The Lashari Shrine

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On a bare height above the right bank of the upper Pshavis Aragvi, between the villages of Khoshara and Tsitelaurta, a walled precinct of stone stands inside a grove that no one cuts. The Georgians of the surrounding valleys call the hill Khmelgora, the “dry mountain,” and also Lashari hill, after the power seated on it. Among the shrines of the northeastern Georgian highlands the precinct is exceptional in one visible respect. Beside its chapel it keeps a belfry that is also a wine-cellar — a low tower some four and a half meters high, a bell hung above and, in the vault beneath, the store for the sanctuary’s holy wine. For most of the year the height is quiet, tended by a single elder. Then, on one Saturday in high summer, the whole of Pshavi climbs to it: each of the twelve communities of the province marches up behind its own icon-banner, to its own patch of consecrated ground, and for three days the mountain becomes the court of a single lord. This is Lasharis Jvari, the Cross of Lashari, and for the space of its festival the province becomes the household of the being it names.

The cross on the dry mountain

Lasharis Jvari (ლაშარის ჯვარი, “the Cross of Lashari”) is the principal sanctuary of Pshavi, a small historic region in the northern part of the Mtskheta-Mtianeti province of eastern Georgia, in the modern municipality of Dusheti. It sits in the rear, upper part of the province, above the settlements strung along the Pshavis Aragvi where it comes down from the high country. What the tradition means by a “cross” here is not a crucifix but a place: in the highland religion of Pshavi, Khevsureti, and Tusheti a sanctuary is a jvari (“cross”), a khati (“icon”), or a salotsavi (“place of prayer”), and each such place is at once a walled precinct on a height, a treasury of donated goods, a stretch of country under a power’s protection, and the seat of a named deity. The Lashari cross is the greatest of the Pshav sanctuaries, and its precinct — grove, chapel, altars, and the singular belfry-cum-wine-cellar — is tended by its own khevisberi, the shrine-priest who keeps the fire, the treasury, and the calendar of the cult.

The belfry is the shrine’s signature. The anthropologist Kevin Tuite, who has spent decades among the Pshav-Khevsur sanctuaries, devotes a study to the belfry-wine-cellar of Lasharis Jvari — a structure rare among the highland shrines, its bell-tower set over the vault (a sazare-marani, “belfry-cellar”) that held the wine used in the sanctuary’s observances. That wine, according to the shrine’s own priest, was carried up from Akhmeta in the lowland of Kakheti, where the Cross of Lashari owned a large vineyard and cellar of its own; for Lasharis Jvari, like the wealthiest of the highland powers, held land, herds, and treasures far beyond its mountain, endowed over centuries by kings and commoners alike. A shrine, in this world, is a landholder and a lord.

The being seated there is Lashari, and he reaches the record along three braided strands that the tradition keeps woven together. In the living shrine religion he is a khvtishvili — a “child of God,” one of the warrior-heroes whom Morige Ghmerti, the ordaining God who rules the highest sky, clad in arms and set over the land. (On the remote high god and his children, see Ghmerti.) Lashari is the great war-deity among them, regarded as a divine warrior who leads the host of his people into battle mounted on a white horse whose wings are of agate. He is invoked for victory in war, for defense against illness and harm, and for the blessing of the fields and the herds — the sovereign protector of the province in every danger that can come to it. None of this is late or marginal: it is the core of what Pshavians have held about the power on the dry mountain, recorded by the great Georgian folklorists — Vera Bardavelidze, who cataloged the highland sanctuaries, and Mikheil Chikovani and Zurab Kiknadze, who set the shrine mythology into a system — and by the ethnographers, Tuite chief among them, who have watched the cult in practice.

