21 May 1864: Abkhazia and the End of the Russo-Caucasian War

Today, on 21 May 2026, we mark the 162nd anniversary of the end of the Russo-Caucasian War. On this date, Abkhazia and the wider North Caucasus remember the victims of the war and the many thousands who were driven from their homeland into exile. The essay that follows revisits that history, its long course, its decisive final year, and its enduring consequences for the Abkhazian people.

21 May 1864

On 21 May each year, Abkhazia and the wider Caucasus pause to remember an event whose consequences are still legible in the demography, politics and self-understanding of the region. On that day in 1864, in a high mountain meadow above the Black Sea coast, a place the Russians had named Krasnaya Polyana, the Red Glade, a Russian army held a thanksgiving service and a parade of victory. The ceremony was attended by Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich Romanov, brother of Emperor Alexander II and viceroy of the Caucasus. The parade marked the moment when organised resistance in the Caucasus was declared at an end.

For the authorities in St Petersburg, 21 May 1864 marked the end of the longest military campaign in the history of the Russian state. For the peoples of the Western Caucasus, the Circassians, Ubykhs, and Abkhazians, whose last fighters had gathered in those mountains, the same day signified something altogether different: the beginning of exile. Within months of the victory parade, much of an entire cultural world had been uprooted from its homeland and dispersed across the Ottoman Empire.

It is this double meaning, a triumph commemorated in one capital and a catastrophe mourned in countless villages, that gives the date its enduring significance. To understand why 21 May is observed today as a day of mourning rather than celebration, one must follow the long arc of the conflict that ended there, and trace its particular consequences for the Abkhazians.

The Russo-Caucasian War: A Conflict Without a Beginning

Historians agree that the Caucasian War ended in 1864. They do not agree on when it began. Various dates have been proposed — 1722, 1763, 1785, 1801, 1817, 1830 — each defensible from a different vantage point. The most persuasive view places the origins of the great confrontation in the reign of Catherine II, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the systematic advance of Russian troops and administration into the North Caucasus first acquired momentum.

By the early nineteenth century, the southern frontier of the Russian Empire had become a vast and intractable theatre of war. The conflict was never a single war in the conventional sense. It unfolded across two largely independent fronts. In the east lay Chechnya and mountainous Dagestan, where a centralised theocratic state, the Caucasian Imamate, coalesced under leaders who waged a disciplined religious and military struggle. In the west lay the lands of the Adyghe–Abkhaz peoples, stretching from the Kuban down the Black Sea coast: a looser world of confederated communities defending their independence canton by canton.

The disparity of resources was immense. By 1837 the imperial army in the Caucasus already numbered some 154,000 soldiers; by the mid-1840s the figure had risen to 185,000, and after the Crimean War it would exceed 350,000. Yet for decades these forces struggled to impose control. In 1840 the Russian Minister of War, Chernyshev, was obliged to concede that prolonged operations against the recalcitrant Circassian tribes had achieved little towards the general pacification of the region. The mountains, the forests, and the social structure of peoples organised for self-defence rather than central command made the Western Caucasus exceptionally difficult to subdue.

The Peoples of the Caucasus

The principal antagonists of the Russian advance, ranged from east to west, were the Avars and other Dagestani peoples, the Chechens, the Circassians (Adyghe), the Ubykhs, and the Abkhazians. Though divided by language and political form, they were bound together by a shared determination to remain masters of their own land.

Two of these names require explanation, for their fate is central to what follows.

The Ubykhs were one of the Adyghe–Abkhaz peoples of the North-West Caucasus and, as George Anchabadze records, the leaders of the western confederations formed in the 1830s to resist the empire. In 1864 the Ubykhs left their homeland to the last village, resettling completely in Turkey and vanishing entirely from the map of the Caucasus, the disappearance of a whole people from their own country, and among the starkest consequences of the war. Their language survived in exile for more than a century within the Anatolian diaspora, but it too was living on borrowed time: with the death of its last fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç, in Turkey on 7 October 1992, the Ubykh tongue fell silent for good. The fate of the Ubykhs, a people uprooted in a single year, their language outliving its homeland by four generations before expiring abroad, would weigh heavily on the Abkhazian imagination, as a glimpse of what total dispersal could mean.

The Sadz were a western Abkhazian community settled between the Bzyp and the Sochi rivers, on the borderland where Abkhazia met the Ubykh and Circassian lands. Independent of the prince who ruled coastal Abkhazia, the Sadz and their neighbours in the high cantons fought alongside the western confederations until the very end. Their territory, too, would be emptied.

