The Samurzakanians (Myrzakans): An Abkhaz Borderland Between the Ghalidzga and the Ingur

Between the rivers Ghalidzga and Ingur lies a narrow band of country that the Russians and Georgians came to call Samurzakano, that the Abkhaz call Myrzakan or Samyrzakan, and that today forms, roughly, the Gal District of Abkhazia. Few places of its size have been argued over so fiercely, and the reason is simple. By the late nineteenth century most of its people spoke Megrelian at home, and that single fact has been made to carry an enormous historical claim: that Samurzakano was always and essentially Georgian, that any Abkhaz reading of its past is a modern nationalist fabrication, and that the district therefore belongs, by deep right, to Georgia rather than to Abkhazia.

The honest answer is more interesting than either of the slogans that compete over it. Samurzakano was an Abkhaz district on an ethnic frontier. Its name is Abkhaz, its ruling house was Abkhaz, its older place names are Abkhaz, and the language its people were losing across the nineteenth century was Abkhaz. It was also, beyond any doubt, a frontier with a large and growing Megrelian population, bound to Mingrelia by trade, by marriage and by the constant movement of people across the Ingur. What the maximalist Georgian account cannot survive is the testimony of its own preferred witnesses. Georgian writers, Russian officials and neutral foreign scholars placed the Samurzakanians on the Abkhaz side of the ledger again and again, even as they recorded, with great precision, their slow drift into Megrelian speech.

The name, and the house that gave it

The plainest place to begin is a Georgian reference work. The Georgian Soviet Encyclopaedia [vol.9 p.37] records that in 1705 three brothers of the Abkhazian ruling family, the Chachba (in Georgian, Shervashidze), divided their territory between them. One took the north from Gagra to the Kodor; the second took the central Abzhywa region from the Kodor to the Ghalidzga; the third, Murzakan, took the southern part from the Ghalidzga to the Ingur, and the province came to bear his name as Samurzakano, roughly the area of the modern Gal District.

Two things in that entry repay attention. The eponym is an Abkhaz prince of the Abkhaz ruling house, and the source recording it is Georgian. The middle district, meanwhile, is called Abzhywa, which in Abkhaz means “the people in between.” The names of these neighbouring districts carry their Abkhaz origin on their face. Abkhaz scholarship fills in the family tree a little differently, placing the eponymous Myrzakan a generation later as the son of Kvapu Chachba, who settled the land between the Ghalidzga and the Ingur. The genealogical detail varies; the substance does not. An Abkhaz prince, of the dynasty that had pushed the border down to the Ingur, lent his name to the country.

Georgian and Russian pens, Abkhaz verdicts

If the name points one way, so do the people who wrote about its inhabitants. In 1936 the Georgian scholar Andrei Gugushvili set out an ethnographic division of the Abkhazians in Georgica, the Journal of Georgian and Caucasian Studies. Among those divisions he lists the Samurzaqanians without hesitation, “the Abkhasians of Samurzaqano between the rivers Galizga and Engur”: a Georgian author, in a Georgian studies journal, counting them as one of the branches of the Abkhaz people.

More striking still is the testimony of a hostile witness. Iakob Gogebashvili, the great Georgian educator, wrote in 1877 a long article in Tiflisky Vestnik under the title “Who should be settled in Abkhazia?” The piece is, in effect, a colonisation plan, a detailed argument for resettling Megrelians on Abkhaz land emptied by deportation. Yet in the course of making that argument Gogebashvili concedes, as a thing too obvious to dispute, that the Samurzakanians are “a branch of the Abkhazian tribe.” A man with every motive to dissolve the Abkhaz into a wider Georgian whole still classed Samurzakano as Abkhaz, and the admission is worth more than a friendly source could ever be, precisely because it is made against the writer’s own programme.

The Russian press of the same year said much the same. The newspaper Kavkaz, in issue 222 of 1877, described the population of Samurzakan as “undoubtedly belonging to the same tribe” as the Abkhaz, while noting that proximity to Mingrelia and kinship with its people had shaped its speech and customs so heavily that it had become, in the writer’s phrase, “so to say, a separate tribe.” The local idiom, neither pure Abkhaz nor ordinary Megrelian, was already being called the Samurzakan dialect.

