Ten Lies, Ten Answers: The Case Against Georgian Mythology on Abkhazia
Ten claims Georgian nationalists keep repeating about Abkhazia. Ten times the sources say otherwise. Footnotes included.
'For history is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction. The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in these ideologies. If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented.'
— Eric Hobsbawm (co-edited with Terence Ranger), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 2012.
AbkhazWorld gets some version of the comment below most days of the year, usually from a real name and a real photograph: that our language has no word for the sea, that our ancestors are Circassian squatters who turned up three centuries ago and stole somebody else's name, that we are, in the fullest sense, not real. It spikes every 27 October, Abkhaz Language Day, but it never really stops. Almost all of it traces back to one source: Pavle Ingorokva's 1954 book Giorgi Merchule, nominally a study of a tenth-century hymnographer, in substance a nine-hundred-page argument that the Abkhaz people do not exist and never did. Two Abkhaz officials, Arkhip Labakhua and Ivan Tarba, told the Soviet Communist Party as much in a 1957 letter, accusing Ingorokva of resting his thesis on 'the falsification of historical documents.' Nobody in Tbilisi was listening. The theory resurfaced with Georgia's national movement from 1988, and in 1990 Zviad Gamsakhurdia, soon to become Georgia's first post-Soviet president, stood on the steps of parliament and told a cheering crowd, in so many words, that 'an Abkhazian people never existed historically.' Two years later, war came, and both sides suffered for it.
This is the pattern Hobsbawm is describing above, running in miniature and on a loop: an invented past, treated ever after as bedrock, because the politics needed one and the real record would not oblige.
This piece addresses ten specific claims, and the men who created them and continue to reproduce them. The method is simple: every claim below is answered with a primary source, not a slogan.
1. "Real Abkhazians were a Georgian tribe. The Apsuas who live there now came down from the North Caucasus in the seventeenth century and stole the name."
Pavle Ingorokva published this claim in 1954, framed as a study of the writer Giorgi Merchule. He borrowed the germ of it from a nineteenth-century aside by D. Bakradze and built nine hundred pages on top. The theory went nowhere for thirty years, then Georgia's national movement revived it after 1988. It never really left. In 1990 Zviad Gamsakhurdia said in public what Ingorokva had only written in a monograph: that the Abkhaz nation did not exist. That was not a seminar remark. That was the head of state, on the eve of a war.
Start with the names. The Abkhaz call themselves Apsua; their exonym, Abkhaz, comes from the Greek and Roman Abasgi. Both are attested continuously from the first and second centuries CE. Pliny the Elder named the Apsilae and placed the Sanigae by Sebastopolis, today's Sukhum. Flavius Arrian, writing for Hadrian in 137 CE, records kings of the Apsilae, the Abasgi and the Sanigae, each confirmed on his throne by Trajan or Hadrian in turn. That is roughly today's ethnic map, sixteen centuries before the supposed seventeenth-century newcomers.
Archaeology agrees. The Tsebelda culture of the Kodor valley runs from the second to the seventh century with no destruction layer and no population-replacement horizon — precisely what a newcomer theory needs and cannot supply.
Linguistics finishes the job. Abkhaz belongs to the Northwest Caucasian family with Adyghe and the extinct Ubykh, and that distance took millennia, not centuries, to open. Ingorokva's own supporting claim, that "Abasgi" is a worn-down "Moschi," fails on his own sources: Strabo places the Moschi far to the south, beyond the Phasis and Cyrus rivers, and Tacitus and Arrian both use "Moschi" and "Abasgi" as two separate peoples in the same period.
The theory's sharpest critics were Georgian scholars themselves: the linguist Ketevan Lomtatidze, the historian Nikoloz Berdzenishvili, the critic Giorgi Soselia, and, at length, the Abkhaz historian Zurab Anchabadze. History has known one Abkhaz people. There is no truer Abkhaz hiding underneath the current one, waiting for a philologist to set them free.
See also: Georgian Myths vs. Historical Facts: The Reality of Abkhazian History
2. "There is no word for 'sea' in the Abkhaz language."
