The Svans

← Encyclopedia

Beside almost every old house in the high valleys stands a stone tower, square and tapering, four or five stories of dry rubble masonry rising blind above the roofs, pierced near the top by a ring of small openings and finished with a stepped crown. They were raised mainly in the ninth to twelfth centuries, and they were built to be lived in and fought from at once: a family kept its ground floor for beasts, its middle floors for grain and for sleeping when the snow closed the passes, and its upper floors for the last stand against a raiding clan, an avalanche, or an army from the plain. At Chazhashi, one of the villages of the Ushguli cluster at the head of the Enguri gorge, more than two hundred of them still stand, under the ice wall of Shkhara, which lifts to 5,201 meters and is the highest mountain in Georgia. Ushguli itself, at about 2,100 meters, was long counted among the highest continuously inhabited settlements in Europe. What the towers guarded, though, was never only families and grain. Behind the walls of stone and the walls of mountain, the people who built them kept a religion — the golden huntress of the high cliffs and the old icon-powers of the shrines — long after the lowlands below had let it go.

The people behind the wall of the Caucasus

The Svans are a living Kartvelian highland people of northwestern Georgia, indigenous to Svaneti, the upper gorges walled off from the Colchian lowland by the barrier of the Great Caucasus. Their country divides in two. Upper Svaneti, Zemo Svaneti, lies along the Enguri (Inguri) river, its chief town Mestia; Lower Svaneti, Kvemo Svaneti, lies over the ridge along the Tskhenistsqali, its chief town Lentekhi. The region carries several of the ten highest peaks of the Caucasus — besides Shkhara, the pyramid of Tetnuldi at 4,974 meters and the twin-peaked Ushba at 4,710 meters — and for much of the year the snow shuts the high road entirely. That geography is the first fact about the Svans, because it is the reason for everything that follows: a land this hard to enter kept what it held.

They speak Svan, a distinct language of the South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, family — the same family as Georgian, Mingrelian, and Laz, and unrelated to the Indo-European and Turkic tongues around it. Within that family Svan is generally regarded as the earliest branch to split from the common Kartvelian stock, which makes it the most deeply divergent of the four and a conservatory of very old forms. It is unwritten, carried in speech and song rather than in a literature of its own, and today most Svans are bilingual in Svan and literary Georgian; before the nineteenth century many of the high valleys were monolingual Svan-speaking. Population estimates for the Svans in Georgia run roughly from fourteen thousand to thirty thousand. They are counted an ethnographic subgroup of the Georgian nation, though the distinction was once sharper on paper than it is now — in the pre-1930 Soviet census the Svans were still returned as a separate group.

Their record reaches back into the classical world through a single durable identification. The geographer Strabo, writing in the first century, described a powerful mountain people he called the Soanes, said to be numerous and warlike, whose custom was to catch the gold their torrents washed down out of the heights in perforated troughs and in fleeces — the raw material, some have long thought, of the legend of the Golden Fleece. The Soanes are conventionally identified with the ancestors of the modern Svans, in more or less the same valleys. This places the Svans within the same ancient Colchian-Caucasian world as the Colchians of the gold-rich Black Sea lowland — the world of Colchis and of Medea — as highland neighbors and kin rather than as the same people. Two confusions have to be set aside at once, because the names invite them. Svaneti is not the eastern-Georgian kingdom of Kartli, which the Greeks called Iberia; the two are both inside Georgia but wholly distinct. And the Caucasian Iberians of Kartli are in turn unrelated to the Iberians of the Spanish peninsula, sharing with them only a borrowed Greek name.

That independence was more than a figure of speech. Much of Upper Svaneti passed the later medieval and early modern centuries as what came to be called Free Svaneti — a cluster of communities acknowledging no lord, governed by their own councils of elders and their own customary law, defended by the towers and by the wall of the mountains, never fully brought under any lowland crown or, until the nineteenth century, under any empire. The blood feud that the towers were partly built against was itself a form of that self-rule, settled by oath and compensation rather than by a distant court; and the shrines were its guarantors, for the oath a Svan swore on the icons of Lagurka bound him where no state could. A society organized around communal shrine-keeping and the sworn word, rather than around a hierarchy imposed from below the mountains, is the social ground on which the old religion stood — and part of why, when the church came, it settled into the shrines instead of sweeping them away.

