Vani

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For something over two centuries the wealthy dead of Colchis were carried up a low terraced hill above the Rioni and laid in the ground sheathed in gold. The hill is called Akhvlediani Gora — a spur of roughly eight and a half hectares on the western edge of the modern town of Vani, in the province of Imereti in western Georgia, where the small river Sulori comes down to join the Rioni about forty-one kilometers southwest of Kutaisi. It is not a commanding height. The country around it is the warm, wet lowland of the Colchian plain, the basin the Greeks knew as the land of the Phasis and remembered as a country full of gold. What the hill held was the honored dead of that country, and the gold they were buried in was of a make no other land produced: diadems, temple-pendants, necklaces built up bead by bead in granulation so fine it reads as texture, animal-headed clasps and openwork ornaments, laid on the body in a density that turned each grave into a small treasury. From those graves, over the following centuries, the hill itself became a walled sacred precinct — the physical sanctuary behind the Greek image of a golden Colchis.

The hill above the rivers

Vani is read from the ground up, and the reading is the work of Georgian archaeology. The excavators have sorted the hill into four long phases, each with its own character. The oldest, from about the eighth to the sixth century BCE, is a modest settlement of log-cabin houses, its floors scattered with the wheel-made, well-fired black pottery of the early Iron-Age Colchian world. From about 600 to 350 BCE comes what the archaeologists describe as a tangible increase in wealth: the hill becomes the seat of a local elite, and its dead go into the ground in the spectacular rich burials for which the site is famous. From roughly 350 to 250 BCE the place is rebuilt in stone — a circuit wall with gates and towers, terraces carrying monumental architecture, the hill reshaped into a fortified sacred city. A final phase runs from about 250 down to the middle of the first century BCE, a period of decline and renewal that ends in fire. Beneath the whole sequence is a single fact the finds keep returning: this was a center where the wealth of Colchis was gathered, offered, and buried, generation after generation, on the same hill.

Its own name in antiquity is unresolved, and the uncertainty is itself part of the record. The classical geographers knew of Colchian towns whose sites can no longer be fixed with confidence. Pliny and Ptolemy name a place called Surium, which some scholars have set at Vani; others have looked instead to a famous passage in Strabo, who reports in the Moschian country above the rivers a temple of the goddess Leukothea, founded by Phrixus, together with an oracle of Phrixus where a ram was never sacrificed — a sanctuary, Strabo adds, once rich, robbed in his own age first by Pharnaces and a little later by Mithridates of Pergamon. The great excavator of Vani, Otar Lordkipanidze, proposed in 1972 that this was Vani itself, and the fit is tempting: a wealthy inland sanctuary plundered by exactly the commanders whose campaigns bracket the hill’s destruction. Yet the identification is contested. David Braund placed Strabo’s Leukothea farther east in the mountains southwest of Borjomi, and others object that Leukothea was a sea-goddess whose cult belongs on the coast, not in the hinterland. The ancient name of the hill remains, for now, a question the ground has not closed.

The land the hill stands in has to be named carefully, because two ancient peoples wear a single Greek label. The Colchians of Vani are Caucasian, the people of the Rioni basin in western Georgia; they are wholly unrelated to the Iberians of the Spanish peninsula, with whom they share nothing but a much later coincidence of exonym. The eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartli, which the classical writers also called Iberia — the Caucasian one — was a separate polity again, centered on Mtskheta beyond the mountains. Vani belongs to Colchis: to the kingdom the Greeks wrote a sun-descended king and a sorceress-princess into, and to the goldsmiths whose real craft the myth of the Golden Fleece grew out of.