It surfaces every Language Day, in screenshott taunts asking how a coastal people forgot the word for the thing outside their window.
The word is амшын, amshyn. It is not an exclusively Abkhazian source; see page 67 of Temur Gvantseladze's Georgian-Abkhaz Dictionary (2019), a Georgian scholar's reference work, giving амшы́н amSHyn and ága as the Abkhaz equivalents of "sea."
That is one word among roughly two thousand. Abkhaz has separate terms for a raft, a felucca, a mast, a sail, a ship's wheel and a ship's hold. Even the word for "west" gives the game away: amratashʷára breaks down as "the sun falling into," the old image of the sun sinking into the sea to the west, which only makes sense for people who have watched it happen from that coast for a very long time.
History backs up the vocabulary. The Dutch scholar Nicolaes Witsen described Abkhaz pirates blockading shipping between Crimea and Constantinople in 1692. The Georgian prince-historian Vakhushti Bagrationi, no soft touch on Abkhaz claims elsewhere, called them "strong and powerful in the sea." In 1802 the Abkhaz ruler Kelesh-Bey gave the Ottoman Sultan a locally built sixty-cannon warship (Prof. Georgy Anchabadze [Achba], interview, HumanRights.ge).
A people who cannot name the sea do not build the Sultan a navy.
See also: Exposing Ignorance: Navigating the Sea of Deceptions and Abkhazians and the Sea, by Otar P. Dzidzaria (Dzari-ipa)
3. "Abkhazia is an inalienable part of Georgia, historically and culturally, one of Georgia's provinces, or one of the Georgian states during fragmentation."
The Kingdom of Abkhazia ran from roughly 780 to 978. Its capital moved from Anakopia, today's New Athos, to Kutaisi, now Georgia's second city. The word Sakartvelo, "Georgia," does not yet exist in that timeframe. It appears only at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to describe the unified realm that grew out of the Abkhazian kingdom of the Leonid dynasty. Not the other way round.
The unification itself runs through an Abkhaz woman. When the Leonid male line died out, the throne passed to Bagrat, son of the Abkhazian princess Gurandukht, who inherited Abkhazia from his mother around 978 and only later added the Kartvelian and Tao crowns from his father. The dynastic register of his own reign, the Divan of the Abkhazian Kings, records the maternal descent carefully. His coinage reads, in Georgian: "Christ, glorify Bagrat, king of the Abkhazians." That title came first and stayed first for his successors. States do not lead with a subordinate people's name on the coinage for generations.
A thirteenth-century Georgian chronicler called Abkhazia the Bagratids' "ancient kingdom", a medieval Georgian writer conceding the genealogy of his own royal house.
Modern history undercuts the claim further. Abkhazia held treaty-republic status associated with Georgia until 1931, when a single Georgian, Joseph Stalin (Dzhugashvili), downgraded it to an autonomous republic by administrative order. For the full detail, see George Hewitt's point-by-point answer to Andrew Andersen.
Add it up and the "inalienable" claim has a counting problem. Since the two peoples first appear in the historical record, they have shared a state for exactly two stretches. The first ran from Bagrat's unification to the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, a kingdom whose rulers styled themselves 'Sovereign of the Abkhazians and Georgians' — Abkhazia's name first, by dynastic inheritance, not conquest. The second ran from 1931 to 1991, when Abkhazia sat inside the Georgian SSR. That second period proves the opposite of what the myth needs: both republics answered to Moscow, not to Tbilisi, and Abkhazia was at no point in those sixty years part of an independent Georgian state. Two windows, in well over a thousand years of separate languages and separate polities, is not inalienable. It is dynastic accident, twice repeated, and a shared Soviet administrator in between.
4. "Many Abkhazians have Georgian surnames" (so, the implication runs, they are 'really' Georgian).
