For a century outsiders arrived in Abkhazia, found Black villagers on the Kodor and announced a discovery. Each generation read them differently. The villagers spoke Abkhaz, farmed, and said their ancestors came from somewhere in Africa they could not name.

A traveller came into Adzyubzha, twenty-two versts from Sukhum on the bank of the Kodor, and stopped to look. Wooden huts roofed with reeds stood against a wall of green forest. Children were playing on the ground. A woman walked past with a load on her head. Everyone in sight was Black and dressed in white against the sun, and he wrote afterwards that the place resembled nothing so much as a picture of an African village.

Edited by Georgy Anchabadze, Marina Pagava, Ia Tutashvili and Georgy Maisuradze

Tbilisi, 2021

Chapter 1. Political Questions

The Abkhaz People's Council

Pages 9 to 75

The violent clashes that erupted in Sukhum on 15–16 July 1989 marked a decisive turning point in modern Abkhaz history. Although the immediate dispute centred on the proposed establishment of a Tbilisi State University branch, the confrontation reflected deeper political, demographic and national tensions that had intensified during the final years of the Soviet Union.

This article traces the developments that preceded the violence, including the rise of competing national movements, the Lykhny Appeal, the crisis surrounding Abkhaz State University and the growing polarisation of Georgian and Abkhaz society. Drawing on eyewitness testimony, published accounts and documentary material, it examines why those July days later came to be remembered as a prelude to the 1992–93 Georgian–Abkhaz war.

In this 1965 ethnographic essay, the distinguished Abkhazian historian and ethnographer Shalva Inal-Ipa (1916 to 1995) traces the maritime traditions of the Abkhazians through archaeology, historical sources, language, folklore, toponymy and religious belief. He presents seafaring as a significant, though often overlooked, part of Abkhazian economic and cultural life.

In the economic and cultural life of the Abkhazians, an indigenous coastal people, the sea and seafaring have been of great importance since ancient times.¹

At the Neolithic settlement of Kistrik, massive wedges and a large number of stone chisels have been discovered. These were evidently used to fashion primitive boats.

How a Muslim, non-Georgian-speaking minority became caught between Tbilisi's assimilation drive and Stalin's terror, told through the letters of the Laz activist Iskander Tsitashi.

Editor's Note

The following chapter is taken from Marc Junge and Bernd Bonwetsch (eds.), Bolschewistische Ordnung in Georgien: Der Große Terror in einer kleinen kaukasischen Republik (Berlin, Munich and Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), from the section 'Ethnos und Terror' (p. 157): the chapter 'Administrative Exklusion: Lazen', pp. 172–189, co-authored by Marc Junge, Daniel Müller, Wolfgang Feurstein and Ivan Džucha.

It is a remarkable piece of scholarship, built almost entirely around one man's paper trail: the letters of Iskander Tsitashi, a Laz activist who spent the 1930s pleading, first with the Comintern and then with Stalin himself, against what he called the 'Georgianisation' of his people - their language pushed out of schools, their land quietly withheld, their newspaper shut down. His warnings were accurate, his faith in Moscow was not, and in 1938 it cost him his life on a fabricated espionage charge. The chapter sets his fate against that of his quieter colleague Mukhammed Vanilishi, who chose flattery over confrontation and lived long enough to talk Beria into reversing part of the 1944 deportations, a contrast the authors draw out with real care. Perhaps the most sobering pages are the statistical ones: the Laz, though a tiny community, were sentenced to death during the Great Terror at a rate far higher than their Georgian neighbours, a pattern the authors link to their closeness with Nestor Lakoba's Abkhazia as much as to their standing as a border people.