The Pshavs

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The priest’s house at Chargali stood within earshot of a shrine. Pavle Razikashvili served the church of the little Pshav village on the Aragvi, and his sons grew up between the two orders that share this country’s calendar — the Christian one their father kept, and the older one on the height above the roofs, where the shrine-elder chanted the invocations over the fire and the men of the commune answered in verse. The eldest boy, Luka, born in 1861, heard both from the start. He heard the sung prayer of the khevisberi and the improvised poetry of the summer gatherings, where a good line could settle an argument and a great one was remembered for a generation; and when he came to write, under the name Vazha-Pshavela — “a lad from Pshavi” — he wrote out of exactly that soil. He learned his theology from shrine-criers, and then handed it to a nation, in Aluda Ketelauri and Host and Guest. The province behind him is the subject here: the people, their communes, and the verse that was their law.

The province on the Aragvi

Pshavi (Georgian ფშავი) is a historic highland region of eastern Georgia, some 340 square kilometers among the southern foothills of the Greater Caucasus, drained by the Pshavis Aragvi — the “Pshav Aragvi” — as it comes down from the high country, and reaching east over a ridge to the headwaters of the Iori. It lies today within the Dusheti municipality of the Mtskheta-Mtianeti province, in the rear of the mountains, just south of Khevsureti across the watershed. The two provinces are close kin. The Pshavs speak a conservative highland dialect of Georgian, near to that of the Khevsurs, and the medieval Georgian writers knew the two peoples together under a single older name, Pkhovi, which once covered the whole of the Pshav and Khevsur country before the two took their separate names.

The province divides into three by its valleys. Pshavi “proper” is the historic heartland — about ten villages strung east from the confluence of the Pshavis Aragvi and the Khevsuretis Aragvi to the village of Ukanapshavi, centered on Shuapkho. Below it lies Lower Pshavi, a larger cluster of some thirty villages around the center Magharoskari, taking in the side-valleys of Chargali, Sharakhevi, and Sondiskhevi. And over the eastern ridge a third group of villages sits along the upper Iori. The country was never populous; the arable ground is thin and the winters are long, and it has emptied steadily since the nineteenth century as families moved to the lowland towns.

The Pshavs reach the documentary record along several strands, and each carries a different kind of knowledge. The first is the living tradition itself — the communes and their shrines, the summer festivals, the households that still return each season to the high villages. The second is the record set down when the tradition was still whole. The ethnographer Sergi Makalatia’s monograph Pshavi, published in Tbilisi in 1934, remains the foundational description of the province, with its village-by-village tables; from those tables comes the count that fixes the scale of the old settlement — 210 households in Pshavi proper and 368 in Lower Pshavi in the early twentieth century, before the long exodus thinned them. To the same record belongs the folklore that Vazha-Pshavela’s own brother Tedo Razikashvili gathered — several thousand highland folk poems and some two hundred tales, carried out of oral memory and onto the page. The third strand is the modern scholarship: Vera Bardavelidze’s illustrated catalog of the Pshav shrines, whose first volume appeared in 1974; Georges Charachidze’s structural study Le systeme religieux de la Georgie paienne (1968); Zurab Kiknadze’s analysis of the shrine and its commune in Kartuli Mitologia I: Jvari da Saqmo (1996); and the fieldwork of the Canadian linguist Kevin Tuite, who followed the Pshav mid-summer festivals through the shrines from 1997 to 2001.

The Pshav highland along the Pshavis Aragvi — the province of some 340 square kilometers whose villages are grouped into communes, each bound to its own shrine on a height above the roofs. Levan Gokadze, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The twelve communes

The Pshavs are organized into temi — communes — and the temi is the unit of the whole social and religious order. A temi is a cluster of hamlets together with a set of named kin-groups of graded genealogical depth: the mama, the sadzmo, the gvari, the nested families of shallower and deeper descent that make up a community. And each temi belongs, by ts’esi — the settled custom that fixes what is owed and how — to its own khati: the icon-shrine seated in a small stone precinct on a height above the village, to which the commune renders its offerings and its service, and which keeps the commune in return. To be a Pshavian is first of all to belong to a temi, and for that temi to belong to a shrine.

