Language as Being: Why Abkhaz Matters More Than a Seat in Parliament, by Archimandrite Dorotheos (Dbar)
Written at New Athos on 24 July 2026, as Abkhazia goes into a parliamentary election in which command of Abkhaz has become a qualification to be fought over, this essay by Archimandrite Dorotheos (Dbar) asks what the language is actually for. Reading Umberto Eco on the ontology of language, and recalling Éamon de Valera on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, he argues that Abkhaz is neither a career test nor an electoral screen but the ground on which the nation exists at all.
With parliamentary elections approaching in Abkhazia, public argument has split once again along the line of language. The discussion about the status of Abkhaz is sliding fast, and sadly, into narrow political intrigue and bureaucratic manoeuvring. Both sides are chasing strictly practical ends, and each mirrors the other. Some fear losing a comfortable post because their command of their own tongue is weak. Others want to use the language as a filter, one that lets the 'right' candidates through to a seat. In this tactical scramble we risk losing sight of the question that actually matters, the one that touches our existence: what do we need Abkhaz for at all, if we have reduced it to a pass into the corridors of power?
While the political battles grow hotter, something that looks remote from all of this set me thinking about what is really at stake. A book I had ordered arrived the other day: Umberto Eco's The Absent Structure: Introduction to Semiology, a landmark work by the Italian scholar and thinker. In his preface Eco sets out a radical ontological argument that turns the familiar picture of communication upside down.
If we are to be consistent in explaining the phenomenon of language, he argues, we have to accept that language is not simply an instrument in human hands. On the contrary, 'language precedes man and even constitutes him as such'. More than that: we do not speak a given language, the language speaks us, obeying inner laws and rules that often lie beyond the reach of our rational knowledge. Language will never be what we think; it is that in which thought takes place. Within such a frame the word is not a sign. It discloses being itself. An ontology of this kind, Eco writes, kills off dry semiotics and leaves room for only one true science of language: poetry.
This philosophical detour is an attempt to recall what matters most. We are obliged to do everything we can to preserve the Abkhaz language. But it is not worth saving as an instrument of political careers, nor as a punishing entrance exam for officials. Abkhaz is precisely what speaks us, the Abkhaz. In it, and only in it, our national thought takes place and the true being of our people is disclosed. That is before we come to the priceless stratum of poetic culture that will vanish along with the language.
Do we grasp that depth today? A society sunk in immediate advantage is not always able to feel the metaphysical worth of its own speech. I am therefore convinced that until we have understood this, we do need to be compelled to learn our own language, and compelled by every lever available, from school curricula to administrative requirements.
I am flatly against our national elite, which by definition ought to understand its own mission, holding state and administrative office without knowing Abkhaz. An elite that forgets the language betrays the very substance of the nation. It is time to stop using the language as a screen for elections and to start seeing it as the ground of our existence.
It is striking that the problems we are arguing over in Abkhazia today were troubling Ireland more than half a century ago. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, Éamon de Valera told his countrymen that the national language plays the decisive part in achieving what a people sets out to do. It is the chief mark of statehood, the embodiment of a people's individuality, the closest bond between its members. No one, he urged the Irish, gives up his own language willingly. A man may learn English, French or German to get on in the world, as they do in Denmark or Holland, but in the heart and in poetry only the voice of his ancestors should sound. De Valera knew that once that thread is cut, a people dissolves into a shapeless cosmopolitanism with no past and no clear future.
Those words are a warning to us. We stand before the same choice, and if we do not wish to repeat other people's mistakes, we are bound to make Abkhaz not a bargaining chip but the ground of our tomorrow.
Dear reader! You can see for yourself what has taken hold of me in this stretch of time: forever soaring off into the heavens, meetings without end, festive sittings, speeches oozing self-congratulation, appearances on platforms, applause that will not stop. What patience our people carry within them, who have already been through such torments! Anyone can see that no good is coming of it...
And we deputies, servants of the people, what are we busy with? Instead of lifting the people's livelihood, instead of lifting the culture of the nations, above all of those few in number, we sit and listen to meetings, to festive sittings, to speeches oozing self-congratulation, to appearances on platforms...
I am a writer, but where is the work I was to create? Every day it draws further from me, like a star hung at a great distance. A writer's destiny is the work he creates. And whenever I look back along my road towards it, I cannot fail to see how mercilessly time has run away from me!
Bagrat Shinkuba, diary, 6 November 1967
New Athos, Abkhazia, 24 July 2026