Without Firing a Shot: How Tali Dzhapua, the Woman with a Camera, Became a Hero of Abkhazia

Tali Dzhapua, a Hero of Abkhazia, picked up a camera to create a documentary record: to capture the faces of the fighters and preserve their thoughts and words for posterity. Journalist Amra Amichba tells the story of how this wartime archive came into being.

Translated by AbkhazWorld

Tali Dzhapua, a Hero of Abkhazia, filmed a unique documentary record of the war. Her archive, comprising almost 160 hours of footage, has given younger generations, as well as the veterans themselves, an exceptional opportunity to see the faces of those who lived through the fighting, hear their words and witness how they responded to extraordinary circumstances. None of this could have been scripted. There is no staged footage in the archive, only reality as it unfolded and the unvarnished truth about the courageous defenders of their homeland.

After the war, Dzhapua produced 50 instalments of War Diary. She is also preparing a multi-volume printed edition based on her wartime footage.

From Philologist to Frontline Medic

Before the war, Tali Dzhapua worked at Abkhaz State University and the D. Gulia Abkhaz Institute of Language, Literature and History, now the D. Gulia Abkhaz Institute for Humanities Research.

‘I wasn’t all that young: I was 35. I had completed my postgraduate studies at the Institute of World Literature in Moscow and had already returned home after defending my dissertation,’ she explains.

Asked how she decided to go to war, Tali smiles and says she has ‘probably answered that question a hundred times’ since the fighting ended. Clearly, many journalists have sought interviews with her. When speaking to a veteran, it is natural to ask what prompted them to go into the midst of the fighting — especially when that veteran is a woman.

‘It wasn’t as though the idea suddenly came into my head one day and I went off to war. We were concerned about the future of our people, our language and our state. We had known about the problem since we were young. So, as we grew older, we became involved in the national liberation movement. I worked at the institute headed by Vladislav Ardzinba. That influenced us too,’ Dzhapua explains.

As a philologist, she recalls encountering another aspect of the Georgianisation of Abkhazia in her work: there was talk of making Georgian the language of official administration.

‘The development of the Abkhaz language, literature and culture was under threat. They sent us typefaces and told us that official paperwork had to be switched to Georgian. For me, as a philologist working on Abkhaz language and literature, demands like that were tantamount to death,’ she says, recalling the feelings of the Abkhaz intelligentsia at the time.

Despite the mounting tensions, many people, Tali among them, did not believe that full-scale hostilities could break out. Nevertheless, she tried to enlist in the Abkhaz Regiment then being formed, but women were not being accepted. When war did begin, many women found themselves at a loss, unsure how they could help. Together with others, Tali made her way to the Red Bridge at the entrance to Sukhum, where Abkhaz militia members fought their first battle. It was there that her wartime service began: almost overnight, a philologist became a frontline medic.

‘The only thing I knew how to do was give injections. We had been taught first aid at university. But if someone who cannot swim is thrown into the water, they have to start moving their arms to save themselves. I suppose that was how we managed to pull ourselves together when we found ourselves in the thick of it. The war gave us a crash course in treating the wounded,’ she says.

Tali Dzhapua's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@talijapua4769

Archival footages of Abkhaz fighters filmed by Tali Dzhapua on September 1993 during the final offensive to liberate Sukhum. Launched on 16 September, the operation culminated in the liberation of the Abkhazian capital from Georgian forces on 27 September 1993.

‘They Know What They Are Doing and Are Where They Are Needed’

When the Abkhaz Internal Troops withdrew to defensive positions on the Gumista, the women medics boarded the buses with them. They were later assigned to different groups so that each had a nurse to care for the wounded. Until March 1993, Tali Dzhapua served as a medic with the Second Upper Eshera Battalion.

She did not discuss her decision to go to the front with either her parents or her brothers. Knowing her strength of character, none of them would have tried to dissuade her anyway.

