The Khevsurs

← Encyclopedia

“In the spring of 1915, some months after Russia’s declaration of war against Turkey, a band of twelfth-century Crusaders, covered from head to foot in rusty chain armour and carrying shields and broad-swords came riding on horseback down the main avenue of Tiflis.” So the American traveler Richard Halliburton opened his chapter on the men of the northeastern Georgian highlands, and the sentence has clung to them ever since: the last people in Europe who still went to war — and, the story added, to church — in mail. Every visible thing in the picture is authentic. Khevsur men did wear the chain shirt, carry the straight broadsword and the small round buckler, work crosses and holy images into their shields and their clothing, and some of them did ride down out of the mountains in the first year of the World War. What is wrong is nearly everything the picture was made to mean. These were not Europe’s lost crusaders, and the church they were said to keep their crosses for was not a Latin one. It stood on a shoulder of their own mountain, under an oak, and it was theirs.

The people of the gorges

The Khevsurs — khevsurebi in their own Georgian, “the people of the gorges,” from khevi, a gorge or mountain valley — are a living Kartvelian highland people of far northeastern Georgia, indigenous to Khevsureti astride the main ridge of the Great Caucasus. Their country is cut in two by the watershed itself, and the two halves carry names spoken from the ridge, the way a man names what lies on his near and his far side. Piraketa Khevsureti, “this-side” Khevsureti, falls on the southern slopes that drain toward the Aragvi and the Georgian lowland — about 428 square kilometers, its center the village of Barisakho. Pirikita Khevsureti, “far-side” Khevsureti, falls on the northern slopes, where the rivers run not south into Georgia but down toward the Argun — the Arghuni — and the plains of Chechnya beyond the range; it is the larger half, about 565 square kilometers, and its chief settlement is the tower-village of Shatili in the deep Argun gorge at roughly 1,400 meters. To stand on the pass between the two is to stand on the line where Georgia’s rivers change their minds.

They are Georgians. Unlike the Svans of the northwestern mountains, who kept a distinct Kartvelian language of their own, the Khevsurs speak a conservative highland dialect of Georgian itself — an archaic speech, close to the medieval tongue and little changed for centuries, but Georgian — and they are counted an ethnographic subgroup of the Georgian nation rather than a people apart. They are Georgian Orthodox, and the shrine order they keep runs alongside the church rather than against it. This is the first correction the record makes to the traveler’s picture: the Khevsurs are not a lost tribe washed up among Georgians but Georgians of the high gorges, as native to the ridge as the pines.

The record in numbers is small, and it has a shape. An 1873 census returned 5,996 people across 61 villages; the region today holds something on the order of three thousand to thirty-two hundred, and even that count is seasonal, for most Khevsur families now winter in the lowland towns and return to the high villages only in the warm months. The country was never populous — the arable ground is scant, the winters long, the passes shut for half the year — and it has thinned since, but it has not emptied.

Their own tradition of where they came from names not a knight but a peasant. The first ancestor, the Khevsurs say, was a man called Gudaneli, a vassal of a lord in the Kakhetian lowland who fled his master’s punishment for a crime and took refuge among the Pshavs, in the Pshav village of Apsho; from his line the Khevsur communes are reckoned to descend. So the Khevsurs count the Pshavs their nearest kin and share with them the whole world of the jvari and the khati. Medieval Georgian writers knew the two peoples together under one name, Pkhovi, and Greek, Roman, and Georgian notices place highland peoples in this basin in the record long before any crusading age. The single richest early portrait of Khevsur life is the ethnographer Sergi Makalatia’s Khevsureti (1935); the fullest modern scholarship in English is the Canadian linguist and ethnographer Kevin Tuite’s, above all his study of the banner of Xaxmat’is-Jvari and Vazha-Pshavela’s Khevsureti.

