Kviria

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When a shrine-elder in the Pshav-Khevsur highlands lifts the horn and begins the long praise that opens a feast, the names come in an order, and the order is a doctrine. First is the high god, Morige Ghmerti, who is named but hardly addressed. The very next word is Kviria. He is not the greatest of the powers, and he is not the nearest to the person who has come to pray; he is the one who stands second, and standing second is his whole office. Between the god who orders the ninth sky and the children-of-god seated in their stone precincts down the valleys, a single steward keeps the traffic moving, and it is his name a highlander speaks before any of the shrine-powers he has actually climbed up to petition.

The name kept in the shrines

Kviria (Georgian კვირია) does not reach the record from antiquity. No classical geographer names him, no inscription, no medieval chronicle; the figure is carried instead in the living speech of the shrines and in the folklore the highlanders kept by heart. In the praise-formulas of the northeastern Georgian sanctuaries his place is fixed by position: he is invoked directly after Morige Ghmerti, “God the Director,” and set between the high god above, the khvtishvili — the “children of god” — beside him, and the human community below. The folklore corpus is consistent about what he is. He is “a hero and a son of the gods who served as a mediator between Ghmerti and humanity,” and he is invoked as “the protector of human society and an instrument of divine justice.” Those two charges — mediation and justice — are the whole of him, and everything else the tradition says arranges itself around them.

The powers he moves among are the ones an ordinary Khevsur or Pshav actually deals with. Each khvtishvili is a deified hero-son with a name, an office, and a stretch of country to guard, seated in a jvari-khati — the small stone shrine, “cross” or “icon,” that is the working institution of the whole highland religion and is treated in its own right at jvari-khati. One child-of-god may hold a whole district, another a single clan; together they protect people, secure the crops and the herds, and make war on the demons pressing up from the world below. Kviria is not one more of these. He does not hold a valley or a lineage. He holds the space above them all and beneath the summit — a different order of office entirely.

How the picture reaches us has to be marked, because it bears on how much weight each part can carry. The fullest portrait is a reconstruction, assembled by the Georgian folklorists who climbed the valleys to record a shrine religion still being practiced — Vera Bardavelidze and Mikheil Chikovani in the twentieth century, and, most fully, Zurab Kiknadze, whose Kartuli Mitologia I: Jvari da Saqmo (“Georgian Mythology I: The Shrine and Its People,” 1996) gave the highland theology its most sustained modern analysis. In the Western literature the ethnographer Kevin Tuite draws on Kiknadze in a 1996 review for the characterization the record of the supreme god Ghmerti already carries in a single line — Kviria as a kind of divine prime minister, mediating between the supreme god and the children-of-god. The testimony is precious and it is also uneven: it differs from valley to valley, and it is region-variable at its very core. Whether the same name in the Svan west denotes the same power as the eastern steward is one of the things the tradition does not resolve, and it is taken up below rather than settled here.

The name survives, besides, in a second medium — sung. In Upper Svaneti “Kviria” is one of the oldest and most layered of the ritual chants, carried in so many variants that some can barely be imagined back to a common source, a few of them metered closely enough to be performed as a round dance. It is unaccompanied, in the manner of the archaic Svan repertory, and where it is sung the pitch tends to rise as the energy of the singers builds — a song that climbs as it goes. So the god reaches the present three ways at once: through the shrine invocation of the east, through the mythic cycle of the demon-wars, and through a hymn still sung over the ridge in the west, each medium preserving a slightly different Kviria and none of them derived from a book.

What the three have in common is the manner of their survival. None was written down until the folklorists came; all were held in memory and in practice, and all were collected late, from a tradition already many centuries inside the church. That is the standing condition of the highland material, and it is the reason the portrait of Kviria is described here at the folklorists’ own reporting distance — as the shape of a living world recorded from outside it, not as anything an outsider is in a position to instruct. The corpus is unusually consistent about his character even so. Across the collections he is the mediator and the just steward, named in the same second place and charged with the same two offices, and it is the steadiness of that testimony, valley to valley, that lets so abstract a figure be described at all.

