Svaneti, Georgia's Isolated Region

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Georgia's Isolated Region of Svaneti

Written and photographed by Adam Sopko

**Two girls in the village of Lengari.**

he first Svanuri words I hear are among the last. With only a few thousand speakers left, the chances that Georgia's ethnic Svans would essay anything in the rolling language--a language without an alphabet--are somewhere between slim and none. Iona Gulidani is an exception.
Iona is slight, even small, and sits bolt upright in a wooden chair. A Svanish cap is settled over his right eye. Ninety-five and blind, Iona is one of the last native speakers of Svan, a language indigenous to the Caucasus region. Most here speak Georgian, the national language.

**Iona Gulidani, in his Svanish wool cap, argues the history of his homeland with his daughter, who is baking bread.**

        His blue blazer bristles with Soviet medals, and he rants in staccato bursts about Mother Georgia, her long-standing dispute with the autonomous region of Abkhazia, and her much-maligned favorite son, Stalin. His daughter, pounding creamy dough into flat loaves, interrupts without skipping a beat. "What can we do with a government that does nothing?" she asks in Georgian.
        "Svaneti is a great land, was great and will be great," Iona says, staring into the blackness that his dark eyes offer. He wrings his aged hands and puts a palm on each knee. "Stalin was Georgian, but he was Svanish in his heart."
        "He was not Svanish," Iona's daughter says as she stokes the fire. "He will never be Svanish." With that she shuts the door to the cast-iron oven--a crate on iron stilts--and gets back to the mound of pale dough. The debate is finished. It's a curious reply to my original question: Who were the first Svans? I have the feeling Iona's answer would be a resounding "We are not the last."

An old culture

slate sky leads me from Iona's through the village of Lengeri to my interpreter's home. The only hotels in Svaneti were abandoned after communism's collapse. The Enguri River provides a constant din beneath the ringing bells of an ox team returning from the mountain. As hogs root in muddy pathways and against stone walls, a black-kerchiefed woman passes by, carrying a pouch of wild berries in the near dark.
        "He is a proud man," Khatuna Pilpani says as she sits next to the iron stove inside her kitchen. "Iona doesn't want you to think the troubles in Georgia are Svanish troubles," she adds, referring to the violent ethnic clashes in the region, especially in an area called Abkhazia.
        In Khatuna's home, as in most Svanish homes, the kitchen's wood-burning stove provides the only heat. Houses are mostly large and simple. There is no plumbing. Electricity is sporadic. The toilet is a diamond cutout in the wooden floor of an outhouse. Books and magazines provide unfriendly toilet paper.
        What about the legends, I ask. Khatuna only smiles and shrugs. "They'll last," she says, as she warms herself near the oven. "Things don't become different or more difficult. They just don't change. The war with Abkhazia has taught us that. The war with Stalin taught our parents." Like most Svans, her attitude is one of least resistance.