The Cross of Lashari on Khmelgora, the “dry mountain” above the right bank of the upper Pshavis Aragvi — the sanctuary of the war-deity Lashari and the gathering-place of all twelve communities of Pshavi. Pshaveli, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The king behind the god

The second strand is written history. When the eighteenth-century royal geographer-historian Vakhushti Bagrationi came to describe the province, he ascribed the shrine’s founding to a named king: Giorgi IV, called Lasha. The attribution has held ever since, and it is why the shrine and its deity bear the royal epithet. Giorgi IV Lasha was the only son of Queen Tamar and her consort David Soslan, born around 1191, crowned in his mother’s lifetime and reigning in his own right from 1213 to 1223. He led the kingdom of Georgia at the height of its medieval power and died at thirty-one, of wounds taken against the first Mongol raiders, and was buried at the monastery of Gelati. His by-name, Lasha, the Georgian tradition glosses as “illuminator of the world”; philologists derive it from an Abkhaz word meaning light. It is this king whose memory the shrine on the dry mountain is said to carry.

The third strand is the scholarly one, and it holds the other two apart even as it explains their knot. Linguists and ethnographers — reading the shrine cult against the deeper stratum of highland religion — take Lashari to have been the name of a pre-Christian deity, an astral and warrior power, long before the thirteenth-century king was born; the historical Giorgi Lasha, by this reading, did not create the god but gave the old cult a royal face, his memory fusing with the ancient khati until the two could no longer be prised apart. In the phrase the ethnographic tradition uses, the fused figure becomes “the sword of the messiah” — a liberator and a leader of the host, the deified warrior in whom an old sky-god and a Christian king stand as one. Three registers thus meet on the height and must be kept distinct: the documented king Giorgi IV Lasha of the chronicles; the deity Lashari of the living shrine, seated on his mountain and riding his winged horse; and the contested reconstruction that reads the second as older than the first. The tradition experiences no contradiction. It venerates a single lord, at once ancient god and remembered king.

Monarch of the twelve communities

What sets Lasharis Jvari apart from the ordinary run of highland shrines is the scale of its lordship. Lashari is no local spirit of one gorge but the sovereign of a whole province. The population of Pshavi is reckoned in twelve communities (temi), grouped by descent, and the Lashari cross unites all twelve: it is the common sanctuary above every clan shrine, the one seat to which all Pshavians belong. The tradition states the relation in the frankest political terms. The shrine was addressed as qelmts’ipe — “monarch,” a prince or minor king subordinate only to God the supreme ruler, yet standing above every other power — and the Pshavians spoke of themselves, collectively, as the vassals of Lasharis Jvari. To be a Pshavian was to be a subject of the cross on the dry mountain, bound to it as a retainer to a lord. In the political symbolism of the mid-summer festival in Pshavi, Tuite reads the whole cult as a model of the province’s order — the shrine the crown, the communities the vassalage, the festival the assembly at which the polity makes itself visible. Lasharis Jvari was, in the plainest terms, the public and religious center of Pshavi, and the traditional place at which justice was rendered for the province as a whole.

Lashari does not rule alone. Beside him the shrine holds his “sworn sister,” Tamar — a goddess of healing and fertility, invoked under the epithet of the “Doctor-Queen,” and identified in highland lore with the historical Queen Tamar, Giorgi’s mother, just as Lashari is identified with her son. Where Lashari is the warrior invoked against enemies, Tamar is the healer invoked against illness; together, the war-deity and the healing-queen were held to rule Pshavi and its people, the two royal figures of the twelfth-century golden age refracted into the two great powers of the mountain. The pairing is exact and deliberate, and it runs through the festival: the province prays to both.

Lashari’s authority, moreover, does not stop at the province’s edge. His cult reached beyond Pshavi into neighboring Tusheti and Khevsureti and among the mountaineers of the North Caucasus, and in the highland imagination the Pshavian Cross of Lashari is paired with the Khevsur Cross of Gudani, Gudanis Jvari, as the two supreme warrior-khati of the eastern mountains — the two shrines before which fighting men gathered and under whose protection they marched. Around these great crosses stand the sibling sanctuaries of the same pantheon: the shrine of the demon-slayer Kopala, whose Khevsur seat is the cross of Khakhmati. Lashari is distinct from each — his own power, his own mountain, his own province — but he belongs with them to a single sacred order of the highlands, in which a khati is at once a living lord, a walled sanctuary on a height, and a stretch of country under a warrior’s guard.

