Hope Built on a Castle in the Air

In a high valley in the Caucasus Mountains, a place so remote it’s cut off for six months each winter, an ancient towered fortress of stone juts heavenward like a bunch of clustered crystals.

The locals, 22 families with the same surname, are descendants of a tiny highland ethnic group called the Khevsuri who lived in and around the fortress for centuries. After decades in which they were exiled and their fortress fell into neglect, the Khevsuri have decided to repair their home and move back in.

And, sensing that they have something special to share, they want to open part of it as a hotel for adventure tourists.

The people of Shatili have made a list, which they pull out to show visitors, detailing which family owns each of the 62 fortress “towers,” as they call them--actually chunky stone blocks three to four stories tall. Nine of the towers have fallen down.

Irakli Chincharauli, the excitable chief of the local border guards, waves the list, which shows that his family owns 11 of the towers, more than any other family.

“I had more ancestors,” he explains proudly. “Everybody in the village knows which families own which towers. Our ancestors lived there, and the elders who are still alive learned it from their elders.”

The Khevsuri should have all but disappeared after authorities drove them from their home in 1952 at the end of the Stalin era--as happened to so many of the Soviet Union’s small ethnic groups--and resettled them on arid land on the plains of eastern Georgia.

But they came back. These were tough, spartan people with the fiercely independent highland mentality that is shared by their closest neighbors, the Chechens, whose territory lies just a few miles away.

Both were warrior tribes. The Chechens’ resistance to Russia continues to this day, and they pay for their dream of independence with blood.

But the Khevsuri fight no more. The tumbledown Shatili fortress is just a quaint symbol of past battles.

They cherish a simpler dream: that their fort might offer an economic future for the village, and a meaningful role in the world.

To visitors last century, before the road into the Argun Gorge was built, the Khevsuri were an intriguing and mysterious tribe. Khevsuri women used cows’ urine to dye their hair blond and sacrificed animals in purification rituals. The men wore chain mail, carried small round shields, fenced with swords and drank beer as a holy rite.

Their features were considered European. That and the intricately embroidered crosses on their costumes--like those of the Crusaders--spawned the theory that they descended from the religious warriors, an idea that acquired legendary status but apparently has no basis in fact.

Their lives were harsh. Mothers washed their new babies in the cold mountain waters. To give birth, they retired alone for three or more days to small stone huts away from the settlement, where they were not allowed to burn fires, even in the deep of winter. Their husbands, meanwhile, would walk around the hut firing shots into the air. Khevsuri women who lost their children were not supposed to weep.

The society put great emphasis on restraint and abstinence. People married late, at about age 30, and having many children was frowned upon. But before marriage, romances with cousins, sisters, brothers and other relatives were allowed.

Vazha Chincharauli, 42, an architect from Shatili, is leading a two-year emergency restoration project to prevent the collapse of the fortress, which was built in the 7th or 8th century. With a World Bank grant of $270,000, chunks of missing walls that had been bitten away by time were rebuilt last year, foundations were restored and work was begun to repair the nine ruined towers. When completed, several of the towers will have their original beehive roofs.

The work is being done by the Shatili people themselves using local stone. So far, $60,000 has been spent, and structural repairs to roofs and interiors will continue this summer.

In a painstaking search of Soviet archives to determine ownership of the fortress, Vazha made a wonderful discovery. Although Soviet authorities designated the fortress a historical monument in 1971, it seems that they forgot to transfer it to the state.

With no document to prove state ownership, the Khevsuri have negotiated an agreement with Georgia’s Committee of Cultural Heritage that the monument be given back to the people. Under the agreement, yet to be stamped and signed, the residents of Shatili will own the fortress but will be forbidden to carry out any work without approval.

Vazha, who claims ownership of two towers, is developing the plans for the hotel and a museum.

“I’m a restorer, and I believe that to keep the castle going you need to make it functional. It has to have a purpose, or it will die,” he says.

David Ninidze, director of the Georgian Cultural Heritage Protection Fund, which was set up in Tbilisi, the capital, by the World Bank, says the bank approved a two-year restoration program and will consider another phase later this year.

He says the agency seemed to like the idea of turning some of the old towers into a hotel. The idea could attract funding, he adds.