The steward of the space between

The organizing insight of the Khevsur-Pshav system is that the supreme god governs at a remove. Morige Ghmerti orders the ninth sky and is scarcely approached; the everyday religious life of a commune is conducted with the children-of-god in their shrines, who carry a person’s need up and bring the high god’s favor down. Kviria is the office that makes that architecture work. The distance from the summit to the ground is bridged not once but twice — the high god, then his steward, and only then the khvtishvili in their precincts — and he is the hinge on which the first and longer span of the distance turns. He is not a power holding a place; he is the power holding the order of all the powers, the single steward through whom the whole graded court is kept.

This is not a cosmos run as a monarchy of one. It is an ordered court — the Director at the summit, a host of children-of-god administering the valleys, and between them a steward who keeps the whole apparatus in its ranks. The map of the shrines is also a map of the society, the sacred jurisdictions nested inside one another the way the human ones are: a power for the district, a power for the clan, a power for the sworn brotherhoods of one village. What Kviria supplies to that graded arrangement is the thing a graded arrangement most needs and least advertises — a principle of order above the ranks, one office that is answerable for the coherence of all the rest.

That makes his dominion peculiarly abstract for so concrete a religion. The other children-of-god have holdings the eye can find: a mountain, a herd, a disease to cure, a demon to fight. Kviria has none of these. What he keeps is the interval itself — the reach between the ninth sky and the stone precincts below, and the good order of everything that passes across it. His is a jurisdiction of relation rather than of terrain, which is exactly why his name comes second in the praise and never first: the office exists because the high god is remote, and it would have no content if the god came near.

To the stewardship the tradition joins the second charge, and it is of a piece with the first. Beside Morige Ghmerti, Kviria is the instrument by which divine justice reaches the world of people — the keeper of right order not for a clan or a field but for the whole assembly, the rightness of what is exchanged between heaven and the commune. Where the demon-slayers among the khvtishvili war on the ogres and secure the harvest, his concern is the good conduct of the entire graded court and of the human society beneath it. Mediation and justice turn out to be the same office seen from two sides: to keep the traffic between summit and ground moving rightly is to administer it, and to administer it is to judge it.

In the demon-war cycle this administering role shows its face in miniature. When Kopala, mightiest of the demon-slayers, is challenged by the ogre-devi to a contest of strength and answers by hurling two boulders pressed into one, it is Kviria who strikes the doubled stone with his whip at the moment it leaves Kopala’s hand and drives it past the giants’ cast and down onto their fortress at Tsikhetgori. The stroke that decides the contest is the steward’s, not the strongman’s — the aide whose intervention throws the order of heaven, literally, behind the champion. The episode belongs to the Kopala cycle and is told there; what it shows of Kviria is the same thing the shrine shows. In the war as at the altar he is the power that stands between, closing the gap the high god’s greatness opens.

The mountain church of Sts Kvirike and Ivlita above Kala in Upper Svaneti — Lagurka, “the holy place” — toward which the mediator’s name was drawn under the sign of the Cross, and to which pilgrims climb each 28 July for Kvirikoba. Jaba1977, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Under the sign of the Cross

Kviria’s afterlife runs by fusion, and it is legible in the very phonetics of worship. In the Christianized frame the highland mediator was drawn toward the Orthodox St Kvirike — the child-martyr Cyricus, or Quiricus, put to death with his mother Ivlita, the Julitta of the calendar, in the persecutions of the early church. The nearness of the two names, Kviria and Kvirike, has been noted as perhaps not accidental; but the resemblance is a suggested link and not a settled derivation, and the tradition itself keeps the older figure alongside the saint rather than dissolving one into the other.

