Mutso

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The stone came up the cliff by hand. Course by course, dressed blocks were hauled and carried and set on the near-vertical rock above the Andaki, on terraces that had stood roofless for more than a hundred years, until the tower-houses closed again over their own floors. The masons who did it, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, were rebuilding a village that had outlived its people. Mutso had been all but empty since before their grandparents were born, its combat towers open to the weather, its terraces holding nothing but fallen stone. What they put back was not a monument to a lost world but a place waiting to be walked into again — the walls raised so that a household could, in principle, come home to them.

The rock above the Andaki

Mutso stands on a near-vertical rocky spur on the right bank of the Andakistskali — the Andaki river — at about 1,880 meters, in the Mutso-Ardoti gorge of Khevsureti, the far-northeastern highland district of Georgia that lies today in Dusheti Municipality of the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region. It is close under the watershed that divides Georgia from the North Caucasus, some twelve kilometers upstream of Shatili, the larger fortress-village in the neighboring Argun gorge. Its coordinates are 42°36′24″ N, 45°12′28″ E. The site is not built on the rock so much as fitted into it: the fortified dwellings climb the spur on stacked terraces, each house rising from the roof of the one below, so that the whole settlement reads from the gorge as a single vertical mass of stone growing out of the cliff.

The fabric, as the heritage record fixes it, is a compact and legible thing. There are approximately thirty fortified dwelling units — older counts run as high as forty houses — arranged on the vertical terraces, together with four combat towers and the ruins of further structures. Three of those towers and houses carry names in the local record. Torghva’s tower, the most famous, sits on a ledge north of the main cluster, overlooking the river; it is bound in Khevsur memory to Torghva Dzagani, a hero of the valley’s folklore who is said to have come from Mutso. The Cholokaant tower stands among the houses in the southern part, known by a name the tradition ties to its leaning form. And the Borchashvili fortress-house is counted among the strongholds of the settlement. The village is remembered as the seat of the Shetekauri and allied clans, and one legend has it, simply, that “the Shetekauris dug Mutso” out of the rock.

The terracing is not an accident of the ground but the whole logic of the place. Because the spur is too steep to spread across, the houses could only be stacked, and stacking them turned the settlement into a single interlocked structure: the flat roof of each fortified dwelling served as the yard and approach of the one above, so that to take the village an attacker would have had to take it house by house, upward, under fire from every terrace overhead. The combat towers — tall, blind-walled, tapering, pierced only near the top — anchored that defense at its key points, giving the fighters height and a last redoubt. Water, arable soil, and room were all scarce on the rock; what it offered instead was a position that could not be rushed and could not be flanked, hanging above a gorge that funneled anyone approaching from the north into a single narrow line of march.

What is known of Mutso comes down three separate channels, each carrying a different kind of knowledge and each uneven in its own way. The first is the ethnographic and folklore record — above all the fieldwork of Sergi Makalatia, whose monograph Khevsureti (1935) set down the Khevsur communes and their shrines from the inside, and the collectors who worked the Argun and Andaki valleys — which preserves Mutso as a living warrior commune bound to its sanctuary. The second is the heritage record: the restoration dossier of the National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation of Georgia, the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List file for Shatili (ref. 5232, submitted in 2007 for the Khevsureti fortress-villages), and the Europa Nostra award documentation, which together fix the physical fabric and its dating. The third is the interpretive scholarship on the highland shrine system — Georges Charachidzé’s Le système religieux de la Géorgie païenne (1968), Vera Bardavelidze’s pantheon studies, Zurab Kiknadze’s Kartuli Mitologia (1996), Kevin Tuite’s Khevsureti papers — within which Mutso is one node among many. A caveat belongs to all three at once. The fine dating of the towers and the crypts rests on the heritage and archaeological record and is not everywhere firm; the settlement is placed by the conservators from about the tenth century onward, and where a single date is given here it should be read as the record’s best estimate, not a fixed fact.

Mutso at dawn — the fortified dwellings climbing the spur on stacked terraces above the Andaki, each house rising from the roof of the one below. Moahim, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The commune held to its khati

Within the tradition Mutso is not merely a fort but a commune held to a sanctuary. At the very summit of the rock stood its master-shrine, the Broliskalo Jvari, seat of the supreme patron of the village’s clans. The record gives its dedication in two name-forms, and both are kept: the “Broliskalo Icon of the Archangel” and “the shrine of St George of Broliskalo.” Both belong to the order the highlanders call jvari (“cross”) and khati (“icon”) — the sacred precinct in which a khvtishvili, a “child of God,” holds one stretch of country under the remote sky-god and is served in its own ground. That system — the offices that tend it, the way a whole commune is bound to its khati — has its own full account in the jvari-khati shrine order; the far high god over the children-of-God, and the long argument over how ancient the arrangement is, belong to Ghmerti and are not reopened here. What is Mutso’s own is the single shrine on its summit and the commune bound to it.

The tradition remembers the Broliskalo icon as a luminous sphere — a thing of light — that granted victory in war and turned aside plague and misfortune. And it remembers what the villagers made of themselves in its service. They were renowned as fighters and hunters, and, in the phrasing the record preserves, “considered themselves permanent members of the army of the sacred flags and guardians of fabulous treasury donated to the Icon over the centuries.” The two halves of that self-understanding hold the place together. The men of Mutso reckoned their fighting and their hunting a service owed to the khati as much as to the realm; and the wealth heaped upon the icon across generations — the treasury no thief in the tradition dared touch — was theirs to guard. Mutso itself was the northernmost bolt on the passes: the strongest outpost in this corner of northern Georgia, set to control the roads down from the North Caucasus and hold the state border. A frontier fortress and a shrine-commune were, on this rock, the same thing. The treasury is worth dwelling on, because it says what kind of place this was. The wealth given to the Broliskalo icon over the centuries was not stored against need or spent; it accumulated, untouchable, as the material sign of the commune’s bond to its patron, and guarding it was reckoned an honor rather than a burden. A community that had little arable ground and less spare wealth kept, at the top of its rock, a hoard it would not touch — because the hoard was the shrine’s and the shrine was the reason the community held together at all.

