightning splits the ridges and thunder rolls down the gorges, the old understanding is that Kopala is again fighting the devi overhead — the flash his stroke, the noise the collision of the powers. The ethnographer Kevin Tuite, in his study of lightning, sacrifice, and possession in the traditional religions of the Caucasus, sets this reading of the storm within the wider highland cult, where the lightning-strike, the trance of the shrine-oracle, and the war on the demons belong to one field of meaning. The god who out-threw the giants with a doubled stone is heard, in every mountain storm, still throwing.

The freer of souls

The most distinctive of Kopala’s powers is not the breaking of ogres but the freeing of what they hold. He alone, the tradition says, can overcome the most stubborn of the demons — the ones no lesser power can master — and those demons have a particular prey: the human soul. They seize a person’s soul and keep it, and in the highland understanding this captivity is what madness is. Insanity was named “the disease of the soul,” a sickness not of the body but of the self, caused by a demon’s grip on the soul that animates a person. Against exactly this Kopala is the specialist. Because he can defeat the demon that no one else can, he can wrest the captured soul back out of its hold and return it to the person it belongs to, and so restore the afflicted mind. The demon-slayer is, by the same strength, a healer — the one to whom the mad were brought, so that the being who breaks the powers of the lower world might break the particular power that had taken a particular soul.

That healing office is written into the map of his sanctuaries, which stand where his victories are remembered. His shrine on Mount Karati in Pshavi is the seat from which — in the words the highlanders use of it — the Karati cross fights the evil souls and heals the mentally ill; the paired niches of Karati and Iakhsar-Karati at Arakhija set the two demon-slayers side by side in stone, as the story sets them side by side in the war. And above the village of Magharoskari, in the Aragvi gorge, stands the Kopala icon, at the place where — the tradition holds — Kopala annihilated the devi and took their ground for his own, planting his sanctuary on the very spot the monsters had held. The sanctuaries are thus not arbitrary. Each marks a point where the war touched the earth: a summit where he fights the soul-stealers still, a niche shared with his companion, a height wrested from the demons and kept. What is done at these shrines — the observances by which a community brings its troubles to the seated god, the oaths, the offerings, the taboos of the hunt — belongs to the closed life of a living cult, and is described here only at the distance the folklorists themselves kept, as a matter of public record rather than of instruction. The point that concerns Kopala’s meaning is simpler and is stated plainly in the tradition: this is the god one turns to when a soul has been taken, because he is the one strong enough to take it back.

The Tsikhetgora crossing in the Pshavis Aragvi valley — the ground the highland tradition names for the ogres’ fortress, onto whose roof Kviria’s whip drove Kopala’s doubled stone. Alexjtb, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Under the sign of the Cross

Kopala’s afterlife runs through the Christianization of Georgia, and it runs by fusion rather than by erasure. The kingdom of Kartli — the Caucasian Iberia, the eastern-Georgian realm whose capital was Mtskheta, and which shares nothing with the Iberia of the Spanish peninsula but a Greek geographer’s name — adopted Christianity as its state religion around 337 CE. The full account of that conversion belongs to the story of the Caucasian Iberians; what concerns Kopala is that in the high valleys the new faith did not replace the old shrine religion but layered onto it. The eastern-Georgian highlands became Orthodox in name while the jvari-khati cult of the shrines — the children of god in their precincts, tended by their own elders and oracles — went on, and the two grew together. Kopala’s cult in particular interwove with the veneration of St George, the pre-eminent saint of the Georgian mountains, so that the demon-slayer of the old order and the dragon-slaying warrior-saint of the new stand, in the syncretic shrine, as facets of one protecting power.

His chief seat in this Christianized frame is bound to Khakhmati in Khevsureti, whose great sanctuary is the Khakhmati Cross, identified as Giorgi Nagvarmshvenieri — a form of St George. It was a shrine worshiped across community lines: not only by the Khevsurs but by the Pshavs, by the people of the Gudamakari gorge, and by neighboring Chechens, and it stood as protector of agriculture, of cattle-breeding, and of fertility, the place to which childless women came to ask for a son. In the highland record the shrine of this warrior-saint and the demon-slayer Kopala belong to a single syncretic complex, the pre-Christian vanquisher of the devi and the Christian warrior-saint held together in one cult. Where the older Kopala had cleared the land of monsters, the Christianized Kopala keeps the offices of protector and healer within a nominally Orthodox order — and the land itself still keeps his story, in the toponyms that map his battles onto the ground: a Kopala stone here, a mark of his lash there, the legend written into the places it happened.

The record and its recovery

The tradition that carries Kopala is a living one, and it has been tested. It survived the twentieth century thinned but not erased: the Soviet decades drove much of the shrine religion out of the open, yet Kopala’s own sanctuaries on Mount Karati and above Magharoskari are tended into the present. The fuller story of that highland survival belongs to the Svans. What might have been lost was in large part saved on the page. Bardavelidze’s shrine-catalog, the mythological studies of Kiknadze and Chikovani, the ethnography of Kevin Tuite and others, and — in a different register — the poetry of Vazha-Pshavela together carried Kopala from oral highland memory into the documented record. The reconstruction is a real scholarly achievement and it is also a genuinely contested one: how much of the modern shrine religion preserves an ancient stratum, and how much took shape in medieval and later centuries, is exactly what specialists argue about, and the details of Kopala’s own story shift from valley to valley, told one way on the Aragvi and another over the ridge. What is not in doubt is the shape of the figure at the center of the argument. Among the reconstructed powers of the pre-Christian Georgian world, Kopala stands out as one of the best-attested — the mace-bearer who out-threw the giants, cleared the middle world for human settlement, and reaches into the soul’s own sickness to bring back what the demons have carried off.

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