Abkhazian Seafaring: Boats, Trade and Maritime Tradition, by Shalva Inal-Ipa

In this 1965 ethnographic essay, the distinguished Abkhazian historian and ethnographer Shalva Inal-Ipa (1916 to 1995) traces the maritime traditions of the Abkhazians through archaeology, historical sources, language, folklore, toponymy and religious belief. He presents seafaring as a significant, though often overlooked, part of Abkhazian economic and cultural life.

In the economic and cultural life of the Abkhazians, an indigenous coastal people, the sea and seafaring have been of great importance since ancient times.¹

At the Neolithic settlement of Kistrik, massive wedges and a large number of stone chisels have been discovered. These were evidently used to fashion primitive boats.

Pebble sinkers used for fishing in river deltas also occur in the Neolithic period. Voyages at sea for the purpose of fishing became increasingly common from the Early Bronze Age, as is shown by heavy sinkers from Kistrik and other sites.²

The earliest accounts of seafaring among the Colchian tribes are found in Xenophon. According to his description, ‘Colchian villages’ were scattered near Trebizond, while fishing and seafaring were highly developed among the coastal Mossynoeci, as attested by the hundreds of boats belonging to that tribe.

Strabo provides exceptionally valuable information on the development of seafaring among the tribes of the Caucasian Black Sea coast in antiquity.

According to him, in the first century BC seafaring was particularly developed among the multi-tribal Heniochi, who occupied a stretch of coast ‘a thousand stadia’ long, in the immediate vicinity of ‘Great Pitiunt’.

Strabo’s description shows the exceptional importance of seafaring to the Heniochi, who ‘dominated the sea’ in their celebrated kamara: small, narrow and light boats designed to carry 25 to 30 men.

They were renowned as outstanding horsemen and as sea pirates dreaded by merchants, living by ‘maritime robbery’.

Seafaring among the Heniochi was so highly developed for its time that they were also known by the Greek name of their boats as ‘kamarites’. Because the coast was rocky, they had neither anchorages nor harbours. They carried their boats on their shoulders into the forests and concealed them until their next voyage, a practice that survived in Abkhazia until the nineteenth century.

The same author tells us that Colchis supplied King Mithridates VI of Pontus with ‘the principal assistance for the organisation of his naval forces’ (XI, 2, 18).

Tacitus (first century AD), writing about the uprising of slaves and local Caucasian tribes against Rome under the leadership of Anicetus, relates how Anicetus set fire to the Roman fleet, leaving the Black Sea deserted.

‘That is why,’ he writes, ‘the barbarians ranged proudly over the sea, having quickly built vessels called kamara, with high sides and a broad bottom, fastened without copper or iron clamps. When the sea is rough, they raise the upper parts of the vessels with planks in proportion to the height of the waves, until the vessels are enclosed like a roof. Thus they toss among the waves, with identical prows at either end and interchangeable oars, so that it is immaterial, and equally safe, for them to put in with either end.’

An anonymous author of the fifth century speaks of the Cercetae, that is, the Circassians, as a people ‘highly experienced in seafaring’. According to Nicolaus of Damascus, among the same people, ‘if anyone makes a mistake while steering a boat, everyone comes up in turn and spits on him’.

It is significant that, as may be seen in particular from the decree of 575 issued on the accession of the Byzantine emperor Tiberius, vassal Lazica, including Abkhazia as one of its constituent parts, was already subject in the sixth century to a maritime levy in kind owed to the Byzantine Empire, known as ta ploima.

It consisted of the supply of vessels, rigging and maritime equipment according to the indictions. When a new emperor came to the throne, the customary exemptions were extended to this levy.

Yulian Kulakovsky writes on this subject: ‘Seafaring, as the principal occupation of the native population, determined the form of taxation.’ In later times, Abkhazian rulers sent shipbuilding timber to Turkey ‘by tradition’.

The ‘kamara’ boats

1. N. Tarasov, in his historical tale ‘Timur in the Caucasus’, which, according to the author, was based on a manuscript he had discovered entitled ‘A History of the Events in the Caucasus in 1395, Told by the Eyewitness Francesco Alaro, Genoa, 1409’, writes of an attack by ‘kamarite’ pirates: ‘The Greeks called Circassian and Abkhazian pirates kamarites. In their boats, the “kamara”, hollowed by fire from the trunks of giant beeches and hidden in groves at the mouths of rivers, they suddenly attacked merchant ships, especially in calm weather.’

‘The Hellenised term “kamarite”,’ wrote Nikolai Marr, ‘was the name of a tribe that inhabited Abkhazia in historical times, north of Sukhum.’

It is difficult to say how far Marr’s interpretation of this term corresponds to reality. It may nevertheless be noted that in the Gumista gorge, through which an ancient road once passed and where traces of numerous ruins have survived, there stood, according to some ancient authors, a town called Comana, to which John Chrysostom was sent into exile.

Writing of the extraordinary persistence of certain features of everyday life, particularly the seafaring described by Strabo, which survived without substantial change into the nineteenth century, A. N. Genko states: ‘There would not even be any need to change the nomenclature. The term “kamara”, which the ancient Cercetae and Heniochi used for their war boats, survived, judging by certain references in the literature, until modern times.’