The three days on the height

The shrine’s meaning gathers, once a year, into its festival, and the festival is the moment the province becomes visible to itself. Lasharoba (also Lasharis-jvroba) falls on the Saturday following the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul and lasts three days. Each of the twelve communities keeps its own local observance first, and then climbs to the mountain: led by its drosha, its icon-banner, a community processes up to Lashari and takes its place at its own altar and congregation-ground, the twelve stations arranged around the precinct, the whole ministered by the head khevisberi. For those days the dry mountain holds the assembled province, each clan under its banner, all under the cross.

The observances are described here at the folklorist’s distance — as a matter of public record, set down by ethnographers, not as an operative rite. They center on the offering that the highland cult makes to its powers: the sacrifice of calves, whose blood is let to flow into a shallow rectangular pit prepared for it, followed by the blessing spoken over the community and its year. There is the perkhuli, the interlinked round-dance of the men, wheeling before the shrine; and at the festival’s close the descent from the height back down to the banks of the Aragvi. What is done within the sanctuary’s walls, and the words the khevisberi speaks over the fire, belong to the closed life of a living cult and are not set out here. The public shape of the thing is clear enough and is what matters for the shrine’s meaning: for three days the province renders to its monarch the homage of a vassalage — its banners, its beasts, its dancing, its prayers for war and health and harvest — and then goes back down to its villages until the next high summer.

The Pshavis Aragvi below the shrine country of upper Pshavi — the river to whose banks the communities descend at the close of Lasharoba. Yasuhiro Kojima, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The festival is a monument of syncretism, and it wears the syncretism openly. The “cross” of Lashari carries two layers at once: the old warrior-khati of the pre-Christian mountain and the cult of a canonized Christian king, the sanctuary keeping a bell and a Christian calendar over a rite of sacrifice and a deity of the older world. This is the pattern of the whole highland religion, which braids Georgian Orthodox Christianity — the faith the eastern-Georgian kingdom of Kartli, the Caucasian Iberia (wholly unrelated to the Iberia of the Spanish peninsula), took as its own in the fourth century — with far older mountain cults that were never displaced. The full account of that turn to Christianity belongs to the story of the Caucasian Iberians; what concerns Lasharis Jvari is that on the dry mountain the two orders did not cancel but fused, the warrior-god and the warrior-saint held together in a single “cross.”

The province and its poet

The shrine’s afterlife carried it out of the mountains and into the idea of Georgia itself. The poet Vazha-Pshavela — pen name of Luka Razikashvili, born in 1861 in the Pshav village of Chargali, whose house on the Aragvi is now a museum — drew this whole sacred world into modern Georgian literature: the shrines and their banners, the warrior ethos of the highland communities, the tragic weight of the cross upon the men who serve it. Through his verse the Pshav sanctuary became legible to a nation, and Lasharis Jvari came to be read by later Georgians as a figure for the country’s own unity — the twelve communities joined under one cross taken as an image of the Georgian people joined in common cause, the highland warriors of the shrine as an emblem of the state and its defense.

That afterlife was tested hard in the twentieth century. Through the Soviet decades much of the cult was thinned and pressed toward silence, yet Lasharoba is again kept on its Saturday in high summer, the twelve communities climbing behind their banners to the dry mountain; the fuller story of how the highland shrine religion survived belongs to the Svans. The religion that Bardavelidze cataloged, Kiknadze and Chikovani systematized, and Tuite has followed in the field is not a museum exhibit but a practiced tradition, thinner than it was and pressed on all sides, and still, on the dry mountain above the Aragvi, the seat of a monarch to whom a province belongs. The height keeps its cross, its grove, and its bell-tower over the wine, and once a year the twelve communities come up to render what a vassal owes a lord.

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