Journey into Svanetia

Abstract

During august and september 1967 I accompanied my uncle, W. E. D. Allen, a Fellow of the Society for forty-eight years, to Georgia and the Caucasus. The principal object of the trip to Georgia was for my uncle to present to the State Museum of Fine Arts in Tbilisi a silver harness which had belonged to King Irakli II (1744-88), the penultimate King of independent Georgia. In addition, it was pro? posed on the same journey to visit the isolated region of Svanetia, north of Kutaisi in the Caucasian mountains, and to present to the museum in Mestia, the capital, the two volumes of Douglas Freshfield's Exploration of the Caucasus (1896) on behalf of the British Museum and the Royal Geographical Society. Svanetia, even today, is isolated and rarely visited by the urban dwellers of Georgia. It comprises the whole of the upper basin of the river Ingur, which finds its way out of the lowlands in the south through a great gorge near Sugdidi, some fifty miles to the west of Kutaisi. The valleys stretch over an area forty miles long by fifteen wide?about the size of the valley of Aosta. From the south-east Svanetia can be approached over the Mamison Pass, and this road is used as the route to the north as well, and was the road taken by Sir William Hayter in 1956 and described in his book The Kremlin and the Embassy. Except for this route and the road from Kutaisi to the south, a branch-off from the Ossetian Military Road running north-east to the Mamison Pass through Lechkhumi, the region is shut off to all but the hardiest foot-travellers. Even today the roads are frequently closed owing to snow and avalanches, while the foot-passes are restricted to the very few able to cut through the red tape of Soviet bureaucracy, without whose permission travel is impossible. Svanetia combines all the most characteristic splendours of the Caucasus. Douglas Freshfield wrote in 1896, in the work we presented to the Mestia Museuni, a fascinating account of the geography and of the means of access to the valleys of Svanetia as well as of the legends which attached to their wild inhabitants. He cites the Arabian geographer, El Masudi, who wrote in the tenth century about a lost valley which was 'enclosed by a wall raised from below upwards, twTo miles high and fifty miles in circumference. This barrier renders it impossible to go within the enclosure. By night many lights may be seen in it in different places and by day are discovered villages, men and cattle, but everything appears little on account of the height from which the spectator looks down. Nobody knows what nation the inhabitants belong to, for they are unable to climb up and no-one who ascends to the top can go down to them'. This mountain wall remained practically impenetrable: 'Among its inhabitants there is no tradition of hospitality . . . they not only turned the stranger from their doors, but they exacted payment for letting him pass them.' The Svans threw off their subjugation to the Georgian kings during the eighteenth century, years before the downfall of the Georgian monarchy. In theory, Upper Svanetia had become a Russian protectorate by 1840; and in 1856 it was annexed to the Viceroyalty of the Caucasus, after the Svan Prince Dadeshiliani, on his way