The Pshavs hold that their communes were originally twelve, and the number carries weight in the tradition’s own reckoning of itself. Here the record marks its own uncertainty, and the uncertainty is worth keeping in view rather than smoothing over. A royal document of 1789 lists not twelve seats but eleven — Uk’ana-Pshavi, Aqadi, Ts’itelaurta, Qoshara, Ts’icho, Muku, Matura, Gogolaurta, Tsabaurta, Udzilaurta, and Shuapkho — and there is no firm agreement about the identity of the twelfth. Makalatia’s reading is that the comparatively young settlement of Chargali, once a satellite of the Gogolauri (Gogochurt) commune, grew and joined the original eleven to complete the twelve. The point is not settled and the sources differ, but the shape of the tradition is clear: the province tells itself as a community of twelve, and Chargali — the village of the poet — enters that number as the latecomer that rounds it out.

Above the local shrines of the individual communes stands the province’s common cult, the crown of the whole system, and it is a pair. The war-deity Lashari, seated at the Cross of Lashari on the dry mountain above the upper Aragvi, was addressed as the qelmts’ipe — the “monarch” — of all Pshavians, a prince subordinate only to God the supreme ruler yet standing above every other power; and the Pshavians spoke of themselves, collectively, as the vassals of the Lashari cross. Beside him stands his “sworn sister” Tamar, the power of healing and fertility invoked as the “Doctor-Queen,” Akim-dedopali, at the sanctuary of Tamar-Ghele; the two of them were held to rule the whole province, with the minor common shrines of Sakvirao and Damaste beneath them. The shrine itself — its grove, its treasury, its lands and herds, and the figures of Lashari and Tamar — belongs to the account of the Lashari cross; what concerns the people here is that the sanctuary is the seat of their order, the one place above every commune to which all twelve belong. Its offices are served by the temi’s own men — the khevisberi who keeps the fire and the calendar, the dasturi who attend the shrine’s household, and the kadagi through whom the khati is held to speak — and the working system of those offices, the same across Pshavi, Khevsureti, and Tusheti, has its own full account in the jvari-khati shrine order and is not set out here.

That the province is habitable at all the tradition credits to its warrior-heroes, the khvtishvili or “children of God.” It was Kopala and Iakhsar — the latter seated at last in a shrine at Shuapkho, in the heart of Pshavi proper — who made war on the devi, the many-headed ogres of the lower world, and drove them under the earth, so that people could take the land and live on it. Their demon-wars belong to their own accounts; what belongs to the province is the result. The Pshav communes are settled on ground that its heroes cleared, and the shrines that mark their victories are woven into the same map of temi and khati by which a Pshavian knows where he stands.

A country of verse

Pshavi is, above all its other distinctions, a country of poetry. In the frame of highland life the improvised word carried real weight: sung and spoken verse, made on the spot at the shrine-gatherings and the feasts, was the medium in which the law and the memory of the communes were held and passed on. A good poet had standing in his temi that a rich man might envy; a sharp verse could win an argument, shame an offender, seal a peace, or fix an event in the collective memory more surely than any record. And the invocations of the shrine-criers — the sung prayers by which the khevisberi addressed the khati on behalf of the commune — were themselves a high public art, the most formal poetry the province possessed, heard by everyone and judged by everyone. A child in a Pshav village grew up inside a spoken literature.