‘Our parents were in the village of Chlou in the Ochamchira district. They hadn’t seen my sister Shchazina and me — we went straight from Sukhum to the war — so we couldn’t ask them or know how they felt at the time. My brothers didn’t say anything either. Of course they worried about us. My brother Alik came to the positions every day to see how I was getting on. He was anxious about me, but he couldn’t bring himself to say, “Leave this place.”’

Her sister, Shchazina Dzhapua, is a recipient of the Order of Leon.

‘After the war, I asked my mother what Father had said when he learnt that his daughters had gone to war. He told her not to interfere or try to talk us out of it: “They know what they are doing and are where they are needed.”’

That was the response of a father whose five children out of six — sons Alik, Timur and Tariel, and daughters Tali and Shchazina — had gone to the front. The father of the future Hero of Abkhazia had himself fought in the Great Patriotic War, reaching Germany. He knew what it meant to defend one’s homeland.

The Abkhaz Gene Pool

The war continued, and fighters were dying. Tali remembers those killed in the first months of the conflict with particular sorrow.

‘You never forget the first wounded and the first dead. Later, there were days when twenty, even a hundred people died, but it was harder to come to terms with those first losses. They were so young, so “green” — twenty-year-olds who had only just graduated from university. Imagine what they could have meant to our people in the future. One of the first to die was Bagrat Malia, right by the bridge at Eshera, where we were stationed. People talk about the Abkhaz gene pool… In his appearance, his character, the courage he showed — in every way, this young man was so fine that you could not take your eyes off him. And we lost him…’ Tali whispers, unable to hide her emotion.

During lulls in the fighting, the soldiers would sometimes swap stories and jokes, trying to lift their spirits and find a little respite from the terrible reality around them.

‘There were some very warm days in September 1992. The harvest was especially plentiful that year, and there was plenty for people in the villages to do on their plots. Instead, they had gone to war. There is a folk belief that a rich harvest foretells war. Merab Kove, a Hero of Abkhazia, loved a joke. Sadly, he was later killed. He would lie down on the grass with his hand beneath his head, look up at the clear sky and say: “My mother’s worried about me being at war. If only she could see me relaxing here, as though I were at a holiday resort!”’ Tali recalls with a smile.

‘The Women Are Coming!'

Having women alongside them at war encouraged the men to remain composed and watch their language. Even among themselves, the fighters spoke differently, refraining from swearing despite the extreme circumstances.

‘The fighters themselves said it — it is there on film — that even when they felt like letting their guard down or giving way to panic, they kept themselves together when women were around. They would have been embarrassed in front of us. In the groups where women served, their fearlessness spurred the men on. When they spotted us in the distance, they would tell one another: “Watch your language, the women are coming!”’ she says.

The medics did not take up arms in battle. The nurses carried weapons only for self-defence.

‘My brother bought me a pistol, but I never fired a single shot during the war. I dressed wounds and later filmed with a video camera. But I cannot say that I fought alongside the men with a weapon in my hands. That didn’t happen,’ she says.

Yulia Bagatelia, Shazina Dzhapua, Marina Bartsyts, Lamara Chamagua, Zinaida Kove and Tali Dzhapua, 1992-93

‘Of Course I’ll Film!’

Instead of a weapon, Tali Dzhapua took up a camera. Remarkably, before the Patriotic War of the People of Abkhazia, she had no idea how to use one. She had never filmed anything; she had not even taken photographs. But after six months at the positions as a nurse, witnessing the heroism of those defending their homeland, she felt a duty to preserve their faces on film.

‘I understood that the war would end one day, and something had to remain for history: what the fighters said, how they discussed the course of the fighting, how each of them behaved. All of that mattered. I wanted it to be recorded somewhere,’ she explains.

So when her elder brother Alik offered to help her buy a video camera and asked whether she would use it, she seized on the idea immediately: ‘Of course I’ll film! Would you ask a blind person whether they needed eyes?’

Tali remembers the date on which she recorded the first footage in her archive: 13 March 1993. It shows fighters boarding buses at the Pitsunda turn-off on the main road through Abkhazia, heading for the front at Eshera.