Across the whole arc of the war, these were not peoples conquered in a single decisive battle but worn down over generations of attrition, deforestation, and the destruction of villages, a campaign that culminated, in its final phase, in the deliberate clearing of the land.

The Sadz were a western Abkhazian community settled between the Bzyp and the Sochi rivers, on the borderland where Abkhazia met the Ubykh and Circassian lands. Independent of the prince who ruled coastal Abkhazia, the Sadz and their neighbours in the high cantons fought alongside the western confederations until the very end. Their territory, too, would be emptied.

Across the whole arc of the war, these were not peoples conquered in a single decisive battle but worn down over generations of attrition, deforestation, and the destruction of villages, a campaign that culminated, in its final phase, in the deliberate clearing of the land.

+ The Last Voice of Ubykh: Remembering Tevfik Esenç

+ Viacheslav Chirikba. “The Ubykh People Were in Practice Consumed in the Flames of the Fight for Freedom”

+ Ubykhs, by T. Tatlok - Caucasian Review, Vol. 7 (1958)

+ The Ethnic History of the Abkhazians in the XIX-XX centuries, by Tejmuraz Achugba

Abkhazia During the War

At the opening of the nineteenth century, Abkhazia was a principality ruled by the house of Chachba. Linguistically and culturally the Abkhazians belonged to the Adyghe–Abkhaz world of the Northwest Caucasus; yet their land had also long been bound to the wider South Caucasus by ties of dynasty and faith. From the late eighth century the Kingdom of Abkhazia flourished as an independent power, its rulers extending their sway over much of what is now western Georgia. In 978 this kingdom passed, through dynastic inheritance, into a larger medieval realm whose sovereigns bore the title "King of the Abkhazians and the Kartvelians," until the system of local principalities was restored in the later Middle Ages. By the early nineteenth century Abkhazia thus stood at the meeting point of two worlds, the mountain peoples to the north, and the Kartvelian principalities to the south-east, heir to its own statehood and to a long history of involvement in the affairs of both.

Nominal Ottoman suzerainty had rested lightly on the principality since the late sixteenth century. In 1806 Prince Keleshbey Chachba broke with the Porte and opened relations with the Russian command, though he was in no hurry to surrender his independence. His death in 1808, in circumstances that remain unclear, opened a long succession crisis. His eldest son Aslanbey, an opponent of rapprochement with Russia, was widely regarded by Abkhazians as the rightful ruler.

In July 1810 a Russian squadron bombarded the fortress of Sukhum and landed troops, who took the town by force; a simultaneous land advance came through Megrelia, by then a Russian client. Aslanbey fled north to the Sadz. In his place the Russians installed his younger half-brother, Sefer-bey — baptised George — as ruler under imperial protection. Russian historiography would later describe this as the “voluntary entry” of Abkhazia into the empire. The reality was a contested occupation: most Abkhazians continued to recognise Aslanbey, and the mountain cantons of Tsabal, Dal and Pskhu refused the authority of a prince imposed by foreign arms.

Abkhazians from the Aibga, 1860s.

+ Abkhazia: History, 18th Century–1917, by Stanislav Lakoba

+ The Struggle for Power in Abkhazia Between the Sons of Keleshbey Chachba (1808–1810), by D. G. Tarba

+ The Abkhaz Principality in the Second Decade of the Nineteenth Century, by D. G. Tarba

+ Abkhazia and the Russian Empire. Aslanbey: Myths and Facts, by Stanislav Lakoba

+ On the Political and Ethnic History of Myrzakan (Samurzakano) in the 19th Century, By Denis Gopia

The decades that followed were a cycle of fragile control and renewed revolt. When George died in February 1821, Aslanbey returned and the country rose; General Gorchakov suppressed the rising and pursued the rebels to the Bzyp. The young prince Mikhail, barely seventeen, was confirmed as ruler, but his authority was thin. A fresh uprising in 1824 forced the Russians to withdraw, holding only the fortress of Sukhum. Order was restored after 1830, when Russian positions were re-established on terms that preserved the privileges of the Abkhazian nobility, and when General Hesse, landing in Sukhum Bay, pushed only as far as Gagra before entrenching there.