**Ushguli, Svaneti's highest village, nestles at the foot of imposing Mount Shkhara at the head of the Enguri River.**

        Khatuna's mother, Nunu Shukvani (married women retain their maiden names), comes in out of the dark. She is tall and wiry, with leathery skin and deep-set eyes. Her dress is dirty and black and her hair a peppery gray. She kisses my traveling companion on the cheek and greets me for the first time. Khatuna turns somber, mumbling a few low words as her mother leaves the room. "My aunt is dead," she says. "Today has been a hard day for my mother."
        A few days later, silently and at a slight distance, I follow members of the Shukvani and Pilpani families up a cobbled pathway. Buried in its center is the concrete pipe that carries mountain waters to the village; where its cargo spills out, the ground is a permanent muck.
        The Lengeri valley opens up below us and stretches east and west until it is swallowed by dipping mountainsides. Reaching the nearest population center, Zugdidi, requires a taxing journey out of the mountains. The town teems with refugees of the war in Abkhazia.
        I can still hear the rush of the Enguri River in its downhill race. Fresh apples, a bit of bread, and an unfinished bottle of pale liquor lean against one gravestone. The image of a solid, black-eyed man who gestures with an upturned palm fronts the polished granite. The Georgian alphabet makes his name indecipherable, but the dates are clear: 1961 to 1995.
        Kneeling at one side of Nunu's sister's grave, three women settle into the grass. Five silent men stand in a semicircle. The gravestone is blank and glossy. The sound of the river blends with the women's laments. "How can a parent outlive a child," a mother wails.
        With the same spontaneity with which they began mourning, they stop. Silently, tearlessly, they back away from the grave. The stern and strong-faced men meld their own songs and prayers with the sound of the torrent below. They toast the lost daughter, sister, mother, and bride with shots of a clear and caustic liquor. A man whose drunkenness is as evident as the creases in his tanned face motions for us to join them. We decline silently, cutting our hands low through the air as if to assure him we are comfortable at a distance. He is insistent, however, and nobody looks up as he makes his way toward us. He grabs me by the wrist and pulls.
        Standing over the grave, he gives us brimming glasses of the pungent alcohol and motions his directions. We raise our glasses to God, to the family, to the loved one lost, and before drinking we pour out shares to the quiet grave beneath us. We do the same with savory foods and then depart to the echo of earlier mourning. It is St. Mariam's Day, Khatuna explains, the Day of the Dead, and across Svaneti its sounds fill the air.
        "Svans never forget," says one of Khatuna's sisters back at the house as she stacks flatbreads on a porcelain plate. A group of women shuffle back and forth between the oven and two tables already laid with sliced tomatoes and cheese, cucumbers, cakes, and fatty meats, as the seated men resume their rounds of toasts. "Tradition makes it impossible. My aunt died two months ago, and my mother will wear black for a very long time." As much to remind themselves, they mourn to remind the village, she says. Shedding their black dresses would suggest they'd outlived their grief. "No one wants to look like they've forgotten."
        In the evening the sun slides into a sea of pines, and another family makes its way to a cemetery guarded by one of the single-nave basilicas that dot the landscape. The churches across Svaneti are the same, down to the drinking horns of sacrificed rams and the aged iron padlocks that keep them shut against thieves. Nunu's kinsmen are drunk and silent.

From generation to generation

owhere is the Georgian patriotism dilemma--whether to be loyal to the country or to the ethnic minority--more apparent than in the division of generations. To gain a greater sense of Svaneti's impasse, I trail Khatuna's brother Ramazi and their father, Garonti, into the mountains that surround Lengeri. We climb north from the valley and away from the highway and its scattered villages, working past meadows of cropped grasses shaved tightly during the summer and fall with giant scythes. We move along a path winding through piles of scree and stands of arthritic-looking pine, past steep hillsides rich with wildflowers where Svaneti's men drive their summering livestock. Long hailed as the "Sovereign of Svaneti," Mount Ushba plunges its twin granite spires into the clear blue day.
Ramazi, all muscle and grin, wipes lively beads of sweat from a broad forehead and sits amid the grasses he's been scything this morning. His father, wearing the handmade wool cap of traditional Svanish men, is stacking the fresh fodder onto a sled fashioned of two wooden skids and a birch bed. Dragged down the mountain behind two plodding oxen, these grasses will feed the family livestock through the remorseless winter.
Ramazi motions with a thick hand and pulls enough English together from what Khatuna has taught him to ask for a cigarette. In my smattering of Georgian I offer that the tobacco is gone, that he, in fact, smoked the last of it. He smiles forgivingly and peers down the slope at his father, still hard at work. Ramazi, it is plain, has no desire to follow in his father's pastoral footsteps. At home he is Svanish, but at night he often joins other young men against blackened walls to smoke marijuana and curse the lot of his still-tribal community.

**Men harvest grass to feed their livestock.**

"I am proud to be Svanish," Ramazi tells me. "But I am proud to be Georgian. I don't know which is better. My family thinks they are the same thing." Wiping the blade of his scythe with a fistful of grass, he continues. "My parents don't want me to go to Tbilisi [Georgia's capital] this year. But there is nothing for me here, only tradition.
"Georgia doesn't have time for Svaneti," Ramazi says as he strides onto the hillside. "They cannot support us here. There are no jobs except for this." He stops. "My father and mother teach also, but they don't get paid. How can you be proud for that? Georgia and Svaneti are two different things. Being Svanish means having nothing. Being Georgian means having a chance."