The shrine’s word was made operative among the living not in the abstract but through its human servants — the khevisberi, the shrine-elder who pronounces the invocations, and the dasturi, the attendant who keeps the order of the gathering — at the seasonal feasts, as at every jvari. What passed within the precinct belongs to the closed life of a working sanctuary and is named here only at the folklorists’ own distance, as public record and not as instruction. And built into the same rock as the towers are the dry-stone burial crypts — the anatori-type mortuary vaults, kin to the better-known crypt complex near Shatili, where the dead of the gorge were laid. Their fuller mortuary story belongs to Anatori; at Mutso they are named soberly and left at rest, one register of a single system. For that is what Mutso is: a sacred-and-defensive whole, the tower-terraces for the living, the crypts in the rock for the dead, and above both the Broliskalo Jvari binding the commune to its patron.

A combat tower of Mutso — one of the four raised on the terraces of the spur, dry-laid stone fitted to the near-vertical rock. Moahim, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The emptying and the return

Mutso is a living community’s abandoned home, not a dead ruin, and its emptying was slow and came from several directions at once. Plague struck first and hardest. When the sickness the highlanders call the Zhami swept the Andaki villages — the tradition dates the worst of it to about 1850, though the crypts hold older dead as well — the sick of neighboring Ardoti were carried up to Mutso to die in its vaults. That is the darker seam of the crypts kept sober at Anatori: the dying who walked, or were carried, to a place set aside for death. Through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries the harsh climate, the lack of arable ground and infrastructure, and the changing economy of the mountains thinned the settlement further. Then came the Soviet-era resettlements of Khevsureti to the lowlands, concentrated in the early 1950s — a government-directed migration that, more than any slow decline, is what the highlanders themselves say emptied the valleys. Khevsureti’s population fell from the 5,996 souls the Russian imperial census of 1873 counted community by community — the census’s summary total gives 4,872 — to roughly 354 permanent residents at the 2014 census; Mutso itself, “almost completely abandoned more than a century ago,” counted only about fifteen residents in the surrounding area at that count. The fuller history of that emptying belongs to the Khevsurs as a people; at Mutso it is written in a whole village standing open to the sky.

Against that emptying stands the restoration. A rehabilitation of the fortified settlement was carried out by the National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation of Georgia — planned from about 2004 and launched in earnest in 2014 — and it was, by the conservators’ own account, one of the most complex heritage projects Georgia had undertaken. The towers were stabilized, facades and roofs and stairs rebuilt, the terraces closed again, all of it in traditional dry-stone masonry, with much of the material hauled up the cliff by hand and rigged pulley much as the original builders had raised it. The scale of the work matched the difficulty of the site: a settlement almost wholly collapsed had to be read back out of its own rubble, the standing towers reinforced without being made new, the fallen dwellings raised again from the terraces they had slid off. Modern needs were fitted quietly into old walls — the buildings adapted so that they could carry electricity and communications and be lived in through a winter — without giving the rock the look of a resort. What the conservators aimed at, and what the award singled out, was stabilization that respected the weathered character of the original stone rather than replacing it with something cleaner and younger than the village had ever been. In 2019 the Fortified Settlement of Mutso was named a winner of the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award in the Conservation category, and went on to take the Public Choice Award as well. The jury framed the work in terms larger than one Georgian valley: the project, it held, “addresses the depopulation of mountain communities, a challenge that is found throughout Europe,” and the restoration of the heritage “has created an awareness among the local community of their intangible heritage and the history of the people of the Caucasus, in turn encouraging their re-engagement with this heritage.” A frontier village that had lost its people was recognized, in the jury’s reading, as an answer to a European problem.

That recognition carries a sober counter-note, and it deserves to be recorded fairly. Some heritage professionals questioned whether the rebuilding preserved the site’s full authenticity — whether, in dismantling and re-laying so much collapsed stone, the work documented each piece rigorously enough. The architect and researcher Nana Mefarishvili, herself among those who worked on Mutso, has argued that when stones are removed from a monument they should be photographed, drawn, and numbered so that each can be returned to its exact original place, and has criticized restoration practice in Georgia where that discipline is not kept — the concern being that reconstruction, however faithful in appearance, can quietly alter the tenth-century authenticity it means to save. This is a preservation debate, running alongside the international recognition rather than against it; it is a question about method, not a verdict on the village.

And the living present is the point of the whole enterprise. Khevsureti keeps its summer shrine festivals — the khatoba and atengenoba cycles of the high season — to which families resettled in the lowlands return to their old villages each year; the Khevsurs are a living Georgian Orthodox people whose shrine practice runs alongside the church, not a vanished one. After the rehabilitation, with electricity and communications restored and the buildings made habitable, several households have begun to plan their return to Mutso itself. (The romance sometimes told of the Khevsurs’ chain mail — that they were lost European crusaders stranded in the Caucasus — is the outsiders’ myth, not history; the mail and the cruciform emblems are the highlanders’ own metalwork and shrine-symbolism, a matter that belongs to the record of the Khevsurs.) What the masons rebuilt, course by dry-stone course, was never meant to stand empty as a picture of the past. A village that outlived its people was raised back up to the point where its people could, if they chose, live in it again — and some of them intend to.

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