Even then, real subordination remained elusive. Tsabal, taken in 1837, rose three years later; the partisan war led by Prince Eshsou Marshan smouldered until 1845 and beyond, drifting between Dal, Tsabal, the rebellious heights of Pskhu and the North Caucasus. Throughout these years many Abkhazians made common cause with the Circassian and Ubykh struggle, so that the principality was never wholly separable from the wider western front.

The Crimean War (1853–1856) briefly transformed the picture. As Anglo-French squadrons gained command of the Black Sea, the Russians evacuated their coastal forts; Turkish troops landed in Abkhazia, and Prince Mikhail, who had earlier earned the Order of the White Eagle for assisting the orderly Russian withdrawal, met the Ottoman commander Omer Pasha and accepted the title of Pasha. He did little for the Turks in return, keeping his lines open to Tiflis. When the Paris peace of 1856 confirmed that Russia would retain its position in the Caucasus, the episode was quietly buried; the investigation into the prince’s conduct was dropped for want of proof of deliberate treason, and his services were judged too useful to discard while the war continued.

Reading Mercury [London, England] - 07 December 1839.

The Polish Connection: Teofil Łapiński and the Search for Allies

The struggle in the Western Caucasus did not go unnoticed in Europe. To opponents of Russian expansion, the mountaineers’ resistance offered the prospect of pinning down the empire’s southern armies, and for Polish revolutionaries, still bent on overturning Russian rule in their own partitioned homeland, it held a particular appeal. Their hope was to kindle a simultaneous rising: Circassian and Abkhazian in the south, Polish in the west.

Among the most active of these figures was Teofil Łapiński, a Polish military commander, writer and committed adversary of Russian imperial power, who travelled to Circassia and Abkhazia during the war. In late 1862 he led an Abkhaz–Circassian delegation to London, where it was received by the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston. In the Prime Minister’s presence, Łapiński made the case for intervention:

“At the present moment, the Abkhazians are the sole tribe who are continuing to mount powerful resistance to Russia in the Caucasus. But even they have become exhausted under the weight of the unequal battle and can be expected to hold out in such conditions for at most another three years. Then they will inevitably follow in the tracks of the other Caucasian tribes: they will move to Turkey. Europe ought, with a view to weakening the northern colossus and keeping its army somehow occupied in the south, when a serious blow is also struck from the opposing side, to support the valiant Abkhazians, forestall their banishment from their native soil and thus save perhaps all the mountain-peoples of the area. To whom if not England, the principal naval power in the world, should this noble and strategic initiative belong in this case?”

The appeal proved prophetic in its arithmetic. Łapiński estimated that the Abkhazians could endure perhaps three more years; the parade at Krasnaya Polyana came barely eighteen months later. Britain, weighing its own interests against the cost of a confrontation with Russia so soon after the Crimean War, did not act. Łapiński recorded his meeting with Palmerston in his memoirs, published in Polish in the newspaper Gazeta Narodowa in 1878, by which time the events he had tried to prevent had run their full course. His mission is a reminder that the fate of the Western Caucasus was, however briefly, a matter of European diplomatic calculation, and that its peoples sought allies abroad even as the encirclement closed around them.

+ 21 May 1864: From Dmitri Kipiani to Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich Romanov

+ Lapinski: Abkhaz people are the last in the Caucasus who still put up resistance to the Muscovites

+ Abkhazia and The Caucasian War: 1810-1864, by George Anchabadze

+ Travels in Circassia – Part II - Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine: July-December, 1856

The Fall of Resistance in Abkhazia

After the Crimean War, the empire turned its full strength against the remaining centres of resistance. In 1856 Adjutant General Baryatinsky was appointed commander-in-chief and given extraordinary forces. He first concentrated against the eastern Imamate; in the summer of 1859, after a tightening blockade, Imam Shamil surrendered on Mount Gunib. That November, Magomed-Amin, the Avar naib who had led the Circassian struggle in the west, laid down his arms with two thousand horsemen. His submission might have served as the basis for a negotiated peace. Instead, prestige and military doctrine prevailed over compromise.

In the autumn of 1861 Alexander II travelled to the North Caucasus and met delegations of mountaineers. They offered to accept Russian sovereignty on condition that they remain on their lands and keep their autonomy. The Emperor refused. The mountaineers were to resettle on the open plains, far from the sea and the highlands they knew, or else depart for the Ottoman Empire, which had signalled its willingness to receive them. Only a minority accepted resettlement; the majority resolved to fight on, in a war whose outcome was no longer in doubt. A systematic advance through Circassia followed, accompanied by the felling of forests, the burning of villages, and the expulsion of populations from their homes.