Khevsur clansmen around 1910, in the mail, arms, and cross-worked garments that outsiders mistook for crusader heirlooms. Photographer unknown, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The commune and its khati

To be a Khevsur is to belong, by ts’esi — customary rule — to a temi, a commune, and for the temi to belong in its turn to its khati: the sacred icon-power seated in a small stone precinct on a height above the village, under a great oak, where the banners and the drinking-vessels are kept and the shrine has its own brewhouse. The community feeds and keeps the shrine; the shrine keeps the community. The precincts go by three names used almost interchangeably — jvari (“cross”), khati (“icon”), and salotsavi (“place of prayer”) — and the working order of that whole system, the same across Khevsureti, Pshavi, and Tusheti, has its own full account in the jvari-khati shrine order. What belongs here is how it shapes a Khevsur life: a person is born into a commune that is born into a shrine, and the map of the shrines is the map of the people.

The shrine is served by human offices, and the offices are specific. The khevisberi — also called the dekanozi — is the shrine-elder who pronounces the invocations and the blessings at the gatherings. The dasturi are the attendants who brew the sacred beer and keep the order of the feasts, the practical stewards of the shrine’s household. And the kadagi is the oracle, the one through whom, in a state of possession, the khati speaks its own demands and its warnings to the people — an office held by women as well as men, and set down here only at the ethnographer’s public-record distance, never as anything to be done or induced. These are not clergy in a lowland sense. They are the temi’s own men and women, raised into their offices by the shrine and answerable to it, keeping a religion that a community administers for itself on its own ground.

Above the shrine-powers stand the khvtishvili, the “children of God,” the warrior-deities each set over a stretch of country; and above them, remote in the ninth sky, Morige Ghmerti the Orderer, so far above the world that the world reaches him only through the powers below. That architecture of distance — the high god served by never being addressed, the mediating children-of-God in their precincts — is the theology set out in the entry on Ghmerti, where the live scholarly question of whether this highland religion preserves an archaic pre-Christian stratum or is largely a later development is treated in full; it is not reopened here.

The year turns on the shrine-feasts. At khatoba, the summer gatherings at the shrines — the paramount among them Gudanis Jvari, the great cross of the Khevsurs — the families who have wintered in the plain come back up to the mountains, beer is brewed in the shrine’s own house, animals are offered, and khinkali is boiled and eaten in the crowd. And at atengenoba, the highland beer-rite kept a hundred days after Easter, the villages brew and gather under a name that carries, far off, the fourth-century bishop and martyr St Athenogenes of Sebastia — one of the plain marks of how deep the Christian calendar runs through a religion outsiders were quick to call something older and stranger than it is. The beer itself is not incidental. It is brewed for the feast in the shrine’s own brewhouse, by the dasturi, and drunk in common; the barley and the hops and the great cauldron are as much a part of the observance as the banner and the blessing.

Alongside the shrine order runs the honor-world for which the Khevsurs are best known outside their mountains: a code that demanded loyalty to one’s clan and an answer to every insult, whose costs included the blood-feud, and against which stood the counter-institutions of sworn brotherhood and the recorded soul-mate custom, tsatsloba — a chaste, ritualized bond between a young man and a young woman, set down by the ethnographers and kept here at that same public-record distance. And at the edge of the village, apart, stood the samrevlo, the seclusion-house to which women withdrew at childbirth and during menstruation under the purity-rule, ts’mindoba. It belonged to the shrine-world’s map of the pure and the set-apart — the same map that put the khati on the height and the brewhouse beside it — and it is noted here soberly, neither made strange nor explained away.

The armor and the myth

The picture by which the Khevsurs first reached the wider world was beautiful and wrong twice over. Into the twentieth century Khevsur men still went armed and armored in a way that had vanished everywhere else in Europe: the chain shirt, the straight broadsword, the small round buckler they called the pari, their shields and garments worked with crosses and holy images. Outsiders looked at the mail and read it as a relic — the armor of lost European crusaders, a band from Lorraine, the story ran, stranded in the Caucasus some eight centuries before, whose mail was “French,” and whose shields bore the letters A.M.D. for Ave Mater Dei, “Hail, Mother of God.” The Russian officer-ethnographer Arnold Zisserman, who spent twenty-five years in the Caucasus between 1842 and 1867, gave the idea its currency, and Richard Halliburton carried it around the world in Seven League Boots (1935), whose Khevsur chapter opens with the Lorraine legend and repeats the tale of mailed riders clanking down into Tiflis in the spring of 1915 to ask, at the governor’s house, where the war was.