This gets the direction of travel backwards. Abkhaz surnames were altered to look Georgian and Mingrelian; they did not evolve that way on their own. The Abkhaz suffix "-ba," from pa-ipa, "son of," was overwritten with endings like "-ya," "-iya," "-va," "-dze" and "-shvili." Aubla became Ubilava. Tsanba became Tsanava. Achba became Anchabadze. Inal-ipa became Inalishvili. See: The Distortion of Abkhaz Surnames.
This was not assimilation drifting along on its own. It escalated under the Menshevik government of 1918–21 and became state policy under Beria's anti-Abkhazian drive from 1937, alongside the closure of Abkhaz-language schools and the rebasing of the Abkhaz alphabet onto Georgian script. Church records show the mechanism at work village by village: a Georgian or Mingrelian priest arrives, and every "-ba" surname in the baptismal register grows a Mingrelian ending within a few years. Put an Abkhaz priest in the same parish, and the surnames revert to their proper spelling.
Change the priest, change the paperwork.
The traffic ran the other way too, and further back. During the Abkhazian Kingdom of the eighth to tenth centuries, Abkhaz feudal families settled deep in western Georgian territory, leaving Georgian place names of Abkhaz origin: Achabeti (from Achba), Chachubeti (from Chachba), all from Abkhaz clan names.
A surname changed by a priest or a decree in 1937 is not evidence of ancient Georgian ancestry. It is evidence of a paper trail, and paper trails can be read backwards.
5. "There are no Abkhaz names in Abkhazia. All toponyms are Georgian."
Run the claim backwards and it refutes itself: the very names that Stalin-era policy went to the trouble of changing are proof there was something Abkhaz there worth erasing. The river Khipsta became Tetri Tsqaro, "White Spring." The village Mikhelripsh became Salkhino. Psirtskha, New Athos, became Akhali Aponi. Gagra was split into Akhali and Dzveli Gagra. Even the Abkhaz-Georgian folk ensemble was rebranded the State Ensemble of Georgian Folk Music and Dance, its Abkhaz half quietly dropped from the label.
Some names survived anyway, and they are instructive. Abzhywa, the district name, breaks down transparently as a-bzhy-wa, "the-between-people", and it is recorded as such even in the Georgian Soviet Encyclopaedia (vol. 9, p.37). Samurzakano, the older name for today's Gal district, comes from Murzakan Chachba, one of three princely brothers of the Abkhaz ruling house who divided the territory in 1705, a fact set down in a Georgian reference work, not an Abkhaz one.
Worth being honest about this frontier country rather than pretending it is tidier than it was: it did see real Mingrelian settlement over the centuries, and the line between Abkhaz and Mingrelian speech moved back and forth with the fortunes of each side, further north at times of Mingrelian strength, further south when Abkhaz power was in the ascendant. That is ordinary frontier history. It is not the same claim as "no Abkhaz names," and it does not rescue it.
Ask anyone repeating this myth to find you a map from before 1937.
'The Ibero-Caucasian hypothesis and the historiography of Abkhazia' (pp.53-65) Kevin Tuite 'The Rise and Fall and Revival of the Ibero-Caucasian Hypothesis' Historiographia Linguistica Vol. 35:1/2 (2008), pp. 23–82
6. "All historical artefacts, places and churches in Abkhazia are Georgian. Nothing belongs to the Abkhaz."
The great church-building programme at Pitsunda, Lykhny and Bedia was carried out at the expense and by the will of Abkhaz kings. It is the direct legacy of Abkhaz statehood, folded only later into a wider Georgian ecclesiastical world.
The liturgical-language argument is the trap this myth walks straight into. Early Abkhazia worshipped in Greek, not Georgian. Byzantium converted the Abasgi around the 540s through an Abasg convert named Euphrates, and Constantinople paid for the church built for the purpose. Georgian only displaces Greek as the language of church and chancery from around the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries; the earliest firmly dated Georgian inscription anywhere in Abkhazia is at Lykhny, carved in 1066, recording the appearance of Halley's Comet. A liturgical language is not an ethnic passport. Latin did not make the English Roman, and Arabic script did not make Central Asia Arab. Apply the same logic here and the "Georgian inscription equals Georgian building" argument dissolves.