By 1864 the Circassians, driven from their original habitats and facing starvation, were leaving for Turkey in their multitudes. After them came the Ubykhs, who fought their last battle on 19 March 1864 before submitting on terms of exile; the Sadz surrendered after the Ubykhs. The final shots of the war were fired in the mountains of Western Abkhazia, where the people of the high canton of Medovey, joined by remnants of other communities, prepared to make a stand. Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich sent four columns — more than twenty-five thousand men in all — converging on the region from different directions. The last pockets of resistance were broken, and the troops gathered in the meadow of Krasnaya Polyana. There, on 21 May 1864, in the Grand Duke’s presence, the thanksgiving service and the victory parade brought the Caucasian War to its formal close.

It is a detail of lasting significance that the Georgian militia of the Russian service stood among the victors at that parade. The triumph at Krasnaya Polyana was an imperial triumph, but it was shared by allies drawn from the South Caucasus, a fact that would acquire meaning in the decades to come.

Group of armed Abkhazians (1870s).

The Abolition of the Abkhazian Princedom

Throughout the long war, Russia had preserved the autonomy of the Abkhazian principality longer than most, precisely because the fighting continued on its borders and the authorities feared that a premature abolition might provoke a rising at their rear. With the war won, that caution was no longer necessary.

In April 1864, on the eve of the final campaign, Prince Mikhail Chachba, now judged “unreliable”, was removed from power. In June the autocratic state abolished the Abkhazian monarchy outright and instituted a temporary “military-national administration.” The term denoted a hybrid form of rule devised for the empire’s restive frontiers: military governance overlaid upon, and gradually displacing, traditional local institutions. Abkhazia was renamed the Sukhum Military Department, and on 12 July 1864 General P. N. Shatilov was installed as its head. Direct imperial administration had replaced a dynasty whose roots reached back a thousand years.

The mood of the conquerors was captured in the ceremony of 9 June 1864, when the Tiflis Marshal of the Nobility, Dmitri Kipiani, greeted Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich on behalf of the Georgian nobility. “Your Imperial Highness,” he declared, “you have completed the conquest of the Caucasus and have thus incorporated in history an event of enormous importance that is inseparable from your name.” The words register, with unintended clarity, how the end of the war was understood from Tiflis: as the consummation of a great imperial achievement.

As for the last prince, his end was bleak. Old and ailing, Mikhail Chachba was arrested in November 1864 on a contrived pretext and deported to Russia, though he kept his pension, his rank of Adjutant General and the title of Most Serene Prince. He died at Voronezh in 1866. In accordance with his wishes, his body was carried home and buried with honour in the ancient cathedral of his ancestors.

+ Thirty years of “guilt” (1877-1907), by Stanislav Lakoba

+ The Exodus of Abkhazians During the 19th Century: Resistance, Uprisings, and Exile

+ Essays on eastern questions: The Abkhasian insurrection, by William G. Palgrave

+ Conquest and Exile, by Austin Jersild

Uprisings and the Years of Exile

The abolition of the principality and the imposition of direct rule provoked precisely the discontent the authorities had long feared. In 1866 the Abkhazians rose again, and the suppression of the revolt was followed, in 1867, by a fresh wave of forced emigration to the Ottoman Empire. The pattern was by now grimly familiar: the major uprisings of 1821–27, 1840–45, 1861, 1866 and finally 1877 each ended in the departure of large numbers of Abkhazians from their homeland.

The decisive blow came during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, when the Abkhazians rose once more, this time with Ottoman encouragement, and the empire answered with the most extensive deportations of all. The cumulative result was the depopulation of central Abkhazia, the heart of the country, and the dispersal across Anatolia and the Levant of communities that never returned.

This mass departure of Caucasian Muslims to Ottoman lands is known by the term Muhajirism (from the Russian makhadzhirstvo, itself derived from the Arabic muhajir, “emigrant”). The word is borrowed from the religious vocabulary of migration for the sake of faith, and it carried that connotation for many who left; but the reality on the ground was coercive, a choice between resettlement under occupation and departure across the sea, made under conditions of defeat, hunger and fear. Estimates of the total number of Abkhazians driven out across the second half of the nineteenth century vary considerably among historians, ranging from roughly one hundred thousand to figures approaching one hundred and thirty-five thousand. Whatever the precise count, the scale is not in dispute: by the time armed resistance finally ceased, the majority of the Abkhazian people no longer lived in Abkhazia.

