The various descriptions and "findings" related on this particular web-page are related to the Bats people, or "Tsova-Tush", as they are known in Georgian, "the Tush from [the Tsova Valley]"(1), whose traditional homeland, "Tsova-ta" or "Bats-ta" (the "-ta" suffix meaning "the place of"), is high up in the mountains of Tushetia in north-eastern Georgia, close to the borders with Chechnya and Daghestan. But first, an introductory babble.
[Note: This text is likely to quickly become very complicated, and somewhat rambling. The Author obviously apologizes to the Reader for any passages which will seem to him too long or incomprehensible (or just badly written); but as regards the complexity and relative obscurity of the terms dictated by the subject-matter - and indeed the relative obscurity of the subject-matter itself - the Author hopes that the Reader will not have stumbled upon this research purely by chance.]
The Caucasus region has long been fabled for the extraordinary diversity of its inhabitants. The valleys and plateaux of the towering, snow-capped Greater and Lesser Caucasus mountain chains - which stretch for nearly 2,000km between the Black and Caspian Seas, rising to over 5,500m and comprising around twenty peaks higher than the Mont Blanc - are populated by dozens and dozens of distinct peoples, who speak a mind-boggling variety of different and often mutually-incomprehensible languages and dialects.
In addition to the high degree of diversity which marks the indigenous Caucasian languages and peoples - a degree which one may attribute to the effects of the relative geographical isolation of human communities over hundreds if not thousands of years, as dictated by the region's rugged, impassable mountainous terrain - the Caucasus has throughout its history been a march-land between Russia and Persia, Anatolia and Central Asia, and has consequently been influenced by countless different cultures, some there to stay, others merely migrating or passing through. Throughout its history, the rugged, unavoidable Caucasus region not only created the extraordinary degree of cultural diversity which marks its inhabitants - it has also preserved it, by isolating and shielding countless communities from mass assimilation into a greater whole.(2)
The first historical documents and artefacts which record and relate the extraordinary linguistic diversity of the region date back to the seventh century before Christ, and come to us from those intrepid Ancient Greek mariners, who had reached the Caucasian shores of the Black Sea as early as the middle or late Bronze Age. The modern Georgian coastal region of Mingrelia is the no longer mythical land of Colchis, where Jason and the Argonauts stole the Golden Fleece and the King's daughter Medea (whose name gives us our word "medicine" - she was skilled at herbal healing). The Golden Fleece itself may not have been a legend, as the author and traveller Tim Severin relates how the Georgian Svans, who have been living in the high valleys of the northwestern Caucasus for aeons, still use sheep's fleeces to filter particles of gold from the mountain streams. The river Jason and his crew sailed the Argo up to reach the Colchian capital was the Phasis River, where the promising culinary aspects of the "pheasant" were allegedly first thought of. The summit of Mount Kazbeg in northern Georgia (5,067m - the name in Georgian is "mkinvartsveri", "The Mountain of Ice") is where legend still has Prometheus in chains, an eagle coming daily to tear at his liver, punished for all eternity by the Gods for having revealed the secret of Fire to Man.(3) Some other ancient Greek legends, such as Perseus' ruse to escape the cave of a sheep-herding, man-eating cyclops (whom he subsequently blinds) by suspending himself underneath a sheep to avoid detection, also have intriguing parallels in the Caucasian myths surrounding the local Nart giants, as does the myth of Prometheus himself. Greek and, later, Roman estimates as to the number of languages spoken in the Caucasus would range from 70 to 300, not so far off the mark when one considers that most contemporary observers identify around 50 distinct languages, with an even greater number of dialects, bringing the total to over a hundred. (In numerous cases, however, the distinction between the two - language and dialect - is difficult to define.)
Today, Narts and Greek adventurers aside, the Caucasus region is inhabited by around 23 million people, who make up the populations of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the seven Caucasian republics in the Russian Federation, all of the countries being post-Soviet states. Of these 23 million, a third speak indigenous Caucasian languages, a third Indo-European tongues, and the remaining third Turkic languages. The Indo-European group of languages includes Armenian, Ossetian (related to Iranian - the closest relative of Ossetian is spoken in a remote valley in Tajikistan, thousands of kilometres to the East), and Russian (a recent arrival); the Turkic group, Turkoman Azeri in Azerbaijan, Karachay-Balkar in the northwestern Caucasus, etc. And of these 23 million speakers, around 4 million speak Georgian, a further 3 million speak Armenian, and 8 million Azeri. It is the remaining 15 million inhabitants and the remaining 47-odd languages they speak (implying an average number of barely 300,000 speakers per language - real numbers are often much, much lower) which interest us.
