A Vengeful Life in Georgia's Hills

UPPER SVANETIA, Georgia -- Eteri Pardzhiani is 52 but looks 30 years older. She struggles to drag her frail body up a small hill to the cemetery where her 22-year-old son, Zviad, murdered in a blood feud last year, is buried.


Tears stream down her wrinkled face as she sings a song of lament and grief. "You were only 22 my little son ... you didn't even leave a child ... what is your old mother to do?" she wails, kneeling next to the perfectly tended grave.


Pardzhiani is one of only 45,000 ethnic Svans, a rugged and independent people who have lived for millennia scattered among the peaks and glaciers of one of Eurasia's most remote corners.


Svanetia lies high in Georgia's Caucasus mountains, which rise to 5,200 meters along the border with Russia. The Svans are one of several ethnic groups in the greater Georgian family. Their distinctive language, Svanuri, broke from Georgian 19 centuries before Christ.


It takes a grueling eight-hour drive, car wheels hugging terrifying cliffsides, to get to the regional capital, Mestia, from the nearest major Georgian town, Zugdidi. Eleventh-century stone watchtowers, sentinels of an ancient empire, dot an often moonlike landscape strewn with boulders and scraggy pine trees.


The Svans have preserved their language and unique traditions largely because of the harsh region's inaccessibility.


One of those traditions is the blood feud, or vendetta -- a custom which nearly wipes out large families in Svanetia. If a young man or woman is killed by a member of another family, the victim's family must avenge the death of their relative by taking a life in the offending family. The vicious circle can continue for generations. "If another person kills a member of your family, you must avenge their death. What else can you do?" says Pardzhiani calmly.


She estimates that around half of the 100 or so families in her home village of Latali, 10 kilometers down a rugged dirt track from Mestia, are currently feuding.


Svanetia was very isolated until recent times. One 19th-century travel writer, Douglas Freshfield, described the Svans as "the most savage and dangerous looking set of people I have ever come across" and noted their love of weapons and fighting.


The Svans were known for their fierce independence, and parts of the territory never came under the domain of outside rule, in contrast to the rest of Georgia, which was constantly carved up by foreign invaders and bickering princedoms. Christianity eventually made its way into Svanetia, but religious ceremonies are still greatly influenced by pagan rites. Animals, homemade alcohol and food are offered as sacrifices to patron saints on holidays as the locals sing, dance and get profoundly drunk.


The Soviet era brought roads and eventually electricity, telephones, television and consumer goods. Local police forces were set up, diluting the effect of ancient practices such as the vendetta.


But the end of the Soviet empire and the economic chaos that marked the first few years of Georgian independence has ironically thrown Svanetia back into its medieval past. The subsidies which once paid for utilities, health and other services are gone. And the vendetta is back with a vengeance.


"There is no police, no laws," Pardzhiani said. "The vendetta has replaced police and laws, and there is much more killing now."