Archaeology adds its own layer. The Taglan burial near modern Gal, with its first- and second-century gold deer-head ornaments, silver vessels and horse fittings, belongs to the same royal lineage Arrian recorded. It is material culture with an unbroken line into the medieval period, not an imported Georgian artefact set.
7. "Colchis was a Georgian state."
Colchis was a political and geographical label for an alliance of distinct Colchian tribes, not a unified, centralised, ethnically Georgian kingdom. Strabo said as much at the time: the local kings ruled over land divided into skeptouchs, districts each headed by its own chieftain, and held only a moderate degree of power. That is not the language of a centralised nation-state. It is the language of a loose confederation, which is exactly what the archaeological record shows too. Even the Greek cities on this coast, Phasis, Gyenos and Dioscurias, had their own constitutions and their own coinage, run by Greek colonists trading alongside, not ruled by, a single Colchian throne.
Retroactively nationalising a Bronze and Iron Age tribal confederation is not history. It is cartography performed backwards from a modern flag. For the full academic case, see Philip Kohl and Gocha Tsetskhladze, "Greeks and 'Georgians' in Ancient Colchis."
8. "The 1992–93 war was a Georgian-Russian war fought in Abkhazia" (Georgia, on this telling, was merely a battlefield, or else Russia was straightforwardly on the Abkhaz side throughout).
Start with who moved first. Boris Yeltsin gave Eduard Shevardnadze the green light for Georgian troops to enter Abkhazia on 14 August 1992. Shevardnadze himself later recalled complaining to Yeltsin about his own army's indiscipline and getting only a shrug back: generals, Yeltsin told him, "can get out of control." That is not the language of a patron directing a proxy war. That is the Georgian head of state being warned by the Kremlin about what his own troops were already doing.
Now concede the part of the myth that happens to be true, because it does not actually help the myth. North Caucasus volunteers, many of them Chechen, did fight for Abkhazia, and some Russian personnel from the old Soviet base at Sukhum sold or handed over arms. But the volunteers answered to no one in Moscow. Their best-known commander, Shamil Basaev, said plainly that his men would help the Abkhaz for as long as the Abkhaz were suffering, and would fight for Georgia the day Russia and Georgia went to war with each other. That is pan-Caucasian solidarity, not a Kremlin operation, and it fought alongside diaspora Abkhaz who crossed the Black Sea from Türkiye, Syria and Jordan for a homeland most of them had never seen.
Georgia, meanwhile, had its own Russian weapons, in bulk, from the top down. Tengiz Kitovani, commander of the Georgian National Guard, said on the record that Russia officially handed his forces the 108 tanks of the Akhaltsikhe division. Georgia held the military edge at the war's outset precisely because it inherited the bulk of the old Transcaucasus Military District's Soviet stockpile; Russian sympathy for the Abkhaz side, such as it was, only grew as the war went on, and Moscow stayed institutionally divided on the question throughout, a divide the historian Anastasia Shesterinina traces in detail in Mobilizing in Uncertainty.
Had Russia simply willed an Abkhaz victory, the Abkhaz side would not have lost the battles it lost, or taken the casualties it took, on the way to winning the war on the ground. And a client does not spend the years afterward under a joint Russian-Georgian blockade, shut out of its own negotiations. Call it a Georgian-Russian war if the phrase still appeals. Just be honest about which side, at the outset, Moscow was actually arming.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze after signing the Treaty on Friendship, Good-Neighbourliness and Co-operation, 3 February 1994. Among the officials behind them are Andrei Kozyrev and Jaba Ioseliani.
+ FBIS archives on the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict + A Russian officer's view of the conflict, 27 April 1993 (FBIS report) + Dodge Billingsley, 'The Battle for Gagra: The Turning Point'
9. "Chechen volunteers played football with the severed heads of Georgian soldiers at Gagra stadium."