Consult the excellent Ethnologue, and look up the dozen or so languages spoken in Georgia (population around 5 million; "sa-kartvel-o" in Georgian, or "The Place of the Karts"): The most-widely spoken language in Georgia, with just under three quarters of the population speaking it, is... Georgian, obviously - a Caucasian language (Kartvelian) indigenous to the region. In second place comes Armenian, an Indo-European language spoken by around 8% of the population, and the dominant tongue in Georgia's two vaguely-separatist southeastern (and largely monolingual in Armenian) provinces of Samtskhe and Javakheti.(4) In third place comes Azeri, spoken by approximately 6% of the population, Azeris who live in the south of Georgia, mostly around the town of Marneuli. Azeri is a Turkic language, whose presence in the Caucasus is the result of the invasions of Turkoman nomads, come from Central Asia via the southern shores of the Caspian from the twelfth century A.D. onwards. The remaining 10% or so of the original 5 million population are divided into around 10 languages and dialects, from Bohtan Neo-Aramaic to Yezidi. These groups vary in size, from Ossetian (3% of the population, i.e. the approximately 150,000 Ossetians who live in their breakaway republic to the north) all the way down to Bats, currently spoken by around 3,000 people (an old estimate - I suspect the real number is probably significantly lower), who make up barely half a village in eastern Georgia, or 0.06% of the population.
The sense of belonging to a people, a nation, can be based upon sharing a common language, and in this sense, the Bats or "Tsova-Tush" are no doubt one of the smallest nations of the Caucasus. Although they are unquestionably Tush (i.e. inhabitants of Tushetia - see map - and therefore Georgians), unlike their neighbours they have been bilingual for as far back as historical sources reach us.
Despite numerous loan-words from Georgian, their primary tongue - which has now long been superseded by Georgian - is or rather "was" from a completely different family: Purely oral (it does not have its own alphabet), it is related to Chechen and Ingush, and is therefore in a different linguistic family altogether. (Nakh, as in "Nakho-Daghestanian", as opposed to Kartvelian - see image below.)
It seems likely that the Bats migrated to Tushetia from Chechen or Ingush lands north of the Caucasus, possibly in search of new pastures for their no doubt large flocks of sheep. (Sheep are the main economic resource in the high mountains, and Tush sheep are prized for their wool and their milk.) Speaking a language related to Chechen, but numbering barely a few thousand, they settled in a remote, far-removed valley, where their number seems to have stabilized at around 2-3,000 (their high altitude mountain home could probably sustain no more). Over several generations, they learnt the Tush dialect of Georgian spoken by their neighbours, which became their second language, useful for social and economic exchanges. Their own dialect of Chechen progressively adopted many new loan-words from Georgian at a slowly-accelerating rate - logically so, when one considers the likely extent of the vocabularies of languages which evolved in isolated mountain valleys.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, through a combination of disease (the Plague, apparently), natural disaster in the form of a landslide which destroyed an entire Bats village, and an imperial Russian policy of resettlement - but perhaps most of all for the prospect of a better, easier life down in the broad, sun-drenched Alazani valley - the Bats began to move down to land which had been granted them and their Tush neighbours as wintering-grounds for their flocks as early as the mid-seventeenth century, in recognition of their valuable assistance in a battle against the invading Persians (see entry under "Zezwaoba - Dalaoba").
From this point onwards, following their resettlement in Zemo-Alvani and the removal of the protective, isolating barriers imposed (and afforded) by their mountainous homeland, the Bats began to become assimilated into the dominant Tush and Georgian cultures. Georgian became the language of their education, and that of the (slightly) wider world around them, the language of future prospects, the language of administration. The first school was built during the first half of the nineteenth century, and classes have since been taught in Georgian and Russian; Bats became the language children learnt and spoke at home i.e. it was progressively reduced to the domestic sphere.
Until the 1960s, children were still taught Bats at home - by their parents or grandparents - but the disappearance of a language is a progressive and self-reinforcing phenomenon. Along with the growing proportion of mixed marriages, and the increasing relevance of Georgian to the everyday lives and prospects of the Bats, the use of Bats was slowly but surely diminishing - in terms of practice and perceived usefulness.
Generations born before the 1960s still learnt Bats at home, if only a somewhat-impoverished version of it - much reduced in vocabulary and grammar, and consequently much reduced in precision and versatility. With a few exceptions, it would seem that those adults who were born in the 1960s and 1970s no longer have the ability to speak Bats with any degree of fluency. Whilst their vocabularies may still be relatively extensive, they are no longer able to construct sentences, or express complicated ideas or notions, etc., and are therefore largely unwilling to speak Bats. And as for the young Bats born since the 1980s, the overwhelming majority do not even know simple greetings or how to count to ten. This is a self-reinforcing process, and, nowadays, barely a few hundred Bats - most of them over 50 - can speak the language of their ancestors with any degree of fluency and confidence. When one thinks that those Bats who descended from their mountainous Tsovata to the lowlands barely 200 years ago still mastered their particular language, perhaps even to the detriment of Georgian, the slow but sure death of the Bats language no longer seems so slow - rather, we have reached a critical point, a critical generation, one that is no longer capable of perpetuating the language by teaching it to their children, even if they wanted to.