The Svan chant carries the same double life. Scholars suppose the first words of its refrain, “kviria lese,” to derive from the Greek kyrie eleison, “Lord, have mercy,” the foundational cry of the Christian liturgy — the one line of the song held to bear plain lexical meaning. Yet its melody and the body of its text are read as pre-Christian, so that the hymn looks like a very old song re-texted, in part, for the church. The chant is also where the western reading of the god surfaces most sharply. As the folklorist Nino Ghambashidze observes, while the eastern Kviria is the supreme god’s second-in-command, the Svanetian Kviria was reckoned stronger — sometimes the supreme deity himself, master of the weather and of the revival of nature. Whether the western supreme Kviria and the eastern steward are one power under two weights, or two figures who happen to share a name, is a genuinely contested question; the present readings are set side by side here and adjudicated neither way. The wider argument over how much of the highland religion preserves an archaic stratum and how much took shape after Christianization is a separate matter, drawn out at ghmerti and not reopened here.

The ethnographic record fixes his observances by name. The festival Kviratskholovba (კვირაცხოვლობა) was kept in his honor among the Pshavs, the Khevsurs, the Svans, and other highland Georgians. Beyond the shrine calendar, the historian David Marshall Lang is cited as connecting the ecstatic carnival observances of Berikaoba and Murqvamoba to Kviria’s cult among the mountain peoples — a secondary attribution, carried in the literature rather than argued from the shrines themselves. His standing, in short, was never uniform. It ran from a divine prime minister in the east to a weather-lord and near-summit in the west, and the same name held both.

The martyrdom of St Ivlita (Julitta), a fragment of the mural cycle the painter Tevdore signed at Lagurka in 1112 — the Christian martyrs Kvirike and Ivlita toward whom the older highland mediator’s name was drawn. Tevdore (1112); photographed by Kober, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The pilgrimage to Kala

The practice that keeps him is not a memory but a walk. Through the Soviet century the shrine religion was thinned but never erased, and the western observance is fully alive. Each year on 28 July, Orthodox pilgrims from across Svaneti make the steep climb to the mountain church of Sts Kvirike and Ivlita above the village of Kala, in the Mestia district of Upper Svaneti — the sanctuary the Svans call Lagurka, “the holy place,” and hold the most binding of all their shrines. The church is usually placed in the eleventh century, and its walls carry the frescoes that the painter Tevdore signed and dated to 1111 or 1112, among them the martyrdom scenes of the two saints; the fuller account of Lagurka’s standing among the Svans — the historian Ekvtime Taqaishvili likened it to what Delphi was for the ancient Greeks — belongs to the story of the Svans. Inside, the pilgrims pray before the venerated Shaliani icon, an old enamel-worked Crucifixion the Svans reckon among their holiest and most miracle-working relics, brought out for the feast from the safekeeping in which it is otherwise held.

The day is called Kvirikoba, and what happens on it keeps the double character the name has worn all along. The night of prayer ends at dawn, and then the mountain gives way to song, dance, and trials of strength: young men compete at sajildao qvis atseva, the lifting and throwing of great scattered stones, heaving the boulders as far as the arm will carry — a contest that any highlander who has heard the Kopala story will recognize, the demon-slayer’s doubled cast reenacted on the grass below the church. And families come to the shrine to pray for what the shrine is above all asked to give: the birth of a child, and by old preference a son. The steward of the space between heaven and the commune keeps, in his Christianized western feast, exactly the two faces he wore in the east — the war-strength of the stone-throw and the ordinary human petition for increase.

The scholarship that carries Kviria is Bardavelidze’s and Chikovani’s reconstructions, Kiknadze’s Kartuli Mitologia I, and Tuite’s ethnography — the work of listeners who wrote down a religion still speaking. The tradition that keeps him is the climb to Kala. Between the two, a figure assembled entirely from living highland memory holds his place: the name spoken second in every praise because his office was always to stand second, the steward through whom a god too great to be addressed is nonetheless served, and the one power in a religion of mountains and herds whose only holding is the distance itself.

→ Related: Iakhsari · Adgilis Deda · Pirkusha · Shatili · Mutso · Anatori · Gudanis Jvari · The Khevsurs · The Pshavs · Kadagi · Jvari Khati