This one does not need ten sentences to fall over. Paata Zakareishvili, the Georgian conflict-resolution figure who later served as his own country's state minister for reconciliation, has said plainly that this is a Georgian legend, not a documented event. When the people with the most reason to keep an atrocity story alive call it folklore instead, that is the end of the argument.
10. "Abkhazia is under the effective control of a pro-Russian ethnocratic Apsuan puppet regime."
Abkhazia has its own elected parliament, its own executive presidency and its own functioning state institutions, not organs administered from Moscow. Freedom House has consistently rated both Georgia and Abkhazia "partly free", the same bracket, not "free state" against "occupied territory."
The 'puppet' label keeps failing its own test. In 2004 Abkhaz voters rejected the Moscow-backed candidate and elected Sergei Bagapsh instead, under heavy Russian pressure and the real threat of civil war. In 2011 Abkhazia refused to hand Russia a 160 square-kilometre strip of north-western border territory ahead of the Sochi Olympics, and the population rallied at New Athos monastery to defend its church's independence from Moscow and its right to hold services in Abkhaz. The state dacha at Pitsunda tells a similar story in miniature: Abkhazia's own prosecutor's office threw out the original lease agreement with Russia in March 2023 over faulty land coordinates, and parliament only ratified a revised version that December after attaching amendments voiding the deal if Russia ever passed the property to a third party. Russia's foreign ministry pushed back on that clause almost immediately. Abkhazia's parliament answered in 2024 by stripping the president of the power to sign international agreements without its prior approval, a change made explicitly because of how Pitsunda had been handled. That is not the behaviour of a rubber-stamp legislature.
The most recent case is the clearest. Through 2024 Abkhazia's own president lobbied hard for an "apartment law" that would have let foreign nationals, in practice Russian buyers, purchase 10,000 units of new housing on the coast. It had a parliamentary majority behind it: twenty-five of thirty-five MPs were counted as loyal to the president who proposed it. It still didn't survive contact with the public. Protesters filled the streets of Ochamchira, MPs got summoned home by their own constituents, and in July 2024 the bill was formally withdrawn "to ease tensions and preserve stability." Set that beside Georgia, the state Brussels and Washington treat as the properly sovereign one: in 2024 its parliament actually passed its own Russian-style "foreign agent" law, over mass protest and at real cost to its EU accession bid. Abkhazia's parliament has not even brought a version of that law to a vote. On this particular evidence, it is not obviously Sukhum taking dictation from Moscow.
The legal test is the Hague Convention of 1907, Articles 42 and 43: occupation means territory under the authority of a hostile army, which the occupier is obliged to administer. In Abkhazia, authority sits with the de facto Abkhaz government. Russian troops do not patrol the streets, staff the checkpoints or police the population; they stay largely on their bases, present under bilateral agreements between two states rather than by unilateral imposition. There is no programme of Russian settlement here comparable to, say, the West Bank.
None of which means the relationship is an equal one, or that Abkhaz sovereignty is never strained from the Russian side; a small, unrecognised state leaning on a much larger patron for its security and its budget is a real dependency, and no honest piece would claim otherwise. But dependency is not puppetry. A puppet does not get to say no to its own puppeteer over an Olympic border strip, a presidential dacha and a president's own flagship law, and keep winning.
The pattern underneath the ten
None of this makes Abkhaz history simple, and nothing above has claimed it does. The frontier moved. Populations mixed. Priests changed names on both sides of every border in the Caucasus. What turns these ten claims into a pattern rather than ten unrelated mistakes is where they come from: one 1954 book, revived by one national movement in 1988, voiced by one head of state on the eve of one war, and still being typed out under Abkhaz Language Day posts by people who have never opened Strabo, let alone Ingorokva. The theory has changed its footnotes over seventy years. It has never changed its conclusion. A myth that has to be re-answered every 27 October is not a myth in retreat. It is a myth with a very good publicist, and rather worse sources.
We have included here the ten most famous of these lies, the ones that resurface every year, on cue, from the same handful of sources. They are not the only ones in circulation. If you have heard a Georgian myth about Abkhazia we haven't covered, send it to