The genealogy that matters most for what the Svans became, though, is not ethnic but sacred, and it runs two ways at once. It runs down from the medieval Georgian Orthodox church, which reached the mountains and Christianized them in the fourth to sixth centuries and dated the shrine calendar ever after. And it runs up, out of a far older layer of hunting-cult and mountain deity — the golden goddess of the game and the icon-shrines of the peaks — that the isolation of the high valleys preserved when the lowlands did not. The Svans are the people in whom those two lineages did not cancel but fused.

The tower-village of Chazhashi in the Ushguli community, its church on the castle hill and the ice of Shkhara — the highest peak in Georgia — beyond. Aleksey Muhranoff, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The inhabited mountain

To the Svans the mountain is inhabited. Above the treeline, in a cavern of the double-peaked Ushba, dwells Dali — Dæl in Svan — the golden-haired goddess whose skin is said to shine like the sun, mistress and protectress of the hoofed wild beasts: the ibex, the tur, and the chamois of the crags, which are her own herds, watched and counted as a herder watches sheep. She grants the hunt or withholds it, and to a hunter she chooses she gives more than luck. She takes him as her lover and, for as long as the bond holds, makes his hunting unfailing — but she binds him to strict conditions of purity and faith, recorded by the folklorists at the ethnographer’s distance rather than as any instruction: he must keep her token hidden, keep from the mortal women of his own house, never boast, never take more game than one man can carry home, never fire on the specially marked animal that walks among the herds, because that animal is the goddess. The hunter who breaks faith is destroyed by the same power that fed him. In the most famous of the Svan ballads it is Betkil who breaks it; Dali takes the shape of a white deer, draws him climbing up onto her own mountain, and leaves him hanging on a ledge from which there is no descent, until he falls. The stories differ from valley to valley — the details of the Svan sacred world are genuinely region-variable — but the shape holds: the wild is owned, the game is a gift, and the gift is revocable. From Dali’s union with a mortal hunter is born Amirani, the chained, Prometheus-like culture hero of the Georgian epic, whose deeds are painted even inside the Christian church of Lamaria at Ushguli, where the tenth-to-twelfth-century frescoes carry scenes from his legend on the walls of the Mother of God.

Beside Dali, and closer to the village than her high country, stand the khati — the sacred icon-powers, each seated in a particular shrine and named for a saint of the church, in whom the older layer and the Orthodox one are folded together past unpicking. Chief among them is Jgrag, the Svan name for Saint George, the mounted warrior and protector, the most revered figure of Svan devotion. There is Lamaria, the Svan Our Lady — the Virgin, but also, in the folk reckoning, a power of the hearth and of women, of motherhood and grain and the dairy herd, whose name the Svans give both to Mary and to the tutelary of the home. And there are the paired martyrs Saint Kvirike and Saint Ivlita, whose shrine at Kala, called Lagurka, is held the holiest of all; the historian Ekvtime Taqaishvili once likened Lagurka’s place among the Svans to what Delphi was among the ancient Greeks — the symbol of their unity — and a Svan’s most binding oath was sworn on its icons.

The teaching of this world is that the powers must be fed and kept. The community brings ritual bread, wax candles, and animal sacrifice to the shrine; the men who serve a particular icon keep it, guard its treasures, and lead its rite; and the year turns on the shrine-feasts. On 28 July comes Kvirikoba, the day of Cyricus, called from the shrine simply Lagurka: the villagers climb to the mountain church of Saint Kvirike and Ivlita above Kala for a night of prayer that ends at dawn in sacrifice, and then in song, dance, and games of strength. In the late winter comes Lamproba, the festival of the lampari — torches of dried birch bark bound to a pole — carried in procession through the villages to the cemeteries and planted in the snow at the graves, one for each of the family’s dead, so that the ancestors are honored and lit home as the year turns back toward spring. Over the whole of it stands Ghmerti, the supreme god of the Georgian sky, remote above the shrines and the hunt. But in the Svan world the highest reverence is worked out not in the far sky-god but in these mountain-close powers, in the huntress on the cliff and the icon on the hill — and success in the hunt, the oldest wealth of a stone-tower people, is always a gift and never a right. The lord of the forest herds whom the lowland highlanders knew as Ochopintre works the same ground of the owned wild; in Svaneti it is Dali who holds it.

