Continuity and Change in the Georgian Highlands: Can Georgian Folk Beliefs Help in the Study of Early Christianity?

A sign at Omalo, Tusheti, warning visitors that they are about to enter a male-only sacred enclosure

Two of these regions were inhabited by the mountain cultures of Svaneti and Tusheti and were largely left to follow their own vernacular religious practices throughout the twentieth century. The third mountain region, Khevsureti, had their rituals and beliefs disrupted by a programme of deportation to the Georgian lowlands by the Soviet authorities in the 1950s. Discussion as to how far these groups have maintained an unbroken tradition of traditional worship and how far the modern ‘paganism’ followed by the Khevsurs and Tushes is a pastiche of ancestral practices intended to reconstruct an almost lost tradition is open to debate amongst contemporary anthropologists, but it is clear that all three regions have been influenced by a greater or lesser degree by the Christianity that became prevalent in the Georgian lowlands from the fourth century onwards.

Traditional meeting place for the elders of Dartlo, Tusheti

At one end of the spectrum we have Svaneti, which is ostensibly a Christian culture although the Christianity practiced in the region is distinctly idiosyncratic and is strongly flavoured by vernacular belief systems. In this instance we have Christian saints identified with a series of non-Christian deities conflated into a syncretistic worldview that was seen as unproblematic until the recent aggressive resurgence of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Elsewhere in Khevsureti and Tusheti there is no deep-rooted Christian tradition – there were 4 nineteenth century churches built in Tusheti, of which one is known to be ruined and two still in use with the fate of the fourth unclear – and in Khevsureti there is a new church in the main village of Shatili but the landscape is still defined more by ancient shrines than it is by a Christian worldview. 

A shrine within the ritual enclosure at Khakhmati, Khevsureti

Therefore questions raised in the works of Charachidzé, Kiknadze and other anthropologists concerning whether or not the different forms of Georgian vernacular belief are pagan systems with an overlying stratum of Christianity or whether the opposite is true are still ongoing, but one thing seems clear and that is that there certainly is an element of two-way traffic between highland and lowland belief systems. It is for this reason that images and brief explanatory texts have been included about these mountain cultures on this website. Although their presence on a site exploring inter-cultural relations in late antiquity is at first glance something of an anomaly, the research undertaken for this project indicated that not only were the mountain cultures the repositories of the material treasures of Georgian society throughouth the Middle Ages (see Chapter 3 in the monograph that accompanies this project for more on this subject), they also bear remnants of earlier cultural practices and rituals that can be analysed for evidence of earlier cultural interactions.

A view of Shatili, Khevsureti

As noted above, these are complex issues that largely remain outside the remit of the research undertaken for the current project but were touched upon throughout fieldwork. Therefore it was felt necessary to explain that as the evidence uncovered suggested strong dualist overtones in Georgian beliefs in late antiquity as Zoroastrianism, Christianity and probably Manichaeanism sought to gain a foothold in the Kartvelian-speaking regions of the Caucasus, it seems possible that some of these earlier belief systems have been at least partially retained in the mountain cultures of Georgia. These cultures are, depending on their different contexts more or less ‘pagan’ or more or less ‘Christian’ on a sliding scale with Svaneti at the most ‘Christian’ end of the spectrum and Khevsur and Tush beliefs tending more to traditional vernacular practices. For this researcher at least, it seems likely that there are some echoes of early Christian ritual present in Khevsur festal cycles and some rituals. Over in the west it also seems likely that the Christian traditions of Svaneti have retained earlier Christian (and non-Christian) elements due to the relative remoteness of the region. This is not to suggest that the mountains were cut off from the lowlands – there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that these mountain civilisations were anything but isolated – but on the other hand they were equally interconnected with the communities on the northern side of the Caucasus mountains and this mosaic of religious and cultural practices makes it very difficult to establish which beliefs and practices may originate from an ancient Christian source. 

A village shrine in Dochu, Tusheti

Therefore this material has been included on this site largely due to the central role of the cross in Khevsur imagery and ritual and the possibility that the Khevsur cross-shaped banner known as a drosha may be linked to early Christian liturgies. In particular there is a possibility that there is a relationship between the drosha and the early oriental Christian practice of crosses representing the body of Christ moving around the church interior to represent Christ incarnate and then His return to the heavenly realm. A variant of this can also be posited for the presence of large pre-altar crosses in Svaneti, a practice that appears to have once been adopted throughout the Kartvelian-speaking lands (early examples of bases for these crosses survive in Jvari, Mtskheta, Anchiskhati, Tbilisi and the church of Zhaleti on Sioni lake in Mtianeti). These issues are discussed with relation to the liturgy in the monograph that accompanies this project, but this brief overview is intended to introduce readers to the presence of traditional Georgian religious practices in the Caucasus mountains and to provide a brief bibliography to enable those who are interested in this issue to research these beliefs further.