It is a good story, and Georgian scholars have derided it for as long as it has been told. The record corrects it at every joint. The mail and the blades are Caucasian and Near Eastern arms-craft, of a kind worn and made and traded across the whole region and its neighbors, not heirlooms carried overland from the Rhine. The crosses are the Khevsurs’ own shrine-devotion — the sign of the khati worked into shield and sleeve, the same crosses that stand over their salotsavi — and not the heraldry of any Latin order. And the Khevsurs are Georgian highlanders whom the record places in these gorges long before the First Crusade was preached. What the armor really attests is not a lost Europe but a living frontier: a people who kept fighting-gear in daily use because they kept fighting, on a border that stayed dangerous into the modern age. The correction is worth making plainly, because the romance did the Khevsurs a double disservice — it made them Europe’s orphans instead of Georgia’s highlanders, and it made a working religion look like fancy dress.

The martial inheritance is real without the myth, and it outlived the mail. It survives in the paired-sword dance khevsururi, still danced, in which two men wheel and strike with sword and buckler; and in the fencing tradition khridoli, whose sword-and-shield component sets two men against each other with the straight blade and the small round pari, under an old rule that unless the man before him is a sworn enemy the fencer turns the blade from the wrist and draws only a light wound. Georgia inscribed khridoli among its intangible cultural monuments in 2014. The gear that outsiders took for a crusader relic was, in the Khevsurs’ own hands, the equipment of a discipline they still practice.

Lebaiskari, one of the Khevsur tower-villages of the Argun gorge — the frontier architecture of a people whose arms were a working answer to a dangerous border, not a museum of lost Europe. Yasuhiro Kojima, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The border and the century

North across the Argun the Khevsurs’ nearest neighbors were not Georgians at all but the Kists and the Chechens, and that border was a border of both raid and rite. The record holds war along it, and it holds sworn brotherhood and shared worship just as plainly. Kists and Chechens of Maisti and Melkhisti venerated the same Anatori jvari near Shatili and came up to the highland festivals, until the closed Soviet frontier severed the traffic across the watershed and left the shared shrine on the wrong side of a sealed line. It is a mistake to render the frontier as only a wall or only a marketplace; it was both, and the same families could stand on either side of the same feud and the same feast across a single generation.

The Soviet century pressed hard on all of it. In 1951 an obligatory resettlement moved much of the Khevsur population down to the lowland plains, and many of the high villages emptied; the northern frontier was sealed, and the road over the pass was closed for much of the year, as it still is. Mutso, on its near-vertical cliff above the Andaki some twelve kilometers beyond Shatili, stood all but abandoned by the middle of the century, its forty-odd towers and houses open to the weather, until a rehabilitation launched in 2014 rebuilt it stone by stone and won, in 2019, a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award for Conservation together with its Public Choice Award. Shatili, terraced up its Argun gorge as a single body of stone, stands on Georgia’s UNESCO tentative list. The villages that the resettlement hollowed out have become, in the record, monuments; but they were made to be lived in, and some of them are being lived in again.

The world of the Khevsurs found its great voice in a Pshav rather than a Khevsur. Vazha-Pshavela — the pen name of Luka Razikashvili (14 July 1861 – 10 July 1915), born at Chargali in the neighboring province of Pshavi — wrote the shrines and feuds and sworn oaths of this highland world from inside it, in poems such as Aluda Ketelauri and Host and Guest, and made it legible to a whole nation. His subject was exactly the Khevsur-Pshav order this entry describes: the commune and its khati, the honor that binds a man and the honor that destroys him, the stranger owed protection across the line of a feud. Through his verse the armored highlander became not the outsiders’ curiosity but a figure of the Georgian moral imagination, and the shrines on the mountain shoulders entered the country’s literature as its own.

The people are present, not past. Families come back up each summer to villages their grandparents were moved out of; the shrines above them are still kept; the khevisberi still speaks the blessing at khatoba, and the beer is still brewed in the shrine’s own house, under the same oaks, below the same peaks. The men in the old photograph rode down out of a country that is still there — and the thing the outside world got wrong about them was never the armor, which was real, but the story it hung upon it.

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