History and Culture of Ancient Abkhazia, by Zurab V. Anchabadze (Achba)

Istoriya i Kultura Drevney Abkhazii (Moscow 1964)

During the Soviet period Abkhazia produced two historians of such distinction that even the Georgian Academy of Sciences could not do other than elect them full members. These were Zurab Anchabadze and Giorgi Dzidzaria. The older scholar produced two monographs during his career together with a number of academic papers. ‘From the History of Abkhazia in the Middle Ages (VI-XVIIth Centuries)’ was published in Sukhum in 1959, whilst his ‘History and Culture of Ancient Abkhazia’ came out in Moscow in 1964. Both of these books were republished in a single volume, as volume 1 of the author’s works (in two volumes), in Sukhum in 2010. They are here available in electronic format.

The younger scholar, who was succeeded upon his death as director of the Abkhazian Research Institute named after Dmitry Gulia by Vladislav Ardzinba, who was destined to lead his country to independence in the war with Georgia of 1992-3, was the author of a number of books, three of which are made available here. ‘Essays on the History of Abkhazia 1910-1921’ covers the years when Tbilisi began to try to consolidate its influence in an Abkhazia denuded of its native population by the mass-exodus that took most Abkhazians to the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the Caucasian War and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 and when the seeds of today’s conflict with Georgia were sown by the tactics adopted by the Georgian Menshevik government (1918-21). When Constantine refused his birthright and the allowed his brother Nicholas to become Russia’s tsar, a number of officers revolted in December 1825. The coup collapsed, and those who participated were exiled to parts of the empire. Dzidzaria’s book ‘The Decembrists in Abkhazia’ looks at those who were dispatched to this part of the Western Caucasus. His work ‘F. Tornau and his Caucasian Materials of the XIXth Century’ examines the life and important writings of one of the Russian officers who served in the Caucasus in the 1830s.

The full book in PDF can be downloaded by clicking here (7.31 MB)