Two years after Abkhaz reached Google Translate, cheap and imperfect AI tools sit within reach of Abkhazia's ministries, newsrooms, classrooms and diaspora associations; used carelessly they will speed the drift towards Russian, and used deliberately they could give the language its best infrastructure in a century.

In the last week of June 2024, Abkhaz appeared on Google Translate. It arrived without ceremony, one of 110 languages added in the largest single expansion in the service's history, alongside Avar, Chechen and Ossetian. For the first time, anyone with a phone in Sukhum, Sakarya or Edinburgh could type a sentence and receive something resembling Abkhaz in return.

Walk through Sukhum today and you will come across a street sign that surprises most visitors: Scotland Street. It is not a whim of the town planners. It is the Abkhaz half of a friendship that has lasted forty years, and its Scottish counterpart sits far to the north-west, in a quiet public park in the Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock. There, for more than two decades, a small stone carried the Abkhaz flag and a short inscription remembering the people of Sukhum who died in the war of 1992 to 1993.

This is the story of that stone, and of the town that raised it.

Olga Kozel is a writer, journalist and literary scholar. She graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute and completed postgraduate studies at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, defending in 2006 a dissertation on the prose and poetics of Fazil Iskander.

Kozel has worked for Cosmopolitan, Trud, and Vechernyaya Moskva, and serves as Head of the Press Office of the Russian Spiritual Theatre GLAS. She is a member of the Union of Journalists and the Moscow Union of Writers.

V. V. Achba., 'Ахьӡи-ахьымӡӷи ирыдҳәаалоу зҵаарақәак Аԥсуа традициаҭә культураҿы,' Aamtaq’a (Historical and Cultural Almanac), no. 1–2, Scientific Research Centre 'Abkhaz Encyclopaedia'; Abkhaz Historical Society, Sukhum:, 2024, pp. 186–191.

Over the course of many centuries of historical development, the Abkhazians developed specific mechanisms that ensured not only physical survival under extreme conditions, but also the attainment of a high status known as aḥyẓ («ахьӡ»), that is, glory earned through heroic and other martial deeds, in accordance with and within the framework of traditional legal consciousness.

The antithesis of this understanding within Abkhaz society, both in the past and today, is aḥyẓməɣ («ахьыӡмӷ»), meaning disgrace or shame, that is, behaviour deemed unworthy and incompatible with the Abkhaz mentality. The relationship between these two concepts, and the predominance of one over the other, became a determining factor in the lives and destinies of the Abkhazians.

Today, it is impossible to imagine an Abkhaz feast without абыста (abysta), a dense porridge more widely known elsewhere as mamalyga. Traditionally, it is served plain and functions as a form of “bread”, complementing the flavours of salted cheese ашә (ashə), spiced beans аҟәыд (aqýd), or meat акәац (akə́ts). Yet maize, from which this dish is prepared today, is a relatively recent arrival in the Caucasus, having been introduced from the Americas.