Sulzberger

CL Sulzberger’s book A Long Row of Candles is mostly a pretty dull diary of people he met and places he went while a top New York Times correspondent.  It shouldn’t be; he lived in interesting times and places.  

The first part, though, is good. He lets himself go a little, becomes a little less stiff.  And you come across passages like this about the Balkans in the 1930s:  

It is, or was, a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars.  Less imaginative westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists.  Karl Marx called them ‘ethnic trash’.

I, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them.  

All the stereotypes are here.  Nonetheless, I know exactly what he means.     

To Caucasus

There are many kinds of wonders in Georgia and the Caucasus.  You might ride this superb underground in Abkhazia and converse with a Khevsur.

    

The Khevsurs wore chain mail into the 20th Century.  The popular belief that they were lost crusaders, sadly seems to be false.  

The Encyclopedia Brittanica of 1911 sheds some light.  In doing so, the EB also exposes the imaginative poverty of the wikipedia encylopedia.  Of the Khevsurs we learn: 

For the most part nomadic, they are still in a semi-barbarous state. They have not the beauty of the Georgian race. They are gaunt and thin to almost a ghastly extent, their generally repulsive aspect being accentuated by their large hands and feet and their ferocious expression…  They are very muscular and capable of bearing extraordinary fatigue. They are fond of fighting, and still wear armour of the true medieval type. This panoply is worn when the law of vendetta, which is sacred among them as among most Caucasian peoples, compels them to seek or avoid their enemy. They carry a spiked gauntlet, the terrible marks of which are borne by a large proportion of the Khevsur faces.

Many curious customs still prevail among the Khevsurs, as for instance the imprisonment of the woman during childbirth in a lonely hut, round which the husband parades, firing off his musket at intervals. After delivery, food is surreptitiously brought the mother, who is kept in her prison a month, after which the hut is burnt… 

The Khevsurs like to call themselves Christians, but their religion is a mixture of Christianity, Mahommedanism and heathen rites. They keep the Sabbath of the Christian church, the Friday of the Moslems and the Saturday of the Jews. They worship sacred trees and offer sacrifices to the spirits of the earth and air.

The ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Caucasus is a rare thing in the world.  There’s probably a lot to learn there for someone who has the time.