Shatili

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At Shatili a defender never had to touch the floor of the gorge. The flat slate roofs are also floors and streets; the tower-houses stand wall to wall up a spur of rock, joined by rooftop walkways, interior passages, and stairs that thread out of one house and into the next, so that a man could climb from the lowest terrace to the highest tower under cover, showing nothing to an enemy on the ground below. There are some sixty of these towers, and they do not read as sixty buildings. They read as one — a single body of stone with sixty doors, terraced up the slope where the Arghuni river turns through the deep gorge of Upper Khevsureti, on the northern slope of the Greater Caucasus, a short walk from what is now the Chechen border of the Russian Federation and about 150 kilometers north of Tbilisi.

The gorge and the thing built in it

Shatili reaches the record first as a thing built rather than a thing founded. It sits in the historical Georgian province of Upper Khevsureti — administratively the Dusheti district of the Mtskheta-Mtianeti region — at roughly 1,400 meters, on the shoulder of the Arghuni (Argun) gorge where the river cuts a deep, narrow trench through the last folds of the Greater Caucasus before the watershed. Its coordinates place it at about 42°39′32″N, 45°09′28″E; the figures matter, because the whole meaning of the settlement is bound to its exact seat on that difficult relief. Historically the village lay within the Kingdom of Kakheti, and it stood at the kingdom’s north-eastern edge — the last Georgian settlement of any size before the passes carried a traveler down into the north Caucasus, and so a place with a frontier’s work to do.

What the record describes is a complex of medieval-to-early-modern fortresses and fortified dwellings, built of stone laid up in lime mortar and roofed flat with slate. The heritage documentation counts some sixty towers — koshki in the local speech — clustered so tightly that they compose a single continuous chain of fortifications rather than a row of separate strongholds. The dating is given as a span, not a date. Survey and heritage sources place the core fabric mainly in the seventh to thirteenth centuries, with tower-building carried on across a long stretch of frontier life into the eighteenth; those century-ranges are approximate, and the honest description of the village is of an accreted work, raised and repaired and raised again over generations, never set down whole at one stroke. The Shatili that stands is the sum of that long building, and its most complete surviving form.

The gorge itself did much of the founding. Upper Khevsureti falls on the far, northern side of the main Caucasus ridge, so that its rivers run not south into Georgia but north toward the plains beyond the range; Shatili stands where the Arghuni has carved its trench narrow and deep, on a spur that commands the water and the track along it. A settlement here was always a settlement on a threshold. The traffic that came up the gorge came from beyond the watershed — traders, herders, and raiders alike moving between the Georgian highland and the north Caucasus — and a village at the chokepoint of that traffic was, whatever else it was, a gate. The flat ground is scant and the buildable rock is steep, and both facts are written into the plan: the towers went up where they could stand, tier above tier, because there was nowhere to spread them out.

The high documentary account of Khevsureti and its people belongs to the ethnographer Sergi Makalatia, whose Khevsureti (1935) remains the fullest early portrait of the highland and its villages, and to the folklore collectors who worked the valleys in the same decades; the modern fieldwork of the linguist and ethnographer Kevin Tuite carried that record into the Western literature. What each of them met, at the head of the Arghuni, was the same object: the northern gate-village of a warrior highland, the most complete surviving specimen of the Khevsur fortified-village type, whose whole built form is an answer to the geography of the pass. Other Khevsur settlements were built to the same idea — Mutso on its crag above the same river, the scattered koshki of the Pirikita and Piraketa valleys — but nowhere did the type reach so complete and so concentrated a form as here, where the terraced towers close into one unbroken mass. The warrior way of life of the people who raised it and hold it — the Argun-basin order that governed war and oath and marriage alike — belongs to the account of the Khevsurs; here it is enough to mark that the village is that order set in stone.

Shatili in the Arghuni (Argun) gorge of Upper Khevsureti, the koshki tower-houses terraced up the spur as a single chain of fortifications. Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

One house with sixty doors

The thing to understand about Shatili is that it is not a village of separate houses that happens to be walled. It is a single defensive organism. The koshki were built wall-to-wall and stacked up the slope in vertical zones, and then fused — bound together by the rooftop walkways, by interior passages, by concealed stairways and corridors that run from tower to tower — so that the temi, the whole commune, could move through the entire settlement without ever showing itself. A family kept beasts on the ground floor, grain and living quarters above, and the fighting rooms higher still; the roof of one house was the terrace and the street of the next. In a raid the village did not disperse into sixty defenses. It closed into one, and its people crossed it overhead and within, out of sight of anyone on the gorge floor. The narrow slit-windows were cut for the frontier and not for the view, and the whole vertical mass of it — homes and fortress at once — was engineered so that a handful could hold a gorge against many.

This is exactly what the heritage documentation singles out as the village’s genius. The UNESCO tentative-list file names the selection of the location, the development of land with a complicated relief, a rational land tenure, the multifunctionalism of the dwelling-and-fortress form, the vertical zoning of construction, and the optimal orientation as the architectural thought realized in Shatili — a settlement, in the file’s terms, that functioned at once as a residential area and as a fortress guarding the north-eastern outskirts of the country. What the language catalogs, in plainer words, is a village designed the way a single building is designed: every terrace, passage, and roofline answering to the demands of the slope, the river, and the raid.