Other Plans

Tali suggests that her brother may have had a ‘secret motive’ in buying her a camera: perhaps he hoped to persuade her to leave the front and begin working with television. But she had other plans.

‘From the outset, my aim was to record the war and film the fighters, rather than make footage for news bulletins. They knew me and trusted me. Things they would tell me, they might not have wanted to tell a reporter sent by an editor to spend a couple of hours making a report. I wasn’t a journalist. I was one of them. For me, the atmosphere captured in those recordings matters enormously. It makes for an entirely different chronicle of the war,’ she says.

Between March and September 1993, Dzhapua recorded 52 three-hour tapes: almost 160 hours of unique documentary footage, which was made public only after the war ended. She had promised those she interviewed that nothing would be broadcast before victory. She kept her word.

‘The fighters had become wary of journalists’ cameras. There was even a superstition that if someone was filmed and shown on television one day, they would be killed the next. Of course, the filming had nothing to do with it: there was a war going on. I promised them that, while the war continued, not a single frame I filmed would be shown on television or anywhere else. And I kept that promise,’ Tali says.

The Difficulties of Filming a War

After the March offensive — the bloodiest operation of the war to liberate Sukhum, launched on the night of 15–16 March 1993 — Dzhapua took her camera everywhere, recording the war as it unfolded. Her footage, she stresses, shows where she went, which positions she visited and whom she spoke to.

She makes an interesting observation: war reporters are sometimes criticised for filming those in the second or third lines, while the bravest fighters on the front line remain absent from the footage.

‘That concerned me too. I couldn’t film during the fighting itself, but I knew the men who went to the front. We followed behind them. I filmed them when they returned from the battlefield. When they allowed it, I tried to film those who had most distinguished themselves. But some very brave fighters would not let themselves be filmed. That is why the faces of many of them are missing from the wartime record,’ she says with regret.

Emotions run high in war, and many people are at breaking point. If a soldier is wounded, for instance, it is impossible to predict how he will react to a camera being pointed at him without permission. These were lessons Tali had to learn through experience.

‘Once, they brought in a wounded fighter from a battle. His leg was broken, and, as usual, I began filming. He cocked his rifle and almost pointed it at me. I told him I had switched the camera off. I admit he frightened me. Later, in hospital, he apologised and said he hadn’t been himself. That is why you must not start filming someone at war without their permission — or, if they have never met you before, without first gaining their trust,’ she explains.

Why the Victory Flag Is Missing from the Footage

Of the war’s defining moments, just one is absent from Tali Dzhapua’s archive: the scenes at the Ingur River, which Abkhaz troops triumphantly reached on 30 September 1993, driving the enemy out of the republic.

During the liberation of Sukhum, she learnt that her nephew Eduard Khonelia, the son of her elder sister Lamara, had been killed on 17 September. He was posthumously awarded the Medal for Courage. The news led Tali to put down her camera. She acknowledges that his death was an ordeal she found deeply difficult to bear.

‘They didn’t tell me straight away that my eighteen-year-old nephew had been killed. When Sukhum was liberated on 27 September, I looked for him. When I couldn’t find him anywhere, I realised he was dead. I kept moving forwards out of sheer inertia, but I no longer took in what or whom I was filming. On 28 September, I reached Kelasur with our troops, then hurried to my sister, who had lost her son thirteen days before the long-awaited victory… Nearly thirty years have passed since the war, and we still have no grave for him. We searched many known burial sites but never found his remains. His mother could not bear the grief and died some time later…’ she says, tears in her eyes.

After spending barely half a day with her elder sister, Tali rejoined the fighters as a medic, now without her camera, and reached the village of Okhurei in the Ochamchira district. The enemy was retreating but still firing. Tali and her sister Shchazina took the seriously wounded to hospital. She reproaches herself for being unable to overcome her grief and continue filming: her documentary record contains no footage of the Abkhaz flag being raised at the border.

‘I still regret it, but the human heart is frail. That is life…’ she says.

War Diary

After the war, Tali devoted herself to the footage she had recorded. It had to be organised and edited, a script written and her own voice-over added to explain the events in detail: where the filming took place, which offensive was about to begin and what the defenders of the homeland were preparing for.