New horizons

n a frustratingly hot day I walk with Nunu to Mestia. With some of the money I've paid her daughter for translating, she hopes to find the few items that her family can't provide on their own: yeast, a pasty tomato sauce, flour.
"Very few things we buy," she says. "Almost everything we need we grow and keep."
Cresting a hill and bearing left, the empty highway sweeps into Mestia. A relic

Mestia's commerce is kiosk capitalism at best...Turkish candy bars, Russian cigarettes, vodkas and detergents.

of Soviet efforts to support tourism in the region, a rusting sign announces in Russian, Georgian, and English, "Have a Good Travel." Along the entrance to town are the scattered carcasses of Russian-made trucks and an abandoned gas station. A giant muffler and its decayed innards sit amid potholes filled with yesterday's rain.
        Mestia's commerce is kiosk capitalism at best, and the large wooden crates that line one side of the village square all push the same Turkish candy bars, Russian cigarettes, vodkas, and detergents. On the other side of the square, gas is delivered in two-liter bottles and glass jars. Some of it looks conspicuously like the liquor we drank at the grave. A park lined with thick conifers breaks up the monotony of abandoned buildings. There are no benches. No tables.
        The end of the Soviet era is illustrated permanently by Mestia's half-completed construction projects. A deserted Soviet resort stands atop one ridge. The machinery that forced a museum's foundation into the rocky ground is on another. A cracked concrete slab with two posts to hang a net reveals an unfinished volleyball court. Under the Soviets, Svaneti became a sanctuary for traveling Russians. But when the Soviet order came to a close, the construction ended along with government sponsorship.
        "It was different twenty years ago," Nunu says, picking through a wooden shelf for a package of yeast. Backing the kiosks, the windows of a hollowed concrete building reveal healthy saplings where you would expect a furnished room. "Twenty years ago there were police," she says. "There was government." Across the square to her left, another building's facade shows sooty streaks licking upward above vacant windows.

Opportunity knocks

n Mestia, Nunu introduces us to her brother-in-law, Vachtung Pilpani. A tall and stocky man with a round, jovial face and wide eyes, Vachtung is one of the few Svans I've met whose work is not in the mountains. He ushers us into a building with long, wooden hallways and very few windows. The corridors are all dark; there are no lights.
        Inside a spartan office is a desk and several chairs. The first telephone I've seen, a heavy rotary dial, acts as a paperweight. Broken pieces of glass are stacked in the corner; like the windows in most homes, those in his office are missing much of their glass.
        A cultural liaison of sorts, Vachtung promotes Svaneti's heritage to anyone listening: to Georgians because they're nearest and to Germans because they, more than most, have made an effort to tour the former republic.
        Vachtung shows us a printed brochure whose cut-and-paste design advertises a troupe of Svanish dancers and singers--all children. Years ago his father and uncle, he tells us, were part of an all-male group that recorded Svanish songs and toured throughout Georgia.
        "Svaneti is unique," he says, folding his hands and leaning back in his chair. "Our songs, our language, our traditions ... Georgia doesn't realize how important it all is. They recognize the Abkhaz language because they fought for that. They know we can't fight because we are remote and have nothing, so they don't worry about us. They're not concerned with self-determined Svans. But you are right to come here; Svaneti has its history."

**The Svans celebrate weddings with the same intensity that they mourn at funerals.**

        I ask who bothers to pay the salary of someone concerned with preserving traditions, and Vachtung smiles. He's not paid, he says, at least by the government. Vacho, as most call him, explains as if he's apologizing that he simply accepts what he can from tour groups seeking a Svanish experience. Vacho's entrepreneurship, while service oriented, is dependent upon a system of gratuities not unlike those dominating the black markets, where economic slowdown has created uniquely profitable yet individual experiences. Thanks to this, Vacho is doing quite well.
        "Have you been to Ushguli?" Vachtung asks as he walks us into the evening air. The merchants in the square are packing their goods into plastic bags and cheap duffels. A number of men wearing black leather coats are gathered around a Russian jeep and the railing that fronts the park. "To see Svaneti you must go to Ushguli. It's our highest village."
        Several days later, Vachtung hires one of the Russian-made Lada Nivas--squat four-wheel-drive hatchbacks--to drive us the thirty miles to Ushguli. Pitching around corners

Georgians are notoriously reckless behind the wheel; the regular roadside shrines had already confirmed their reputation.

