Last week I went to a village about half hour north of here
with a friend from Telavi University who was giving a presentation to high
school students there. The village was in Pankisi Gorge.
Pankisi was settled mostly by the Kists, an ethnic group
descended from Chechens who came down through the gorge from Chechnya in the
1800s. Chechnya is now a Russian republic, but the Chechens are an ancient
mountain people, independent and querulous, and have a long history of
disobedience and declaring sovereignty at any opportunity. When Sopo, my friend
from the University, had told me about the people of Pankisi, she talked at
some length about their unadulterated Caucasian beauty, and I found myself
smiling at how racist these innocent observations would sound to me if casually
overheard at somewhere like Barnes and Noble.
There are about 7000 Kist people today, 5000 living near us
in the Gorge; they speak three languages, a Chechen dialect, as well as Russian
and Georgian. They're an interesting case of assimilation and resistance to
assimilation. They are Georgian, they speak Georgian, they are citizens, and
they are accepted as a part of Georgia by ethnic Georgians. They've even adopted
Georgian last name suffixes, -shvili, child, or -dze, son.
But they are quite different as well, with their own
language, temperament, and most of are Muslim, whereas Georgians' Orthodoxy is
deeper than, well, even individual religious beliefs. Sopo mentioned that in
her youth the Kists were not so conservative as now, and one often didn't even
realize they were Kist until hearing their last name. But in the past 20 or so
years, "traveling Muslim preachers," as she called them, had
engendered a much more strict observance of Islam in the new generation.
Pankisi Goerge leads eventually to Chechnya, and developed
quite a reputation in the early 2000s, with reports of it becoming a haven for
illegal arms trade, and Chechen rebels. The Chechen rebel military leader
Rusian Gelayev is said to recouped there after defeats in Chechnya, and
recruited from the local Kist population. They have also been recent reports of
Kists having been recruited to fight in Syria, and Georgians have been reported
having been killed there.
The school was normal school. The English teacher was a
Georgian, and the highschoolers were quiet and good-natured, and I found myself
wishing I could spend more time with them. Most of the girls were wearing light
and colorful headscarfs, a few students no headwear, and one was completely
covered in black, except her face.Yes, I noticed this.
Pankisi is quiet place now, well within Georgia's control,
but I had to get permission to visit from our office, and was told not to go to
any farther villages. The End.