It was from exactly this soil that the national poet rose. Vazha-Pshavela — the pen name of Luka Razikashvili, born on 14 July 1861 at Chargali, the son of the priest Pavle Razikashvili, and dead on 10 July 1915 in Tbilisi — took the world of the shrine and made it the moral center of modern Georgian literature. His great work is a handful of epic poems drawn straight from the ethics of the temi: Aluda Ketelauri (1888), in which a Khevsur warrior honors a brave enemy he has killed and is broken by his own commune for it; Bakhtrioni (1892); Host and Guest, Stumar-Maspindzeli (1893), in which the sacred duty of hospitality collides with the blood-law and destroys both host and guest; The Avenger of the Blood (1897); and The Snake-Eater, Gvelis-Mchameli (1901). Around them stand some four hundred lyric poems and a body of ethnographic prose on Pshav life. What the epics take from the shrine-world is its hardest matter — the absolute claims of hospitality, blood, and honor, and the tragedy of the single conscience that sees past the commune’s law and is punished by it. In Host and Guest, the man who shelters a stranger across the line of a feud, because the shrine’s law of the guest demands it, is destroyed by his own people for keeping faith. Vazha did not invent that dilemma. He heard it argued in verse at the festivals, and he gave it back to Georgia as literature.

He did not stand alone in his own house. His brother Niko, who wrote under the name Bachana (1866–1927), was himself a poet; his brother Tedo (1869–1922) became an ethnologist and the great collector of Pshav and highland folklore, setting down the oral verse and tales that would otherwise have gone with the last people who knew them. A single priest’s family at Chargali, in one generation, turned a highland province into a literature — one brother writing it, another poet beside him, a third preserving the oral tradition from which both drew.

Vazha-Pshavela (Luka Razikashvili, 1861–1915), the priest’s son of Chargali who drew the shrine-world’s ethics into modern Georgian literature. Photograph by Alexandre Roinashvili (1846–1898), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The church, the century, and the return

The Pshavs are a living Georgian Orthodox community, and their shrine practice runs alongside the church rather than against it. Nominally Orthodox, they have kept the older mountain religion in a syncretic form, so that the two orders share a single calendar and a single year: the priest keeps his feasts and the khevisberi keeps the shrine’s, and the mid-summer cycle of festivals — keyed to the Feast of Sts Peter and Paul, gathering the communities to the Lashari cross and then, on the following day, to Tamar-Ghele, together with the highland observances of Atengenoba, the beer-rite that carries far off the name of the fourth-century martyr St Athenogenes — belongs to the same turning year as the parish round. Whether the Pshav-Khevsur system preserves an archaic pre-Christian stratum or is substantially a later development is the question Tuite named “archaism or innovation,” argued out in full in the account of Ghmerti and not reopened here.

The twentieth century pressed hard on the tradition. Under Sovietization the shrine estates — the lands and herds by which the great sanctuaries had held their wealth — were broken up, and the sworn women who had lived a consecrated life near Tamar-Ghele and tended its cattle, in the samrevlo custom, were sent to work on the collective farms. The record notes the rupture soberly and at its own distance; it was one loss among many in a province that was thinning anyway, as the young went down to the towns. What might have been lost from the record was in large part saved on the page — by Makalatia’s monograph, by Bardavelidze’s shrine catalog, by Kiknadze and Charachidze on the shrine mythology, and, in the Western literature, by Tuite, who followed the mid-summer festival cycle through the shrines at the century’s end.

Vazha-Pshavela’s own afterlife carried the province out of the mountains and into the national imagination. He was buried in the Pantheon of writers and public figures on Mtatsminda, the holy mountain above Tbilisi; in 1961 his house at Chargali became a museum, later rebuilt and enlarged, that keeps his manuscripts and the ethnographic furniture of the highland life he wrote from. Through his verse the Pshav shrine-world — its hospitality and its blood-law, its lonely consciences and its warrior-saints — became the property of a whole nation’s literature, and the little province on the Aragvi became a name every Georgian schoolchild knows.

The living present is thinner than it was, and real. Lasharoba is again kept in high summer, the communities climbing to the Lashari cross and, the next day, to Tamar-Ghele; Pshav, Khevsur, and Kist households still come down together to the Alaverdoba fair at Alaverdi in the Kakhetian lowland; families return each season to Magharoskari, Shuapkho, and Chargali, to houses their grandparents left. In 2016 the Georgian state began weighing “Protected Landscape” status for the province — a recognition, in the language of heritage, of a country whose real monument is not a building but an order of life: the twelve communes and their shrines, and the verse in which a people once kept its own law, and out of which it gave the nation its poet.

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