A gold diadem of Colchian workmanship from the graves of Vani, 5th–4th century BCE, in the Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi. Jonathan Cardy, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The gold in the graves

The power of the place showed first in its dead. From roughly the sixth to the fourth century BCE the elite of this corner of Colchis were buried on the hill under an astonishing weight of gold, and the goldwork is the signature of the site. It is jewelry of a workmanship particular to Colchis: hammered diadems, their plaques worked in repoussé with facing animals and scenes of beasts in combat; earrings and temple-pendants hung with fixed globular and bipyramidal drops; necklaces and pectorals strung with rows of tiny cast figures — tortoises, birds, crouching animals — each built up by granulation and filigree so fine that the metal seems to have grain rather than ornament. One diadem recovered from the hill, of the fifth or fourth century BCE, weighs better than two hundred grams of gold. That this was made on the spot and not only imported is not a guess: the excavators found a goldsmith’s workshop on the hill, with tools, unfinished pieces, slag, and charred wood beside a cult place — the physical evidence of a local school of goldsmiths practicing beside the sanctuary they supplied.

Around the local gold lay the imported world. The graves held Greek luxury alongside the Colchian ornament, and the earliest datable Greek object from the hill is a Chiot chalice of the early sixth century BCE — a mark of how early the wine-country of Colchis was reaching across the Black Sea for the vessels of the feast. From the Achaemenid Persian east came seals and gems in the Graeco-Persian manner, and the gold itself carries the eastern taste for the animal-combat motif; a fourth-century signet-ring from the site is cut with a personal name, Dedatos, one of the very few Colchians of Vani whose name survives at all. What the burials describe is not an isolated backwater but a wealthy society trading in both directions — a hill on which the honored dead were dressed in the finest local craft and furnished with the imported marks of rank, and then closed into the ground so richly that the grave and the treasury became the same thing.

The gold itself had a source the myth would seize on. The rivers that drain the western Caucasus run over auriferous gravels and carry fine gold dust down into the lowland, and the classical writers preserved the technique by which the Colchians took it: fleeces of wool were pegged into the mountain streams, and the current dropped its freight of metal into the fibers, so that a sheepskin drawn out and dried came up gilded — a golden fleece in the most literal sense, and modern fieldwork in the streams of the highlands has confirmed the method still works. That the marvelous Fleece of the story grew from this everyday practice is a hypothesis rather than a settled fact, but it is the hypothesis the country’s own geology keeps proposing. The goldsmiths of Vani worked, in other words, in a land where gold came down out of the mountains in the water, and the honored dead of that land were sent into the ground clothed in the finished form of the country’s oldest wealth.

Within the sacred world of Colchis, this was how the god was approached: through gold, and through blood and the poured cup. The burials attest animal sacrifice, and in the richest of them the excavators read the marks of human sacrifice attending the death of the elite. The traveling exhibition that later carried these finds abroad took its title from precisely this knot of practices — Wine, Worship, and Sacrifice — and the phrase names what the deposits hold rather than dressing them up. The material is described here at the archaeologist’s distance, as the visible face of a temple-economy, not offered as any kind of operative rite; the interior meaning of the Colchian cult is largely lost, and what remains is the apparatus — the metal, the vessels, the bones in the ground.

The temple-city

In the fourth and third centuries the hill changed its nature. The graves gave way, or gave rise, to a walled sacred city: a stone circuit with gates and towers climbing the terraces, and on the terraces a monumental architecture in the Greek manner. The excavators recovered Corinthian capitals and lion-head waterspouts, the fittings of temples built to a Hellenistic design and set down in a Colchian sanctuary — the classical vocabulary of column and cornice put to the service of the local gods. With the buildings came sculpture in bronze, cast on the spot: a celebrated life-size bronze torso, fragments of other life-size figures, a bronze Nike among them, the debris of a sanctuary that had once carried standing statuary in metal. To walk the hill in its last centuries would have been to move up through a fortified precinct of temples and bronze figures, the whole of it given over to the ritual life of the country.

