Courting Can Be a Downright Dangerous Game in Tiny Republic in the Caucasus

Courting can be a deadly business in the mountains of Dagestan, a tiny republic in the northeastern foothills of the Caucasus.

“If a man comes to you to talk, you must turn your face away,” said Meivenusa Khalova, a Dagestani girl at the market in the southern town of Derbent.

What if she falls in love?

A shocking question. A group of elderly women nearby click their tongues in disapproval, glancing around hastily to see if any men are in earshot.

“Love is evil,” said Verdina Dijakhverat, a stern matron with seven sons.

Her friend Mafizat Iskenderov nodded. “It’s also evil if the girl sees the bridegroom’s face before marriage,” she said.

In the Caucasus highlands, parents decide marriages. Any girl who weds a Russian, for example, may be stabbed to death by male relatives.

The fiercely independent Dagestanis live in mountain valleys sandwiched between the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, south of Russia proper, north of Azerbaijan and east of Georgia.

Thirty-three ethnic groups, including Lezkis, Kumyks, Chechens, Ingushes, Avars, Armenians, Kalmyks, Kabardians, Azeris and Jews, are in the population of 2 million.

“Ten years ago, we never knew we were so many different peoples,” said Ramazan Ramazanov, a government official in the town of Mekhramkent, about 125 miles south of the capital, Makhachkala.

“Now people are calling themselves different nations. We can’t even drive to Moscow. Everyone is fighting each other all along the way,” he said.

Russia first annexed the Black Sea coast area of Dagestan in 1722, under Peter the Great. But resistance continued for another century and a half.

In the mid-19th Century, at the height of local resistance to Russian expansion, religious fanaticism held sway here. A variant of Sufism, a mystical version of Islam, was popular.

Its hero was Shamil, the leader of the Caucasian wars of the 1830s and 1840s. His ideal was to create a theocratic Islamic state. His lieutenants were mullahs, or Muslim clergy.

Today, Dagestani women still conform to traditional restrictions, never speaking to men in public.

Head scarfs provide a code to sexual status. Unmarried girls do not wear them. Young married women wear whites and greens, while old ones wear black or brown.

Bride-snatching is common since the cost of dowries has soared with inflation. In the old days, a man would seize his beloved as he galloped by on his horse. Nowadays, he uses a car.

Many of the women work on collective farms, where they earn around 50 to 60 rubles a month--about 50 cents at the black market rate.

Women bent under straw baskets of hay or copper water pitchers are a common sight.

How about the menfolk?

“Behave yourself. You must not talk to men,” warned a ollective farm chief, Ali Ekber Gumak, from the Kusarsky region. “They may think you’re a bad girl.”