Svaneti: Georgia’s Paradise Lost

Ramazi Pilpani, all muscle and grin, wipes lively beads of sweat from a broad forehead and sits into the grasses he’s been laboring all morning to bring down.  Pulling his knees nearer to his chest he lets out a playful sigh.  His scythe, like a sickle bearing weight, lies at his feet.  Twenty-five yards beneath him and wearing the handmade wool cap donned by traditional Svanish men, his father is taking pains to stack the fresh fodder onto a sled fashioned of two wooden skids and a faultless birch bed.  Dragged back down the mountain behind two plodding oxen, these grasses, stock piled summer and fall, will feed the family livestock through the slow moving winter. 

Ramaz, as his family calls him, motions with a stout hand and pulls enough English from what his sister, our interpreter, has taught him to ask for a cigarette.  In my smattering of Georgian I offer that the tobacco is gone, that he in fact has smoked the last of it.  Ramaz smiles a forgiving smile and peers down at his father, still hard at work and sweating beneath a cap carrying with it the whole of Svaneti’s history.  The future face of the Svans, at 16 Ramazi rarely fits the gray wool of a Svanish cap around his head of black hair.  While in his family’s home he falls quickly into the custom of ages, still singing the songs of these Svanish highlanders and dancing their dances.  But at night he’ll often join other men his age against blackened walls and atop easy-made benches to smoke pot and take turns cursing the lot of his still tribal community.

From my perch high above the Svanish village of Lengeri, tucked deep inside the Caucasus range that serves as a natural and domineering border between Russia and Georgia, I trace the fall of the Enguri River and the road that follows it through steep canyons.  Well beyond sight, after the river and its companion highway disappear behind a rich, green bend, the small city of Zugdidi teems with refugees of Georgia’s bloody and longstanding war with the autonomous region of Abkhazia.  East of that, Georgia’s capital city, Tbilisi, is busy building a community modeled after its European neighbors though with a Central Asian flare.  Signs of communism’s long reign are still visible despite an aggressive effort to introduce modernized and free market culture.  Trailing that same highway northeast through Elysian fields and dense fir, beneath the monarchal gaze of steel-eyed mountains and past periodic medieval villages, the region of Upper Svaneti opens up along the 50 kilometers that separates Lengeri and Ushguli, the “highest” continually inhabited village in Europe. 

Today, along with the chaos and uncertainty gripping most recovering former Soviet republics, the mountain region of Upper Svaneti in the Caucasus and culture rich Georgian Republic is fighting a fight few win: a battle for identity in a faceless nation.  Long hailed as independent despite the despotism or democracy that surrounded it, Svaneti now finds itself torn between the consistency of its centuries-old practices and an urgent need of political, social, and technical reform. 

* * *  After the sun has dipped itself into a sea of green pine, Iona Gulidani shuffles from beneath a shadowy veil, one foot sliding ahead of the next across wooden floorboards made marble after a century of traffic.  Sitting bolt upright into a squat wooden chair, his Svanish cap settled cockeyed and covering his right eye, Iona speaks in a passionate Svanuri tongue.  Now 95 and speaking a language with no alphabet, a language with less than 2,000 fluent speakers, Iona is a walking metaphor.  The embodiment of Svaneti’s character and a keeper of its customs and secrets, Iona portends a future of uncertain footing. 

In a blazer busied with Soviet entrusted medals, he talks of Svaneti with the same passion he profits Stalin, Georgia’s favorite son.  His daughter interrupts, talking to the handfuls of creamy dough she’s been working into rounded loaves.  “What can we do with a government that does nothing?” she asks. 

Quick to claim their independence in 1991, Georgia soon felt the painful effects of political divisiveness and emerging ethnic unrest.  And though now making strides, Georgia continues to suffer the ill consequences of its untimed reform, including the alienation of its most rural populations.  Tucked inside these Caucasus barriers, Svaneti remains tethered to the yoke of hereditary custom. 

Still tending to the scars left by Soviet occupation, Svaneti’s numbers carry the odd distinction of forcing through both a geographic and socio-political limbo.  Poised at a unique crossroads between Europe and Central Asia and dotting the gray line between the Middle East and Russia, Georgia’s history is a patchwork of Tartar and Muslim influence, the rise of Christianity and subjugation to Czarist and eventually Soviet rule.  As if that wouldn’t suffice for an identity crisis, Svaneti, perched between Georgia’s struggling autonomous regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia faces a peculiar fight within the fray. 

* * *  Cresting a hill and sweeping left the lone highway forces east into Mestia.  A relic 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 Mestia are the scattered carcasses of Russian-made trucks and an abandoned petrol station.  A giant muffler and its decayed innards lay amid potholes filled with yesterday’s rain. 

In Mestia, Svaneti’s provincial capital and lone cartographic reference point, the end of the Soviet era is written permanently in the shape of half-completed construction projects.  A Soviet resort, deserted and crumbling stands atop one ridge, overlooking the abandoned machinery that years ago gurgled and roared as it pushed the foundation of a museum into the mountain air.  Under the Soviets, Svaneti became a hotbed for traveling Russians.  But when the Soviet order came to a close, both the hammer and the sickle fell. 