When the Bats language disappears, as it surely will within another few generations, a large piece of Bats culture will vanish with it, a loss which will perhaps be too great to bear for the Bats' sense of communal identity.
I am no linguist, no Professor emeritus of Caucasian Languages, have no ethnolinguistic qualifications whatsoever. What little information I have found on the Bats people on the internet and in books (barely a few sentences in the latter - perhaps I should try and find some better ones?) concentrates mainly on their language - on exciting and universally-popular subjects such as special verbal forms, pharyngeal consonants, agglutinative or flective morphological systems, verbal genres and gerundives, and so on.
For the few clicks this site (and a future, dedicated one) will get every month, for those of you who are interested in this small, insignificant people, know that I simply wanted to give the Bats people a face!
More soon.
(1) These two terms - "Bats" and "Tsova-Tush" - are interchangeable. As noted above, the term "Tsova-Tush" specifically denotes those Tush who used to live in the Tsova valley (and who now live in the lowlands village of Zemo Alvani - see map). There are three other Tush communities, together numbering around 25,000, of whom numerous families still live in their mountain villages, a few all year-round through the harsh, long winters. They are the "Pirikiti-", "Gometsari-", and the most numerous "Chaghma-Tush", from their eponymous valleys. Whilst surely all Georgians know of the Tush (or, more likely, know of their Christian Georgian mountain brothers who live among the near-mythical peaks of Tushetia), a mere handful are aware of the geographical (and therefore, to some extent, cultural and linguistic) distinctions between "Pirikiti-", "Gometsari-" and "Chaghma-" Tush, and practically none seem to have ever heard of the "Tsova-" Tush. Amongst the Tush themselves, there seems to be a slightly discriminatory and therefore negative connotation to "Tsova-Tush", precisely because the latter speak (or rather "spoke") their second, non-Kartvelian (and therefore non-Georgian) language. "The Black Tush" seems to also be a term sometimes used to refer to them: Perhaps the word "tsova" is related to the Georgian word for "black", "shavi"? In any case, it is also the name of the Tsovatistsqali River ("Tsovat-is-tsqali" meaning "Tsovata-of Water" i.e. "The River of Tsovata"). In Bats, the "-ta" suffix denotes place, as in "kuikh-ta", "The Land of the Georgians", or "indur-ta", "The Place of [the Indur extended family, or "Indurs"]". To cut a long footnote short, it is entirely possible that, when the Chechen-speaking Bats migrated to Tushetia centuries ago - as seems likely - that they were referred to by an existing, Georgian Tush population as "The Tsova" or "The Blacks", the valley they chose to settle in naturally becoming "The Place of the Blacks", and the river that runs through it "The River of the Blacks". However, despite this vague sense of discrimination, the historic and long-standing geographical proximity of the Tush in general to Chechen- and Andi-speaking peoples living in villages just across the mountains in Chechnya and Daghestan, and the necessary socio-economic interdependence of the pastoral, semi-nomadic ways of life of these mountain peoples, has caused most Tush to be familiar with - and sometimes even share - aspects of neighbouring, non-Georgian cultures, including some elements of their non-Kartvelian languages.
(2) Paradoxically, the harsh and difficult life shared by those different communities living high up in the mountains - the Tush, Svans, Chechens, Khevsurs, Ossetes, Ingush, Avars, etc. etc. - has resulted in many commonalities and mutual influences as regards language, religious and superstitious beliefs, dress, customs and traditions, cuisine, architecture, and so on. Many a priori different or "incompatible" peoples - such as the Christian [Georgian] Khevsurs and the Muslim Chechens, for example - no doubt consider themselves closer to one another than they do to lowlanders or other a priori related communities. It is related and commonly-held that, when the "punished" Chechens returned to their Caucasian homeland from their deportation and exile to Kazakhstan (following their official "rehabilitation" after Kruschev's "secret" denunciation of Stalin's and Stalinism's excesses, pronounced in 1957), that the Chechens discovered that their Georgian neighbours the Khevsurs had taken care of their homes and flocks, and promptly returned them to their rightful owners.
(3) When the great nineteenth-century mountaineer Douglas Freshfield first reached the summit in 1838, locals had told him that he would find the grave of Abraham, or a giant cockerel, or treasure guarded by a giant bull, or some silmilar amazement; sadly, nowhere is it related that he saw there anything more than a lot of ice and snow. On his way down, still close to the summit, and no doubt brooding about treasure and giant cockerels, he apparently bumped into a shepherd and his flock, scaring the poor, lonesome man out of his wits.