The strongbox of Georgia

The reception of the Svans is, above everything, a story of survival by altitude — of a country so hard to reach that both a treasure and a religion could be carried up into it and kept. Christianized in the fourth to sixth centuries and lavished, in the medieval golden age, with churches, wall paintings, and gold-and-silver icon-work, Svaneti reached the height of that endowment under Queen Tamar, who reigned from 1184 to 1213 and whose reign the Svans remember as their own high season. Then the mountains became the strongbox of the kingdom. When the lowlands were overrun — by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and by later invaders after them — icons, crosses, illuminated manuscripts, and royal treasure were sent up into the towers and the mountain churches for safekeeping, where they were safer than anywhere below; and much of it, being safer there, never came back. Svaneti became a living reliquary of early Georgian sacred art. At Lagurka the walls carry frescoes signed by the painter Tevdore and dated to 1111 or 1112, among the high points of medieval Georgian monumental painting, and the shrine keeps, with them, venerated medieval icons and metalwork; the region as a whole holds an extraordinary concentration of cloisonné enamel, chased silver, and gold icon-crosses gathered from across the Georgian world into its high churches.

The same isolation that made Svaneti a treasury let its older layer persist. Orthodoxy did not erase the mountain religion so much as fuse with it. The Svans venerate Saint George as Jgrag and the Virgin as Lamaria while still keeping Dali’s hunting-lore, the shrine-sacrifices, and a festival like Lamproba that its own keepers describe as a blend of Christianity and far older belief. How much of the modern Svan cult is a genuine survival of an ancient Caucasian religion, and how much a medieval Christian renaming of powers already there, is a real question, and a debated one. The Georgian ethnographers who recovered the highland religion read it as preserving a deep pre-Christian stratum: above all Vera Bardavelidze, whose Svan fieldwork in the 1930s recorded the sacred breads offered to a figure she noted as “Dali of the New Year” and set out the structure of the shrine religion, and the later students of Georgian mythology who built on her. Against a too-confident reconstruction stands the plain fact that the material is region-variable and was collected late, from a tradition already centuries inside the church. What is not in dispute is that the old layer was still there to be collected.

The stone architecture carried the same survival into the modern record. The tower-houses, the koshki, raised mainly in the ninth to twelfth centuries as combined fortress and dwelling against invasion, avalanche, and the blood feud, stand in Upper Svaneti in numbers and states of preservation found almost nowhere else, and in 1996 they carried the region onto the UNESCO World Heritage list — a landscape of medieval mountain villages, Chazhashi and its neighbors, kept whole by the very remoteness that had kept everything else. Svan complex three-part polyphony, among the most archaic of Georgia’s singing traditions, is likewise recognized, and listed as endangered.

Modernity has pressed hard on all of it. In 1875 and 1876 the Svans of Khalde, in the free upper valleys, resisted the Russian imperial administration’s survey of their land and livestock for taxation and rose in the last of the armed revolts of the Georgian mountaineers against the empire; a regular column with artillery under General Erast Tsitovich reduced the village in the summer of 1876, and Khalde was destroyed, its people scattered, its very name struck from the map for a time. The Soviet century pressed on the shrine religion in its own way, and out-migration, avalanche disaster, and the emptying of the high villages have pressed since. And yet the Svans remain a present, self-conscious people. They keep their towers under the same peaks, keep Svan on their tongues beside Georgian, keep the icons in the shrines and the oaths that are sworn on them, and keep climbing to Lagurka on the twenty-eighth of July and carrying the birch torches to the graves at winter’s end. The huntress still owns the game in the country above the last village, and the old powers still sit in their churches on the hills — kept, as the treasure was kept, by the height of the mountains and by a people who never came down.

The Lagurka shrine — the church of Saints Kvirike and Ivlita above Kala — held the holiest of the Svan sanctuaries and the place of the Kvirikoba pilgrimage each 28 July. Jaba1977, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

→ Related: Dali · Ochopintre · Ghmerti · Kopala · The Colchians · The Iberians Caucasus · Armazi · Armaztsikhe Bagineti · Vani Sanctuary · The Lashari Shrine · Khakhmati · Colchis · Medea