Making the walk from Lengeri to Mestia, Nunu Shukvani is apologetic and pleading.  A tall, thin and strong woman with features carved in block fashion, Nunu’s dark eyes matched by her dark dress speak volumes even before our conversation begins.  In her best English, Nunu, short for Shushana, tells me not to “say bad things about [her] country.”  It is the first time in nearly five weeks that she has replaced her Svanish pride for a thinly veiled humility.  Twenty years ago there were Russian goods, she says, Russian organization.  Twenty years ago according to Nunu, there were police, there was government.  Today, the burned-out shell of a police station – the third such shell in ten years – looms over the concrete and asphalt square that serves as Mestia’s, and Svaneti’s, center of commerce. 

That commerce is kiosk capitalism at best, where each stand pushes the same array of Turkish candy bars, Russian cigarettes, vodkas and detergents.  On opposite sides of the square petrol is delivered in two-liter bottles and glass jars.  On one side of the square a park lined with thick conifers and a steel railing mirrors the police station’s darkened shell.  Empty but for cluttered trash, beer bottles and cigarette wrappings, it boasts only a metal pipe at one corner from which mineral rich and carbonated water continuously flows.  No benches.  No tables.  Like a Pollock painting, the park’s floor is a dirt canvas marked by inconsistent rubbish.  Wading past the men that linger and leer around the park’s shaded railing, Svans sip and slurp at the fresh water as they move in and out of the square in search of something new after years of seeing only old. 

Employment throughout Svaneti is concentrated in the subsistence driven labor that prevailed for centuries.  Men spend their spring and summer months hiking deep into the mountains, carving native grasses to feed oxen and cows through the winter and felling the available hard woods that will keep their home-fires burning year round.  Wives and daughters spend the majority of their days tending to gardens and preparing foods that can be stored without the help of electric refrigeration. 

The few government jobs available to the Svans, those of teaching and medicine, persist at a rate one step above stagnant.  While both doctors and teachers get paid roughly the same salaries, ranging from 25 to 30 lari per month ($12.50-$15), neither have been paid in the last six to seven months.  And like hospitals, schools find themselves under supplied and in vast disrepair.  Adding to this, the transportation network is in poor condition, disrupted by ethnic conflict, highway banditry, fuel shortages, and frequent rockslides.  Maintenance and repair are non-existent. 

In our conversations Nunu, without saying it directly, admits the worst.  Her Georgia, and particularly her countryside region of Svaneti, is grinding to an unfortunate halt.  The end result of a ten-year battle for political and socio-economic stability following the country’s first independence in nearly seventy years. 

Inside Mestia’s hospital, a collection of nurses crowds into a small room warmed with a hot-plate, the same hot-plate found in most Georgian kitchens and the same hot-plate used to heat treat the few medical instruments the hospital owns.  Outside the room, a dark corridor runs past five or six closed doors.  A scaly white, the doors stand in contrast to the crumbling green concrete that sheds itself daily onto the cracked wooden floorboards.  The first indoor plumbing I’ve seen throughout my stay, one dark and dank room looks more like a moss rich cave.  With no toilet and a porcelain sink mildewed to a textured finish, the concrete that marks the floor is at best piecemeal. 

The five aged nurses regard me with polite respect.  Products of an era when socio-economic difficulties and government grievances were kept private, they are unwilling to talk of the hospital without a doctor present.  When the doctor does arrive, wearing a gray-white coat to match her gray-white complexion, the nurses in the room excuse themselves.  While not working with doctors and patients, they’ll spend their time in front of the crumbling hospital chopping wood and delivering it to the iron stoves that heat the building.  While the distribution network of energy was privatized in 1998, Svaneti continues to suffer from inadequate delivery.  In 1996 as much as 96% of Georgia’s rural population still used wood as the primary fuel for heating.

The doctor explains to me that she is among 20 doctors and nurses that work in the hospital, Svaneti’s only.  And like the other government paid employees in the region, mostly teachers, they were last paid some months ago.  Unlike her nurses, she is eager to speak of the situation though without giving her name.  It is not for some great fear of tyranny and oppression however, but embarrassment and humility.  So proud to be Georgian, prouder still to be Svanish, she is disconcerted by the politics that have led to this situation.

Under Soviet control, she explains, the state saw to it that they had everything they needed.  Today they operate under the worst conditions in 20 years.  It has been two years since equipment was updated.  And while they need “everything,” they do not expect it to come soon.  “The conditions are bad,” she says.  But according to state-delivered statistics, the Svans are getting the assistance they need.  Boasting an infant mortality rate and a death rate among the nation’s lowest, Svaneti has one of Georgia’s highest rates in population increase.  Despite this seeming success, our interpreter Khatuna Pilpani has miscarried twice in two years and spent the first three weeks of our stay laid up with an infection to her leg that, based on the explanation she gave, was bled clean.

If the rate of population increase is correct, it also is misleading, for the youngest generations of Svans are abandoning the toils of this region, along with its language and traditions, for the prospect of greater stability in one of the country’s lone economic centers, the capital city.  Just a long day’s journey from Svaneti, Tbilisi nonetheless offers a world apart. 