A bronze figure of Nike from Vani, among the cast sculpture of the temple-city, in the Vani Archaeological Museum. Carole Raddato, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

What that ritual life was, the finds sketch rather than spell out. The sanctuaries yielded enigmatic figurines and idols whose meaning is not recoverable, and beside them a great abundance of the apparatus of the wine-feast: drinking vessels in quantity, and masks of Dionysos that tie the precinct to the vine and to a cult of wine. Colchis was one of the oldest lands of the grape, and the reviewers of the Vani material have stressed how thoroughly the deposits bind worship to the shared cup — the wine, the libation, and the sacrifice bound into a single practice (Bryn Mawr Classical Review). If the tutelary power of the hill had a name, the likeliest candidate on offer is Strabo’s Leukothea, the goddess with her oracle in the Moschian country — but that identification, as noted, is contested, and the sanctuary is safer described than named. What can be said with confidence is that here the ritual wealth of Colchis concentrated: the gold in the graves and the bronze on the terraces and the masks of the wine-god are the same devotion read at three depths of the same hill.

The place sat inside a wider Caucasian sacred geography whose other centers have their own hills. Across the mountains in eastern Kartli, the royal citadel of Armaztsikhe crowned its own height above a river-junction, seat of the armored dynastic god Armazi. Vani is the western answer to it — not a fortress of the state so much as a treasury of the dead grown into a temple-city, the Colchian rather than the Iberian pole of the pre-Christian religious world of the Georgian lands.

The body of a myth

Vani is, in the plainest sense, the archaeological body of a story. The Greek image of Colchis as a country rich in gold, and the tale of the Golden Fleece and the Argonauts who sailed the length of the Black Sea for it, had for centuries no ground under them but poetry — the Argonautica of Apollonius, read strictly as a myth-source and never as a chronicle. The hill supplies part of the missing ground. It does not prove the voyage of Jason or the existence of Medea; scholars are careful on that point, and the historical kernel behind the Fleece remains debated. But it shows, in gold and bronze and buried treasure, that the country the Greeks dreamed as golden was in fact a land of goldsmiths whose finest work no other people made — that the dream had a real object.

Its recovery is a modern story, and largely a Georgian one. The first finds were reported in 1851 by the orientalist Marie-Félicité Brosset; the hill was surveyed by the pioneering Georgian scholar Ekvtime Taqaishvili in 1896 and again in 1901–1903. Nino Khoshtaria directed excavations from 1947 to 1962, and from 1966 the systematic campaigns began under Otar Lordkipanidze, who worked the site for more than three decades to 2002 and gave Colchian archaeology its modern shape; the work has continued since under Darejan Kacharava. Lordkipanidze founded the on-site Vani Archaeological Museum in 1985, during an international symposium held at the hill, and its Gold Fund was inaugurated in 1987 after a particularly rich burial came to light. The museum, now bearing his name, holds the gold and bronze and imported luxury drawn from the hill; and still only about a third of Akhvlediani Gora has been dug. What has already come out of that third is a corpus — Colchian goldwork, life-size bronze sculpture, Greek and Persian imports, and a vast funerary record — sufficient to make Vani one of the central sites of the pre-classical Caucasus.

The treasures traveled. Between 2007 and 2009 the finds crossed the Atlantic in a major exhibition, shown as Wine, Worship, and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, and as The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani at the Getty Villa in 2009 — carrying the hill to a world audience as the sanctuary-city behind the Fleece. In 2007 Georgia entered the site on the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list, the formal step toward international recognition of what the excavators had drawn out of the ground.

Even the hill’s end is unsettled history. The temple-city was destroyed by fire in the middle of the first century BCE, and Lordkipanidze read two successive destruction layers, laid down within a few years of each other. Which armies did it is a genuine question: the candidates are the Roman general Pompey, whose eastern campaign reached the country in 65 BCE; Pharnaces II of Pontus, active around 49 BCE; and Mithridates of Pergamon, about 47 BCE — the last two the very commanders Strabo names as the plunderers of his Leukothea sanctuary, which is one reason the identification with Vani has proved so hard to let go of. The fire closed the hill as a working sanctuary, and it was never rebuilt.

The people who made it are gone into the record — the Colchians a genuinely ancient documented nation of goldsmiths and temple-builders, past-tense now. But the hill did not pass out of the world with them. Their descendants the Georgians are a living people, and they hold Vani as national patrimony: the archaeological heart of Colchis, the ground under the oldest story the country tells about itself, and the place where the gold the Greeks sailed for is not a fleece but a hill full of graves.

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