(4) The Armenians apparently came to the region from Anatolia in around 600 B.C. Here they invaded and destroyed the ancient kingdom of Urartu, which was centred upon the southeastern shores of Lake Van, now in eastern Anatolia, before being themselves bounced around by the Persians, the Romans, the Parthians, The Sassanids (Persians again), the Arabs, the Turkomans, the Mongols, Kurdish nomads, Tamerlaine, more Turkomans, the Sefevids (more Persians), and the Ottomans for the next two and a half thousand years.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
And now for some photographs!
A few words on (traditional) conjugal relationships among the Tsova-Tush (Bats):
The Tsova-Tush (Bats) had a tradition of silence among individuals and families linked by marriage, a tradition which can be found among many peoples of the
Following her marriage, a woman was forbidden by custom to speak to members of her husband's family for varying periods of time - these ranged from one month (before she could address her mother-in-law) to several years (her father- and brothers-in-law).
After a month of complete silence, the poor girl received a small present from her mother-in-law ("nan", "mother" in Tsova), and was finally allowed to speak to her.
Several years later, she received a gift from her father-in-law ("dad", "father") - perhaps some jewellery, or a small sum of money, or a cow or sheep - but she did not receive the present directly from him: rather, from her mother-in-law, acting as an intermediary, and in the presence of one of her husband's sisters or brothers.
According to custom, following this gift from her "dad", she must bring him some wine. Her father-in-law would bless her, and speak the words "I bought you, and you must start speaking!"
This information was taken from Roland Topchishvili's article on the Tsova-Tush/Bats people. Prof. Topchishvili is Professor of Ethnology at the Javakhishvili Institute of History of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, and is a specialist in the ethnography of Georgia and other Caucasian regions.
"For our unforgettable sister Khato Meotishvili, from Abram Lagazidze. This very same portrait graces the war memorial in Zemo-Alvani: Young Abram must have died in the Great Patriotic War a few years later.
Dancing on "Trinity Day".
My "naan" ("mother") Patima, aged 9.
1946.
"To my Mother - Greetings from Moscow!"
A supra - a Georgian feast - in Tsovata.
And a (pitifully-basic) map of Tsovata, showing the 8 villages.
Originally, they lived here in felt tents. The houses visible on the main photograph were built as summer "dachas", cottages, in the 1960s and '70s, and although almost all of them fell into ruin a long time ago, the place is apparently still a popular summer destination.
The grass in the central (no doubt originally purely black-and-white) photograph seems to have been hand-tinted green.
A view of Indurta, "the capital of Tsovata".
A group of men pose with the photograph of a dead relative. I believe the [Georgian] tradition calls for not shaving during the period of mourning (40 days), but I suspect some of these men already sported beards.
A picnic - perhaps in Tsovata.
Note the accordeon in the background - the traditional Tush musical instrument. I hope to put some audio recordings on this blog soon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am very much indebted to different people and sources for the material I present in this chapter of my blog. To friends in Tbilisi and Zemo-Alvani for their help (particularly to "the sherriff" and his uncle, to my hosts Lasha and Ketevani, my "naan", and to Rezo, "the minister of culture"), and to various academics and institutions whose work I have been plundering for information; etc.
(And whilst we're on the subject of academic research, how about a little "lexicostatistical glottochronology"?
On the horizontal axis are the main languages (or language groups) of the Caucasus; on the vertical, centuries. The circled numbers denote the percentage of commonality between the vocabularies of the two languages they link; their height on the vertical axis indicates how long ago the two languages separated.
So, for example:
Abkhaz and Abaz share 80% of their vocabularies, and separated around 750 years ago.
Georgian/Zan and Svan share only 30%, and split around 4,000 years ago.
And so on. (For novelty purposes only - there is a more professional version of this chart here.) And now for more photographs.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beso - my "vasho", brother from Alvani - showing his stuff in Indurta.
Collecting (and perhaps carding) newly-sheared wool in Tsovata.
4 comments:
Hey, tolles Material, was Du gesammelt hast, Alex! Ich bin auf die Tonaufnahmen später auch sehr gespannt ! Wird bei mir gebloggt !
Beste Grüße, Hans Heiner
Alex. Your blogg is excellent, a true insight into a forgotten people.
Good for you.
Cheers Chris Wills
awesome!!!!
Thank you for sharing . How did you get into the subject? I and my partner spent 15 days in Georgia last summer including 5 days with a family in Lengeri (near Mestia in Svaneti) whose children we had already met here in Israel. We fell in love with the country and have kept up contact with several people we met. We wish to return this coming summer and hope to visit (walking) Tusheti.
Post a Comment