Dzhapua can rightly be called a documentary chronicler of the war. Among the things that make her footage so valuable are its precise dates and times.

‘The recordings show not only the date but the hour and minute. In war, that matters! Some of those filmed would be dead an hour later, or two days later. Editing the footage after the war, I already knew this and could add: “Killed on such-and-such a date.” This is more than a television programme. It is a documentary chronicle, a record of the war,’ she stresses.

No one who speaks in Dzhapua’s footage is anonymous: each person is identified by name.

‘Whenever I interviewed someone, I asked who they were and where they came from, and recorded their answers on the tape. But interviews were not an end in themselves. What mattered was showing a fighter’s life during the quiet moments too: finding out what interested him, what troubled him, what brought him joy, what he hoped for and how he imagined life in a free Abkhazia after the war. Thousands of people pass before your eyes in this footage. Many never speak on camera, but they were filmed and their faces have been preserved for history. All of that mattered to me,’ she explains.

In 1994, to mark the first anniversary of victory, Abkhaz Television broadcast the first film based on her footage, War Diary. Tali still remembers how viewers received the documentary and the responses it prompted.

‘The programme made a huge impression. That was when I realised how much it meant to the veterans to see themselves in those recordings after some time had passed,’ she says.

In the years that followed, Tali worked intensively on organising her archive so that she could present the finished films to veterans and the wider public. The War Diary series comprises 50 hour-long films.

She says the archive offers considerable scope for films on particular themes and even individual people. Among her plans is a compilation of the fighters’ comments about their commander-in-chief, Abkhazia’s first president, Vladislav Ardzinba.

‘It is hard to overstate what Vladislav meant as a commander-in-chief whom people trusted and in whom they placed their hopes. “We will win!” every fighter would say. Even when there was little reason for hope, their faith in Vladislav was unshakeable. After unsuccessful offensives, too, the fact that the commander-in-chief did not lose heart or betray them united the fighters and gave them strength and faith in victory,’ she explains.

A Life’s Work and Service to the Homeland

Although Tali regards her work on the video archive as her life’s principal undertaking and the lasting legacy she will leave behind, she has also worked in other fields and held several senior positions. In 1996, she was elected to the People’s Assembly — the Parliament of the Republic of Abkhazia. She later became director of the Foundation for the Development of the Abkhaz Language. She served as Minister of Education for two years, in 2003–2004, before returning to the Abkhaz Institute for Humanities Research. In 2016, she became head of the State Commission on the Abkhaz Language under the President, while also serving as an aide to President Raul Khajimba. She was subsequently appointed chair of the Abkhaz State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.

Since 2017, she has again worked at the Abkhaz Institute for Humanities Research, in its Department of Source Studies, preparing a written version of her extensive video chronicle.

‘Producing a printed version of the footage, with transcripts and my own commentary, is a vast and complicated undertaking. There will be at least ten volumes. The draft is almost ready, and I am making revisions. The hardest part is preparing the commentary and notes: the information has to be reliable. What a fighter says at the front has to be checked against the documented record. How closely do they agree? If there are discrepancies, why? What were the actual circumstances of a particular offensive or defeat? As a researcher, I have to examine everything, compare the evidence and establish the historical truth. That is the scholarly approach,’ says Dzhapua, a senior research fellow at the Institute who holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in philology.

Fearless Tali

While preparing this article, we asked veterans of the Patriotic War of the People of Abkhazia to share their memories of Tali Dzhapua.

Nugzar Chachibaya, a veteran awarded the Medal for Courage, was among the first wounded men she treated. He recalls being wounded on 28 August 1992 near the bridge over the Gumista River, on the Sukhum side. To reach him, she had to run across the bridge under enemy fire.