The most cautious of the relevant Georgian voices is the historian Dmitry Bakradze, who toured Mingrelia, Samurzakan and Abkhazia in 1860 and published his sketch in Gazeta Kavkaz. Bakradze treats Mingrelians and Abkhazians as distinct peoples, and of the Samurzakanians he says that some take them for an Abkhazian tribe while, in his own view, they “represent a mix of Abkhazians and Mingrelians.” This is not an Abkhaz partisan but a balanced Georgian scholar, and even his guarded verdict sets the Samurzakanians between Abkhaz and Megrelian, not among the plain Georgians of the interior. The cautious Georgian position is one about how far an originally Abkhaz population had blended, not a denial that it was Abkhaz to begin with.

A language being lost

Here is the heart of the matter, and the part of the case that no charge of “one isolated nineteenth-century opinion” can touch. The shift from Abkhaz to Megrelian in Samurzakano is not a single observation but a process, tracked by Georgian, Russian and foreign linguists across several decades, each describing a slightly later stage of the same retreat.

The Georgian philologist Avksenty Tsagareli, who visited in 1877 and published into 1880, found a thoroughly bilingual frontier. In much of the district Megrelian was the language of the household while the men still spoke Abkhaz, and there were villages on the very right bank of the Ingur where men knew and used it. West of the Okhurej, Abkhaz still predominated outright, and in some places Tsagareli could scarcely tell which tongue counted as the native one. He also noticed something that points back in time rather than forward: the princes and nobles held on to Abkhaz longest, and even flaunted it as a mark of standing, while Abkhaz survived as the language of certain church rites. As late as the close of the century people were still praying to the deity Zhini in Abkhaz.

Behind Tsagareli stands an earlier observer with deeper local roots. Konstantin Machavariani, born and raised in Samurzakano, recalled that in the 1850s few people used Megrelian while Abkhaz was in wide use. Looking back from 1914, the linguist Iosif Kipshidze stated flatly that until quite recently Abkhaz had been as widespread in the district as Megrelian, and wrote of the transfer to Megrelian as a recent thing.

The naturalist Nikolai Albov, who spent five years in Abkhazia in the 1890s, gathered the most telling testimony of all. In the south-eastern villages around Sabierio, Dikhazurga and Chuburkhindzhi, where Megrelian had by then become the only spoken language, the elders told him that “in the old days they spoke more Abkhaz here.” The mountains and rivers of the whole region, he added, carry names that are “almost exclusively Abkhaz,” and a later survey of the maps bears him out.

Set these witnesses in sequence and the conclusion is hard to escape. A people does not lose a language it never spoke. A community shifting from Abkhaz to Megrelian, with its older generation remembering the former and its toponymy preserving it, must have begun on the Abkhaz side. None of this requires the district to have been ethnically pure, and it plainly was not. Megrelian had been gaining ground for a long time, and in the eastern villages along the Ingur it had already won. The honest reading of the linguistic data is not purity but direction: the arrow points from Abkhaz towards Megrelian, and an arrow has a tail as well as a head.

Some believe that Samurzakano, which stretches from the Okhurei River to the Enguri, belongs to Mingrelia rather than Abkhazia. They are mistaken. Although the inhabitants of Samurzakano speak Mingrelian, they are, in fact, Abkhazians... ...This region is called Samurzakano because it was once the hereditary domain of Murzakan Shervashidze.

— Konstantin Machavariani, 'From My Diary', Moambe, No. 9, 1895

Outside witnesses

Step outside the quarrel altogether and the verdict holds. Ronald Wixman’s Peoples of the USSR: An Ethnographic Handbook, a neutral Western reference work with no stake in the dispute, lists the Samurzakan as one of the three divisions of the Abkhaz, speaking a distinct dialect of Abkhaz heavily influenced by Megrelian and being assimilated by the Megrelians. Wixman then makes the point that cuts to the centre of the modern argument: in much of the literature this assimilation “has mistakenly been referred to as the Georgianization of the Abkhaz.” The label that Georgian writers prefer is, in the judgement of an outside specialist, a misnomer for the absorption of one people by another.

