Photo Story
Svans, the gatekeepers of the mountains
Author: Mano Svanidze
Topic:
Traditions
This photo story was published in the Chai Khana photo book in 2021.
For Vakhtang Pilpiani, the svanuri kudi, Svanetian hat, is not just a cap—it is an identity. Just like the complex, Svan polyphonic singing is not just a passion—it is a mission.
Vakhtang is a jolly looking man with a resonant, rhythmic voice; when he speaks—or sings—you listen.
"I do my best to ensure that every kid who has a talent for music can get involved and has access to musical education,” he says. He regularly goes to different parts of Svaneti to discover new talents. He looks for lotbars, choir masters. “Lotbars are able to sing every voice, teach every voice. It is a very complex skill. This is how we try to preserve our music for the next generation and keep it going.”
In Svaneti, the mountain region in northern Georgia where his family has lived for generations, 5,000-meter cliffs scrape the sky and tiny villages nestle in impossibly green valleys carved by rivers that snake toward the Russian border. Svaneti’s koshki—UNESCO-protected ancient watchtowers—helped Svans repel a host of marauding armies throughout history.
Centuries of relative isolation shielded its culture, allowing Svans to preserve their traditions untouched. Some of the Svan complex harmonies that are performed by Vakhtang’s choir and others date back to pre-Christian times. People sang at home, in the fields, at festivities, before fighting and while mourning in their own language, Svan, which is as complex as it is ancient.
Svan is considered the most distinctive of the four South Caucasian Kartvelian languages. It dates back to around the second millennium BC and, as it developed independently from the others, it retained many archaic features. Spoken by an estimated 30,000 people, Svan is designated as “definitely endangered” by UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations. While linguists widely agree that Svan is indeed a language, in Georgia many refer to it as a Georgian dialect.
As it is not taught at school, Svan relies on oral tradition for its survival. However, proficient speakers are dwindling and many fear that assimilation with Georgian will eventually kill off the language altogether.
Vakhtang’s generation still uses Svan as their spoken language in their daily life, but as Svaneti has become more integrated with the rest of the country through migration and tourism, Georgian has taken over. Greater integration with the outside world has improved the region’s economy and allowed more people to remain, but it has also disrupted the Svan-speaking environment—the space to speak, develop and preserve the language is shrinking.
Many villages are slowly, yet steadily, dying out as people move to either Mestia or down to the lowlands. In 2014 Ughvali, a village near Etseri, reported only five permanent residents
Younger Svans, like 30-year-old Lasha Kantsliani, are hoping to use tourism as an opportunity to preserve Svan culture. Lasha moved to Tbilisi to study photography at university, but he plans to return to Etseri, the village where he grew up, to open a guesthouse. He grew up speaking Svan—all his family members speak it at home—and he learned Georgian at school.
“I don’t think that Svan will disappear, but it is sad to see that fewer and fewer people speak it.”
For Vakhtang, keeping the millennia-old culture of his region alive means everything.
“We, Svans, are the gatekeepers of our culture. We have to preserve it.”
Lasha Kantsliani, 30, returns to Etseri as often as he can. After years spent in the capital, he plans to return to the highlands and set up a hostel on the mountains he loves and misses.
Lasha helps his father Guram to attend to the animals. Farming has been central to Svans’ life for centuries.
Lasha prepares kubdari, bread stuffed with meat, Georgian spices and onions. Also called kubed, it is considered the Svans’ national dish and is included in the list of Georgia’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Lasha and Guram Kantsliani’s family album. Some of the photographs were taken by Mesurate Shaqro— “photo maker Shaqro.” He was a photographer from the low land of Samegrelo who, in the 1970s and 1980s, used to travel up to villages in Svaneti to take family portraits in exchange for food. “He would take photos and, on the next visit, he would bring the prints. Every family in Etseri has a photo he took,” Guram recalls.
Lali Skhirtladze and her husband Tony Hanmer in their house in Etseri. Tony, a Canadian, visited Svaneti in 1999—and it was love at first sight. Tony writes extensively about life in Svaneti and manages the Facebook group “Svaneti Renaissance” dedicated to all things Svanetian. He is also a strong supporter of the Svan language.
“Some people label me as a ‘separatist’ for promoting the Svan language. I want to promote it [because] I don’t want it to die out.”
Lela Chartolani, 43. She worries about the fate of the Svan language, fearing it will disappear. “Our language is not popular among the young generations. Younger families do not speak it at home, opting to use only Georgian. And since there are no classes at school, children simply do not know the language of their ancestors. It is important to introduce the language in school in order to preserve it.”
Lela, who is a musician in the Svan folk group Riho, speaks only in Svan with other Svan people. A former teacher, Lela would often write Svan words and characters on the board during breaks and help children learn to pronounce the words. Svan is not taught in schools and children grow up speaking it at home. Written Svan uses the Georgian script n but it is substantially different from Georgian.
Vakhtang Pilpani wearing the traditional round dome-shaped Svanetian hat. Vakhtang is a pillar in the community’s effort to keep Svan heritage alive. He is the choir director of the Riho Ensemble Group, which he joined when he was a teenager. Talent and passion run deep in the family—Vakhtang’s father, Islam, was the choir’s driving force for over 50 years.