‘I cannot separate the two medics in my mind: Tali Dzhapua and Nadezhda Ashuba, a recipient of the Order of Leon. They were together, and that was when I met them both. With extraordinary strength, they dragged me on a blanket across the bridge to the waiting ambulance. Not everyone could have crossed that bridge: the tank and machine-gun fire was so intense. On the way back, Tali shielded me with her own body so that I would not be hit again. I doubt it even occurred to her at that moment that she herself might be killed. What mattered most to her was saving a life,’ he says.

After a time, Chachibaya was discharged from hospital and returned to his position. Tali was still caring for the wounded, and later he often saw her on the Gumista front with her camera as well. He admits that they sometimes refused to let her film. Only after the war, when he saw the footage, did he understand the importance of what she had been doing.

‘Back then, we thought it was bad luck to be filmed. I appear in the footage, even though I used to dodge the camera. Now I am glad that this documentary record survives. I have sons, and my grandchildren are growing up. It makes me happy that they can see their father and grandfather as a young man, where he was and what he did. Now I understand the value of her work. It was wrong to stop her filming what she thought was important. Tali Dzhapua’s footage preserves the faces and interviews of our brothers-in-arms who are no longer alive. Their memory is precious to us. It is deeply moving. Everything comes back,’ he says.

After the war, he explains, Tali prepared discs for each battalion as gifts, containing footage of its fighters. When veterans gather to celebrate Victory Day, they play the recordings and remember their youth at war.

‘We are happy, we laugh, and sometimes we cannot hold back the tears. Some people who consider themselves heroes have not done half of what Tali Dzhapua did, both as a medic and as a camera operator chronicling the war,’ Chachibaya says.

Marina Bartsits, a wartime medic, recipient of the Medal for Courage and creator of an extensive photographic archive of the war, says she went to the front in October 1992 because her friend and colleague Tali Dzhapua was there.

‘In war, it matters who is beside you. You need someone who will not let you down, someone you can trust, someone who will not abandon you. The reputation and standing of the person you will be serving alongside matter enormously too. That is why I went specifically to where Tali was,’ Marina explains.

She stresses that Tali’s first priority during the war was saving lives. If a wounded person needed first aid, she switched off her camera. When events that would have been especially valuable to the documentary record began to unfold, Tali ‘missed all of it’ because she was busy helping people.

‘A camera operator keeps filming whatever is happening around them, rather than putting down the camera and rushing to save someone. For Tali, saving people mattered more. She would put her camera aside and start bandaging a wounded man. Once, I filmed her doing just that. She rushed to help, and I kept the camera running and pointed it towards her,’ Marina says with a smile, explaining Tali’s brief appearance in her own wartime footage.

Bartsits points out that filming and creating a video chronicle of the war were entirely Tali’s own initiative. No one had assigned her the task. When she was running out of tapes, the fighters brought her old film cassettes, which she recorded over with new footage.

Unlike journalists wearing vests marked ‘Press’, whom international law protects from harm during hostilities, Tali Dzhapua went through the entire war without any protective identification.

‘Tali wore military clothing throughout the war. And combatants in military uniform are people who can be killed. A soldier is usually armed, with his weapon at the ready. He is alert, sees where the firing is coming from and knows what is happening around him. A camera operator is almost blind: one eye is closed, and the other is looking into the camera, seeing only through the lens. A walking target. Filming a war is dangerous and exhausting work. To my mind, it shows Tali’s fearlessness. Journalists usually arrive, film and leave. Tali was constantly at the front, in the trenches, on the very first line,’ Marina says.

She emphasises that Dzhapua worked across the entire Gumista front, filming during all the major offensives and among every group and battalion.

‘Imagine the standing you need to be able to move freely between all the battalions with a camera, and how much trust both the fighters and their commanders must have in you. Tali created a treasure trove for the national archive. With an expert’s care, she documented everything. She is leaving our people this priceless collection, her own audiovisual archive of the history of the Patriotic War. I do not think the history of Abkhazia in that period could be written without her archive. For that, we owe her our deepest thanks,’ Marina Bartsits concludes.

By a decree issued by President Vladislav Ardzinba on 25 September 1995, Tali Dzhapua was awarded the high title of Hero of Abkhazia.