 

In 1899 the pages of the Chernomorskij Vestnik hosted a debate over the ethnic standing of the Samurzakanians, with the Kartvelian Machavariani arguing that they were Abkhaz and his opponent that they were Megrelian. The exchange records a conversation with a Samurzakanoan peasant named Uru Gua. Told that some held the Samurzakanians to be Megrelians who had always spoken Megrelian, Uru Gua answered that he well remembered his father and grandfather, that they never spoke Megrelian, and that everyone there had conversed in Abkhaz. He named the communities he meant: Bedia, Chxortoli, Okumi, Gali, Tsarche. It is the memory of an ordinary man, reaching back two generations into living family recollection, and it describes an Abkhaz-speaking country.

 

A peaceable account that still concedes the facts

The strongest move in the whole case is one an opponent cannot dismiss as special pleading. There exists a careful study of Samurzakano in the journal Central Asia and the Caucasus, written by a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. It is not an Abkhaz source, and it is emphatically not a conflict narrative. Its entire thesis is irenic: that Abkhazians and Megrels lived side by side in this border country for centuries, their cultures intertwining, and that the war of 1992 to 1993 was the work of the people in power rather than the product of any ancient enmity. Because its sympathies run so plainly towards coexistence, the facts it nonetheless records carry extra weight.

And the facts it records are these. Megrelian migration into Samurzakano was real, sustained and largely socioeconomic. People moved because land was short in Mingrelia and because serfdom there was harsh, while across the Ingur the peasant owned his land and answered to no serf-master. A welcoming local institution, asasstvo, from the Abkhaz word asas, “guest,” gave the incomer the rights of a settled villager, and the study is candid that the bulk of these welcomed migrants were Megrels. It is equally candid about the long Abkhazo-Megrelian bilingualism that followed and its outcome, the gradual transfer “to Megrelian as the native language,” with Kipshidze again cited for how recent that transfer was.

Two further details from the same study close the argument. In 1918 the Menshevik government of Georgia tried to detach Samurzakano and attach it to the Kutaisi Gubernia, and within two months it was forced to hand the district back to Abkhazia, because the local people objected to “territorial and cultural alienation from Abkhazia” as a grave injustice. The Megrelian-speaking population did not, when the question was put to them, wish to be governed from the Georgian side. And the study marks, without euphemism, the moment when the long organic drift gave way to something else: the situation, it says, “radically changed in the 1930s to 1940s when migrants from Megrelia, Guria, Imereti and Rachi moved, sometimes by force, in great numbers.” A coexistence narrative, written in Moscow, arrives at the Abkhaz conclusions on every contested point.

Surnames, place names and the engineered turn

The nineteenth-century shift was mostly the work of demography and convenience. What came later was policy, and its clearest fingerprint is left on the surnames. Across Samurzakano, and across Abkhazia more widely, Abkhaz family names were remodelled into Megrelian and Georgian forms: Achba became Anchabadze, Inal-ipa became Inalishvili, Maan became Margania, Lakra became Lakerbaia, and so down a long list. The Abkhaz suffix indicating descent, the “ba” of pa-ipa, “son,” was overwritten with Megrelian and Georgian endings. The work was often done by clergy at baptism, recording a newborn’s name in Georgian script that the illiterate parents could not read, so that the family learned of the change only years later when the church register had become the sole written record of who they were.

This is not an Abkhaz grievance manufactured after the fact. It was protested at the time by Georgians. Konstantin Machavariani, writing in 1900 in the Black Sea Bulletin, condemned the Georgian and Megrelian priests who imposed their endings on Abkhaz names, mocking them as self-appointed bearers of culture and noting that the alteration was usually carried out with the bearers none the wiser. Iakob Gogebashvili, the same man whose 1877 article called for settling Megrelians in Abkhazia, wrote in 1907 against the “distorting and altering” of Abkhaz surnames, and Dirmit Gulia, a founder of modern Abkhaz letters, recorded in 1912 his disgust at priests who could not read their own language yet busied themselves turning Abkhaz names into Georgian ones. When the advocates of Georgian settlement and the fathers of Abkhaz literature agree that Abkhaz names were being falsified, the fact is not in serious doubt.