The Demographic Transformation of Abkhazia

The deportations did not merely reduce a population; they hollowed out a homeland. The clearing of the western cantons in 1864, Sadz, Akhchipsy, Aibga, Pskhu — left the coastline from Sochi to the Bzyp very nearly deserted, with perhaps twenty-five thousand people driven out from those districts alone. The later expulsions emptied the central districts in their turn. By the most sober reckoning, tracts amounting to almost half the area of Abkhazia were left without inhabitants.

Empty land does not stay empty. The vacated territories were gradually resettled by newcomers from across the empire, Russians, Armenians, Greeks, Estonians and others, who settled especially in the town, and by land-hungry peasants from the densely populated lowland districts of western Georgia: Megrelia, Guria and Imereti. The arithmetic of this transformation is stark. In the census of 1897 the Abkhazians still made up just over half the population of their own country. Within a generation they had become a minority within it. A territory that had been overwhelmingly mono-ethnic was remade, within decades, into the multi-ethnic patchwork it has remained ever since.

The suffering did not end with exile. Those who remained lived under a regime of suspicion and disability. For their part in the war of 1877–78, the whole Abkhazian people was officially branded “guilty of treason”, a collective stigma not lifted until 1907. Abkhazians were barred from living in the three principal towns of Sukhum, Gudauta and Ochamchira, or within seven kilometres of the seashore, and Abkhazian peasants were stripped of their right to personal plots of land. A people reduced to a minority in their homeland were further pushed to its margins.

Sources: Russian, Soviet and Georgian population censuses and ‘Conciliation Resources’ (UK).

Georgian Settlement and the Roots of a Later Conflict

It was in these years that the demographic question acquired the political charge it has never since lost. The tsarist authorities, uncertain of Georgian loyalty and wary of fostering a Georgian national movement on a sensitive frontier, in fact tried to limit Georgian migration into Abkhazia, preferring to settle the vacant lands with Russians and other non-Georgians. Yet the newcomers from central Russia struggled with the subtropical climate and the difficult terrain, while peasants from neighbouring western Georgia adapted readily, and so, despite official preference, the Georgian share of the settler population steadily grew.

Among the Georgian intelligentsia, the resettlement of Abkhazia became a subject of open advocacy. In 1877, at the very moment the Abkhazians were being driven from their land — the Tiflis Herald published an article by Yakob Gogebashvili, the noted champion of Georgian-language education, under the title “Who Should Be Settled in Abkhazia?” His answer was unambiguous: Megrels. The Abkhazian historian Stanislav Lakoba observed bitterly that the piece appeared while the Abkhazians “were bleeding profusely and forced in masses to leave their homeland,” and recalled the Abkhaz proverb that “a snake bit the one who fell out of the tree.” Such attitudes belonged to their age, the high noon of European colonialism, when “cultured” peoples assumed a natural right to settle the lands of those they judged less cultured, but they planted a grievance that would prove remarkably durable.

+ Ethno-demographic history of Abkhazia, 1886 - 1989, by Daniel Müller

+ Who should be settled in Abkhazia? By Jakob Gogebashvili (1877)

+ Georgii Tsereteli (1879): It’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus

+ Demographic change in Abkhazia 1886–1989

+ Revelations of forgotten voices

The deeper consequence was a slow change in the very shape of the conflict. What had begun as an almost purely Abkhazian–Russian confrontation was gradually transformed, over the closing decades of tsarist rule, into a primarily Abkhazian–Georgian one. The question at its centre, whether Abkhazia would or would not be absorbed into the emerging Georgian nation, is, in essence, the same question that would be fought over in the twentieth century. On that question, the Abkhazians and the Russian authorities found themselves, paradoxically, on the same side; and so Russia, the persecutor of the Abkhazians, came at times to play the role of their shield against Georgian incorporation. The basic geometry of the Russia–Georgia–Abkhazia triangle was set in this period, and it has scarcely shifted since.

The line of continuity runs directly into the Soviet century. The Georgianisation of Abkhazia under Stalin and Beria, the renewed settlement of western Georgian peasants from 1937, the replacement of Abkhaz place-names, the closure of Abkhaz schools, repeated, in a harsher key, the demographic logic of the nineteenth century. And the war of 1992–93, which devastated Abkhazia within living memory, can only be properly understood against this long background. The fear that animated the Abkhazian movement in the late Soviet years, the fear that a small people might be assimilated out of existence, or follow the Ubykhs into oblivion, was not an abstraction. It was the inheritance of 1864.