with a ringing horn to alert oncoming traffic (there is none) and coasting downhill to save precious gas, our driver gives new weight to old anxieties. Georgians are notoriously reckless behind the wheel; the regular roadside shrines--most bearing a portrait of the deceased and a bottle of liquor for ad hoc ceremonies--had already confirmed their reputation.
        Ushguli's mountain chill is welcome after the journey, and there is little doubt that we are near the trail's end. Red hillsides stretch to the valley floor that backs Ushguli's farthest settlement. The medieval towers that define Svaneti's heritage reach across the landscape like silent and sturdy pillars. Three- and four-story blocks of stone, they have long symbolized independence and isolation. The Enguri River, a violent and unforgiving force lower in the Caucasus, weaves through the valley with a meandering pulse. At 17,063 feet, Mount Shkhara is among Svaneti's most domineering mountains. It provides a white and gray wall against which Ushguli seems more remote. Somewhere over its summit is Russia.
        Our arrival causes some stir, as travelers are infrequent. Our driver asks where we might find Dato Ratiani, a friend of Vachtung's. Out of the crowd, a short man approaches with a freckled boy behind. Wearing a black sweater vest, a black baseball cap, and a pair of solid boots beneath green wool pants, he is better dressed than most. His dark features and skin give him a Mediterranean appearance, and his broad grin is more relaxed than those of the other Svans I've met. He and his three small children, wife, and mother-in-law crowd us into a square, one-room building with low ceilings. There is a table against one wall, the standard Svanish oven against the other. A slate walkway leads across a short lawn to a building where he and his family sleep.
        His wife, a bulging woman with a toothy grin and cheeks that seem to overlap, puts salted meat, saltier cheese, breads, soup, and fresh cucumbers on the table in front of us. Her children smile and laugh, each fighting to hide behind the other until the grandmother snaps at them. Dato, too, is all smiles.
        After the meal we drink cups of thick Turkish coffee and follow Dato over the slate steps into the house opposite. At its far end is a room with floors painted a deep red, white walls with books stacked across wooden shelves, and a desk with a collection of neatly piled papers, scissors, and a stethoscope.
        "My father was a doctor here," Dato says, pointing to a faded photograph of a white-haired man wearing a lab coat and backed by a Svanish tower. "He was very respected. He went to school in Tbilisi, but he came back here because he knew he could help. Now there are no doctors here." Dato pours a ruddy liquor into two glasses and gives one to me.
        "When people leave here they don't come back," he observes. "They think the world is better outside Svaneti because they think outside Svaneti there is opportunity. There is opportunity here." In a cabinet with wooden doors, medicines are stacked bottle to bottle. His father's lab coat hangs on the back of the door. The single window looks onto a hillside pockmarked with stacks of scythed hay and meandering sheep. "To my father," he says.
        Soviet influence, which first offered modern convenience, sowed the seeds of westernization. Svanish generations ultimately looked outside their mountain homes to a world of increasing advantage. But Georgia's failing economy and its struggling government have made opportunity synonymous with past efforts. There is little the Svans can do besides look to their heritage and thousand-year-old ways, carving a future of renewed subsistence agriculture. Most, like Dato, do so without self-pity or frustration.
        "We have our national pride," he says as we walk back into the sun. "We are all proud to be Georgian and proud to be Svanish. These are hard times but we all want what is best, the way my father wanted what was best."

Teaching the world to dance

t sunset, scattered clouds work themselves east as the sun glides west, dipping beneath blue-green and snowcapped mountains. There is a chill in the air, but the heat pouring from the Pilpani kitchen is overwhelming. I sit near an open window for the comfort of cool air on my back. The faces in the room have warm red cheeks.
        Khatuna sits with her sisters on an old-fashioned couch. Garonti is at the table enjoying his soup with handfuls of fresh bread. Nunu sits near the stove, her head leaning in repose against a concrete wall painted blue. She periodically stokes an already strong fire.
        Sitting next to me, Ramazi works a stocky hand over the neck of a guitar and strums lazily with the other. One sister, Nana, plays a panduri, a Svanish instrument resembling a small guitar with sharper angles and fewer strings. It's almost like being in the middle of a dream, the family arm in arm around a warming fire.
        In clear, crisp tones Nana and Khatuna sing to Lileo, the sun and a god. Anna, another sister, and Ramazi join them, slowly at first. Soon the guitar and panduri are the sole accompaniments as Khatuna and Anna dance together in fluid circles, holding the other's gaze, losing it as they twirl and picking it back up as they face each other again. The wood floor adds additional cadence as they stomp rhythmically. "Now you," Khatuna says, grabbing me by the hand and pulling me to the floor. Garonti smiles. A strong and stoic man, he is not without a sense of humor.
        Soon, the level beat of footsteps is an incongruous thump of heels and toes. "Look at me, in my eyes," Khatuna says, as I study the efforts of her feet. She fits her arms akimbo and high-steps foot to foot. She says, "The Svans have taught everyone to dance."

Adam Sopko is a freelance writer based in Wyoming.