The census record points the same way. The German scholar Daniel Müller, examining the “Family Lists” of 1886 in George Hewitt’s handbook The Abkhazians, shows how the compilers handled the Samurzakanians. They were counted within the Abkhaz total; the authorities found it hard to draw any line between Abkhazians and Samurzakanians, and so listed them by territory instead. Yet those same compilers had no trouble separating Megrelians from Samurzakanians, whom they regularly recorded living side by side. An administration that could not tell Samurzakanians apart from Abkhaz, but could tell them apart from Megrelians at a glance, was not registering a Megrelian population under a foreign label.

The self-understanding of the Samurzakanians, where it surfaces in the record, runs in the same channel. When their princes swore allegiance to Russia in 1805, they did so as “the undersigned, Abkhazian princes of the state of Samurzakano.” A generation later, when a Russian general handed the district to the Megrelian Dadiani on the strength of an ancestral claim, an eyewitness recorded the people driving off the Dadiani officials with the words, repeated through his account, “We are Abkhazians, not Mingrelians.”

What the twentieth century added was coercion on a scale the nineteenth had never seen. From 1937 the head of the Georgian Communist Party, Lavrenti Beria, opened what is remembered as his anti-Abkhazian drive: the forced movement of non-Abkhazians, chiefly Megrels, into Abkhazia in great numbers, alongside assimilation by other means. Abkhaz schools were closed and replaced by Georgian ones, the Abkhaz alphabet was recast on a Georgian base, and the map itself was rewritten, with rivers and villages given Georgian names such as Tetri Tsqaro for Khipsta and Akhali Aponi for Psirtskha. Surnames, schooling, script and place names were worked on together, and the effect on a population already shifting in its everyday speech was to leave it with fewer and fewer reminders of what it had been.

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

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

+ Three Extracts from the Georgian Newspapers Droeba and Iveria

+ Revelations of forgotten voices

What the evidence will and will not bear

Two phases need to be held apart, and the strength of the Abkhaz case lies exactly in keeping them distinct. The migration and bilingualism of the nineteenth century were, in the main, organic. Megrels came because the land was better and the lord lighter, the two languages lived together for decades, and the balance tipped slowly towards Megrelian of its own weight, so that by the 1926 census only about a tenth of the Gal District still gave Abkhaz as its mother tongue and a young generation was letting it go. None of that was imposed. The resettlement and renaming of the Stalin and Beria years were a different thing entirely, driven from above and, on the record’s own word, carried out at times by force.

One further fact, which the maximalist account treats as an embarrassment, is better read as a confirmation. Some Samurzakanians, asked their nationality, counted themselves neither Abkhaz nor Megrel and took a certain pride in being a people of their own. An ambiguous identity of that kind is the expected signature of a population caught halfway through assimilation, which is just what the language data describe. A community fully Megrelian would have called itself Megrelian, and a community untouched would have called itself Abkhaz. The in-between answer belongs to people in the middle of a change.

The Abkhaz claim, stated honestly, is therefore not a claim of purity, and it does not need to be. Samurzakano was a true frontier, with deep intermarriage, long bilingualism and a Megrelian presence that grew until it became a Megrelian-speaking majority. But its name is Abkhaz, its ruling house was Abkhaz, its older toponymy is Abkhaz, and the language its people remembered losing was Abkhaz. The Georgian, Russian and foreign witnesses an opponent would call to the stand return, one after another, the same verdict. The drift from Abkhaz to Megrelian was real, the engineering of the later identity was real, and both presuppose the very Abkhaz starting point that the maximalist account exists to deny.

Further reading

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

+ Samurzakanians or Murzakanians by Simon Basaria

+ Scholarly-literary section: A sketch of Mingrelia, Samurzakan, and Abkhazia, by Dmitry Bakradze (1860)

+ The Distortion of Abkhaz Surnames

+ Who are the Mingrelians? Language, Identity and Politics in Western Georgia, by Laurence Broers

+ Abkhaz Loans in Megrelian, by Vyacheslav Chirikba

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