The Legacy of the War and Historical Memory

The Caucasian War left a wound that subsequent history kept reopening. For the Adyghe–Abkhaz peoples in particular, the number of those who departed exceeded the number of those who stayed, an inversion that few nations have survived intact. The Ubykhs did not survive it at all as a distinct people on their own soil. The Circassians, once the most numerous nation of the North-West Caucasus, were scattered. The Abkhazians endured, but as a diminished minority in a transformed land, bearing for a generation the official mark of collective guilt.

A contemporary observer described the mountaineers leaving for the sea as “defeated but not conquered”, a phrase that captures the peculiar character of the memory the war bequeathed. It is not only a memory of military defeat, but of a homeland half-emptied, of a diaspora that today vastly outnumbers the population of Abkhazia itself, and of a way of life broken at its roots. For the Abkhazians, this history is not antiquarian. It shapes how they understand who they are, why their land is multi-ethnic, why the question of who belongs there remains so charged, and why the survival of their language and people is felt as a matter never wholly secure.

To grasp the resilience of the Abkhazians in the present, one must reckon with this past. Theirs is the story of a people who have repeatedly faced dispersal and assimilation, and who have nonetheless preserved a continuous sense of belonging to a particular stretch of coast between the mountains and the sea.

+ 15 October 1997: Resolution of the People's Assembly Parliament of the Republic of Abkhazia

+ UNPO Resolution on the Issue of the Repatriation of Deported Abkhaz during the Russian Caucasian War and the Legitimacy of the regime Sanctions against Abkhazia

+ The Caucasian War: Zigzags of Russian Historiography, by Said-Khasan Muskhadzhiev

+ Declaration of the Assembly of the Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus

Modern Remembrance

The formal commemoration of these events belongs to the era of the late Soviet awakening, when the peoples of the Caucasus began to recover and assert their own histories. On 31 May 1990, at a gathering in Sukhum, some thirty thousand representatives of the Caucasian mountain peoples adopted a resolution recognising 21 May 1864, the day the Caucasian War had ended at Krasnaya Polyana, as a day of remembrance for the victims of the war and for those who had endured forced deportation. The choice was deliberate: the date of the conquerors’ parade became the date of the conquered peoples’ mourning.

Seven years later, on 15 October 1997, the Parliament of the Republic of Abkhazia passed a resolution recognising the nineteenth-century deportation of the Abkhazian people to Ottoman lands as a grave violation of human rights and as genocide. The resolution further called for the unconditional acceptance of the descendants of the exiled Abkhaz and Abazinian people who wish to return to their ancestral homeland, an appeal addressed across more than a century to the vast diaspora that the Muhajirism had created. The question of repatriation, of reconnecting a scattered people to the land from which their forebears were driven, thus remains an open and living concern, not a closed chapter of history.

The events of 21 May 1864 lend themselves easily to simplification, and resist it on closer inspection. The Caucasian War was not a contest of pure villainy against pure innocence, but a collision between an expanding empire pursuing a frontier strategy and a constellation of peoples defending their independence, a collision in which local princes manoeuvred, neighbours took sides, and European powers calculated their interests from a safe distance. The Abkhazian princes were at various moments rebels, vassals and exiles; the Georgian nobility shared in the imperial victory; the Russian state alternated between persecutor and protector of the very people it had conquered. History rarely arranges itself into clean opposites, and the history of the Caucasus least of all.

What is not in doubt is the human consequence. A war that the empire counted as its longest and finally its most complete ended, for the Abkhazians, in the loss of their statehood, the emptying of their heartland, and the reduction of a people to a minority in their own country. The memory of that loss did not fade with the nineteenth century. It passed into the demographic and political fabric of Abkhazia, surfaced again under Soviet rule, and stood in the background of the conflict that consumed the region in the 1990s.

To remember 21 May, then, is not merely to mark a battle in a distant war. It is to acknowledge how a single day can hold two histories at once, a parade and an exodus, and to recognise that the descendants of those who left, and of those who stayed, are still living with the consequences. In honouring that memory, the Abkhazians do not seek to relitigate the past so much as to insist that it be understood; for only against the full depth of this history can the present condition of Abkhazia, and the endurance of its people, be properly read.