The zoning is the clearest expression of it. Shatili is read most easily as a vertical scheme — the settlement banked up the spur in stages, the towers rising where the rock allowed, each house both a link in the perimeter and a floor of the whole. The flat roofs were the horizontal streets of that vertical town; the passages were its interior ones. A defender did not need to sally into the open to shift from one point of the wall to another, because the wall was continuous and the movement within it was covered. The stone-and-lime masonry was raised to hold against weather and siege alike, and the mass of it — grouped, terraced, blind to the gorge but open to itself — is why a small population could treat the entire village as a keep. There is nothing merely picturesque in the arrangement; the tight grouping, the shared walls, the roofs that double as ground, the slits instead of windows are all the same decision, taken over and over across the centuries of building, that the village would answer to the raid before it answered to the view.

Set within this stone commune, and belonging to the same order that governs the whole highland world, are the village’s shrine precincts — the jvari, khati, and salotsavi that seat a khvtishvili, one of the children-of-god, over the community and carry its oaths and harvests upward toward Morige Ghmerti, the remote high god who orders the sky and is reached only through such intermediaries. That mediation architecture, and the long scholarly question of how old the highland shrine theology really is, are the matter of the live Ghmerti entry and are not re-argued here; the working order of the shrines — the offices that serve them, the festivals that gather them — is the matter of the jvari-khati system. What belongs to Shatili is only that these precincts, with the prohibitions of ground and grove attached to them, sit inside the same continuous fabric as the towers, rendered at the record’s distance and no closer. The village’s meaning is therefore double and single at once. It is architecture as survival, a settlement built so that a few could hold a pass. And it is architecture as belonging, a commune whose houses, roofs, towers, and holy precincts are one continuous body bound by ts’esi, the customary law, to its place. A village built as one body is also, in this world, a body meant to be defended together and to pray together.

The koshki of Shatili, flat-roofed and fused wall-to-wall so that the whole commune could cross the village under cover. Vyacheslav Argenberg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

Resettlement, return, and the kept calendar

Shatili’s afterlife runs through the twentieth century’s hardest turn and out the other side, alive. In the early 1950s the Soviet authorities resettled the population of Shatili, and most of the Khevsureti region with it, down to the Georgian lowlands of Kakheti, citing the labor and the living conditions of the high valleys. A new, lower Shatili was built not far from the old one, and in time some of the families were allowed to return. The old stone village was never wholly abandoned to ruin, but it was emptied, and its recovery has been partial and seasonal.

The 2014 census counted twenty-two residents. Today the old village is held by roughly a dozen families, largely through the warm months, because the road up the Arghuni closes with the winter snow and the gorge seals itself off for much of the year. The route in climbs from the lowland side of the range over a high pass and drops into the northern valleys, and it is a summer road; when it shuts, Shatili keeps only its handful of year-round hearths, and the rest of the population is below in Kakheti. The village is thus best described not as a ruin and not as a year-round town but as a living village-monument and a place of seasonal return — the families coming back up the gorge as the road opens and going down again before it shuts. Guesthouses now operate among the towers, several of them inside the historic koshki themselves, so that the same rooms once kept for grain and for the last stand now take in travelers who come for the architecture and the mountains. The tourism is real and growing, and it is also the practical means by which the old village is kept in use rather than surrendered to the weather: a koshk with guests in it is a koshk that gets its roof mended.

The resettlement was of a piece with the era’s treatment of the difficult highlands: a state that measured a place by its yield and its accessibility found the high Khevsur villages wanting on both counts and moved their people to where fields were broad and roads were open. What that logic could not account for was attachment — to the towers, to the shrines, to the ground held by ts’esi — and so the return, when it was permitted, followed the old lines back up the gorge, family by family, to houses that had never stopped being theirs in anything but occupancy. The pattern that resulted, of a winter population in the lowlands and a summer population in the towers, is the living shape the twentieth century left on Shatili: not the clean break the resettlement intended, but a rhythm of descent and return keyed to the closing and opening of a single mountain road.

The village keeps its calendar. Shatiloba, its own annual festival, falls on the first or second weekend of September, and it gathers the highland’s whole repertoire: horse-racing — the riders, drawn from the neighboring villages, set out from Mutso and finish at Shatili — along with traditional wrestling, folk music and dance, poetry, and a communal feast among the towers. It is a homecoming as much as a festival, timed to the end of the warm season when the gorge is still open and the families are still up, and it draws the scattered community and its visitors back into the one stone village for a few days before the descent. Across Khevsureti more widely, the khatoba shrine festivities of the jvari-khati precincts come in July, as a movable observance tied to the Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul; the shrine order and the Orthodox calendar are kept together here, as they are throughout these mountains, the Khevsurs being a living Georgian Orthodox community whose shrine practice runs alongside the church rather than against it. A short way up the gorge from the village stand the above-ground Anatori crypts, the mortuary vaults of a plague-stricken settlement; the dead of that story are Anatori’s to carry, not Shatili’s.

For its heritage standing, Shatili has sat on Georgia’s UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 24 October 2007, submitted by the country’s Ministry of Culture under the cultural-landscape criterion. The distinction is worth keeping exact: the tentative list is a register of candidates a state may later nominate, not the inscribed World Heritage List. Shatili is a candidate, not an inscribed site — and it enters that register precisely on the strength described above, its authenticity, in the file’s account, completely preserved in architectural form, material, and location. The cultural-landscape criterion under which it is entered is fitting, since the case for the village is inseparable from its ground: the towers cannot be understood, or valued, apart from the gorge that shaped them, and the file makes the relief and the settlement a single object of protection.

The road opens again in the spring, and the families come back up the Arghuni to the towers their forebears raised course by course over the centuries. Smoke rises again from koshki that were built so that no one on the gorge floor could see who moved inside them, and in September the horses run in from Mutso to a village that still stands as one body of stone above its river.

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