* * *  After a late evening arrival in Ushguli was met with typical Svanish hospitality – a supper of soups and cheeses, breads and tea – our first morning offers a collection of clouds colored a heavy mix of blues and yellows.  Men and women are at their duties; ox carts work themselves into the mountains that surround and the low of cows and a rooster’s call announce the day’s arrival.  In Ushguli I find myself near the end of it all, shadowed by Shkhara’s 5,000 meters and surrounded by a world in further exile where the Christianity adopted in the 4th century still blends itself with sharp pagan practice. 

Here, where the Enguri makes its first forceful efforts through the Caucasus and to the Black Sea, the Nizharadze family is busy butchering a freshly killed bull.  Today is the Tslis Tawi (first anniversary) of a well-respected family member, and as the men of the family work at dicing the animal’s every muscle, the women move in blurred fashion between houses, kindling the kitchen fires that will burn all day in preparation for the celebration.

In the evening, as the sun slides lower into the now blue-gray sky, a small party makes its way to one of several cemeteries guarded by the single-nave basilicas that dot Svaneti’s religious landscape like tidy and hollow blocks of silent worship.  Inside an iron fence, the women shout tearful laments into the Svanish air and the men stand silent.  Eventually it will be their turn to sing homage, toast the lost hero, and leave food and gifts for his comfort.  The Tslis Tawi will not end until late into the night, when the food is long finished and the drink long dry, and another day is tolled in favor of the past. 

Commenting on the permanent mourning of so many Svanish women, nineteen-year old Salome Guruli admits only an academic interest in the ways of her family and community.  While supportive of the traditions still alive in this mountain frontier, Salome explains that many of the women wear black not simply for the deceased.  As much to remind themselves, they mourn to remind the village, she says.  Shrouded more in memory than garments, shedding their black dress would suggest they’d outlived their grief.  No one wants to look as if they’ve forgotten. 

Like many of Svaneti’s younger generation, Salome spends only her summer holidays in the mountainous region.  During the academic year she attends one of Tbilisi’s many state run universities.  An art history student, she is far from optimistic about the possibility of employment after her graduation.  “It is very difficult in this country to make something,” she says though quickly correcting herself, “It is very difficult to do something.” 

Svaneti’s youth, understanding something of the freedoms and possibilities granted them by a democratic system, cannot help but hope for a future of political and social expansion.  The elderly, having known only the security offered by the Soviet system, a security without luxury, lament the day that Georgia found herself alone in a world of uncertainties.  When asked if she is happy, Tsiala Gulidani, a Georgian Literature teacher and local historian still certain that the Svanish heritage will continue on, nonetheless answers bluntly, “No.” 

* * * Nowhere in the Georgian Republic will you find a greater sense of nationalism despite such political and physical alienation.  With roughly four telephones for every 100 people and a single access road whose passage is as indefinite as most paychecks, the government’s political uncertainties, growing trade deficit, and problems with tax evasion and corruption, only strengthen the Svanish claim to independence and isolation.  It’s a catch 22 however, for the generation now coming of age in these highlands; perpetuate the traditions and cultures of your ancestors at the cost of modernization, or battle for the technologies and infrastructure that may quickly rout the ways of ages past.  Svaneti has rarely been so divided between development and regress.

On our final day inside these mountainous confines, Gocha Shukvani greets me with a sweaty handshake and a warm kiss to the cheek.  He taps a wrist and offers a wry smile.  I’m late.  Donned in Adidas shoes and sweats, he continues his laps around Mestia’s athletic center, an indoor facility whose façade says more about the decaying of infrastructures than the building of them.  Like any story about any ghetto there are pathways that lead outside the circumstances that surround a troubled center’s youth.  Athletics are a universal.  After his laps have counted themselves out, Gocha tells me that there were two Svanish wrestlers and one boxer in the Sydney Olympics.  Unveiling his Svanish pride, he suggests that he, now only 16, will be the next.

The three current Olympians hail from this same gymnasium and its one rotted mat and aging boxing ring.  Gocha turns to the ring where he shadowboxes for the next 25 minutes, fighting an opponent he cannot see, cannot understand, cannot anticipate.  Like the future that so many Svans now battle, Gocha’s adversary relies on the fact that the present is as trifling as the days and years ahead.  That in order to strike one blow, the feet must first be planted, stability guaranteed, the target clear and plain.

Gocha bandies about the ring’s square dimensions, throwing fists up and out but carrying in his black eyes a look unsteady, uncertain.  Forward or back, right or left, the way is not clearly marked, the combatant not one but many, not only here but there.  On the floor around him there are training sessions for boxing and for judo underway – all young boys still full of Svanish fever.  And here, for this moment, at this time, there is a breakthrough.  Gocha tosses his hands to the sky and sends a furtive grin my way.  Even the nine young fighters throwing jabs in the soggy air turn their eyes to the ring.  His competitor is down, perhaps out, and Gocha reminds me in a wink that battles are won not always against the visible opponent or with accountable odds, but by reaching blindly into the shadows and stepping wildly though onto unsettled ground. 

©2003 Adam Sopko