Even if no investment and no tourists come, the Khevsuri say, they will be satisfied to live bound by history to these high mountain slopes, like an ancient tree hanging on in a modern world.

In the small wooden house in Shatili of Irakli, the local border guard chief, there is little to distract the eye. For heat and cooking, a rough tin stove squats in the middle of the main room. Behind it, a single smoke-stained shelf holds a row of books. The furnishings are sparse and simple.

But the windowpanes frame a view of breathtaking peaks tumbling down to a burbling river. It’s full of trout, says Irakli, who can’t seem to help but promote the mountains--some of them 12,000 feet high--that he loves so passionately.

In a trip along the river track, Irakli’s four-wheel-drive rears and bucks through the ruts as he shows off the local sights. He stops on the road above a group of low stone huts where people stricken with the plague came to die many centuries ago. In one hut, the doorway is barred and bones are visible within.

Another hut serves as a lookout for snipers watching for Chechen fighters who might illegally cross the border about a mile away.

Farther on, Irakli points out the skeleton of a Chechen helicopter, which crashed in the ravine before the 1994-96 Chechen war. Farther still is the hill that divides Chechnya and Georgia. A clump of what seem to be stick-like trees planted on the crest of the hill turns out to be Russian border guards.

For centuries, wars have surged along this valley. The history of the Caucasus Mountains is so full of violence and sorrow that one Georgian poet last century, Vazha Pshavela, saw the peaks as tragic men never admitting the rocks of sadness clamped to their hearts.

“In the gorge below, the river roars, its seething, inward wrath. The mountains bend down, wash their faces in the spray, the souls of dead men living on their flanks,” he wrote in a poem called “Host and Guest.”

The Khevsuri were fierce fighters able to hold their own against the mighty Chechen warriors who lived in the northern part of the Argun Gorge lying across the border in Chechnya--the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in the current Chechen war.

Khevsuri military traditions were often violent and cruel. The tribe carried on blood feuds through generations, and when Khevsuri men vanquished an enemy, they cut off the arm of the defeated chieftain and nailed it at the entry of their fortress.

The battles live on in the memories of the proud descendants. Today’s Chincharaulis boast that Khevsuri warriors always served in the personal guard of the Georgian king, or mepe.

Irakli Chincharauli tells of a battle in the 1840s against the Chechen and Dagestani warriors of Imam Shamil, the charismatic leader who fought for 30 years to resist Russian domination.

As Irakli tells it, the Khevsuri of Shatili refused to let the Chechens through the Argun Gorge to attack the Russian garrison at Telavi in eastern Georgia.

But the Khevsuri and Chechen tribes had enough in common that they often used the same places of worship. The Khevsuri practiced a mix of Orthodox Christianity and paganism, while the Chechens practiced a mix of Islam and paganism.

They often fought on the same side to repel invaders. In 1813, they united against the czar’s troops in Georgia. Russian cannons, never before seen in the Argun Gorge, ripped holes in the Khevsuri fortresses dotting the valley, including the Shatili fort.

Because of their isolation, the Khevsuri were still using swords and shields, daggers and flintlock rifles--the same weapons they used to resist the Russians--through the end of the 1930s.

In spring, when the snow recedes and the damp earth sprouts a carpet of mountain crocuses, it is easy to forget the violent legacy of the Caucasus. But just as war touched the Khevsuri in centuries past, it could ruin their dreams today.

Vazha Chincharauli, the architect, is worried about the impact of the Chechen war on his project.

He bought a house in the gorge three years ago, which he opened as a hotel last year. Quite a few foreign tourists made it to Shatili along challenging roads last summer--15 to 20 a day on the busiest days.

“The road is difficult and quite exotic,” he says with an enigmatic smile.

But in December, a Russian helicopter fired rockets at the village, and a Russian missile was fired at the Shatili border post. With the guerrilla war just across the border likely to drag on, Vazha fears that tourists--and the investors whom locals hope to attract--will shy away.

Vazha believes that the hotel would help improve life for the people of Shatili.

“But if it doesn’t go ahead, life will go on. It’s the Khevsuri’s spirit. You can never change that,” he says.