Frédéric Dubois de Montpéreux wrote: ‘These galleys are called in Circassian kaf or kouafa, and also kamara; in Abkhaz, akhbat...’ The kamara was therefore a local Circassian (or Abkhazian?) term that remained in use during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The traditions of the ‘kamarites’ continued thereafter, as a number of references in the existing literature attest. The principal forces behind the development of seafaring were economic and cultural needs, above all trade and maritime fishing.

A shipyard in the Ochamchira district

In 1963, through a study of Abkhazian toponymy, historical traditions and the evidence of written sources, the present author identified traces of a substantial hydraulic structure: an ancient shipyard and navigable canal in the village of Tamysh, in the Ochamchira district.

These traces remain visible in places to this day.

The route of the Tamysh navigable canal, known in Abkhaz as the ‘Place where boats pass’, begins at the easternmost bend of the River Bzana, approximately 3 kilometres (2,870 metres) in a fairly straight line, from the point where the river enters the Black Sea. The canal was 2,300 metres long. From its starting point it ran in a straight line towards the south-east, crossed two streams and entered the River Dgamysh (at its westernmost bend), 2,400 metres (again in a straight line), from the point where that river enters the Black Sea.

At the beginning of the route, two (or perhaps several) parallel branch canals ran southwards. They served as moorings or shelters for vessels and were known as the ‘Place where boats are tethered’. Nearby stood one of the local centres for the production (literally, the ‘hewing’) of boats.

The builders of Tamysh, evidently drawing on extensive traditions of hydraulic engineering, laid out the canal along the most practical route and made excellent use of every feature of the interfluve. The canal follows the shortest possible line connecting the Bzana and Dgamysh rivers. At its beginning, its direction forms a natural continuation of the bed of the Bzana, while its entrance into the Dgamysh aligns with the flow of that river. The beginning of the canal was selected approximately 500 metres farther from the seashore than its end, creating the necessary difference in elevation between the two ends for water to flow by gravity from the Bzana into the Dgamysh. The canal’s intersection with two perennial streams increased its total water supply. A design involving excavated sections at the ends of the canal and an artificial reservoir in the central part of the route also appears entirely probable.

[Figure: Schematic of the ancient shipyard and navigable canal in the village of Tamysh (approximate reconstruction). Key: 1. Ashkhuatsvyrta, place where boats are hewn. 2. Ashkhuayakhearta, place where boats are tethered. 3. Ashkhuataniquarta, place where boats pass. 4. Site of archaeological finds. 5. Akra, lighthouse. 6. Main estate of Prince Alybei Chachba (Shervashidze). 7. Harbour of Prince Alybei Chachba.]

At the same time, its distance from the seashore (on average more than 2.5 kilometres) gave the canal considerable protection from attack by sea pirates and made it entirely inaccessible to maritime storms.

The canal, whose study has only just begun, apparently dates from the Middle Ages, although further investigation of the monument may produce an earlier date.

Hippocrates, an author of the fifth to fourth centuries BC, wrote of the Colchians: ‘As for the regions along the Phasis, the country is marshy, hot, damp and wooded. Heavy rain falls there at every season of the year. The people spend their lives amid the marshes. Their wooden or reed huts are built on the water. They travel little on foot, except in the town or at the market, and generally move about in dugout canoes up and down the canals, of which there are many...’ (emphasis added by Sh. Inal-Ipa).

Another ancient author, Apollonius Rhodius, who lived in the second half of the third century BC, wrote ‘The Voyage of the Argonauts’, a work reflecting events dating from the end of the second millennium into the first millennium BC. In presenting the Herodotean tradition of the Egyptian origin of the Colchians, he states that the inhabitants of Aea, the capital of the Colchian kingdom, ‘preserve records made by their fathers on tablets, in which all the routes and boundaries of water and land are set out for travellers’.

The same myth of the Argonauts refers to the developed seafaring of the ‘countless tribes of the Colchians’. By contrast, it speaks of certain ‘wild pastoral’ tribes of the northern Black Sea region and the Danube lands fleeing in ‘fear of the ships’, since they ‘had not yet seen seagoing vessels’.

Many passages in the Argonautica show that the bold Colchian seafarers possessed a sound knowledge of maritime routes.

Merchants and pirates

Trade, first and foremost, fostered the development of seafaring.

Agathias (sixth century) observed that ‘the Colchians undertake sea voyages whenever possible and profit from trade’.

The economic life of Abkhazia depended to a considerable extent on export and import trade. Certain kinds of raw material, olive oil, wine, luxury goods and other commodities were imported. Construction timber, boxwood, honey and wax, fish, and the products of animal husbandry and agriculture were exported.

Lively overseas trade inevitably stimulated the development of seafaring among the coastal population. The salt trade was especially important. When the ancient inhabitants of Abkhazia did not themselves boil salt from seawater, they imported it by sea. The arrival of a ship carrying salt was a joyful event, as the proverb attests: ‘The vessel is sailing, bringing us salt’ (Ashkhua aauait, atsyka aanagoit) (children used these words to lure the hoopoe).

Piracy, which flourished on the Black Sea from antiquity onwards, was another condition sustaining the development of seafaring. As Karl Marx observed, in the early stages of maritime trade the merchant was often also a pirate.

It is known, for example, that Greek merchants sailing the seas never missed an opportunity to plunder and profit at another’s expense. Friedrich Engels noted that the Normans, in their powerful sailing vessels with sharp lines, carried out plundering raids as far as Constantinople in one direction and America in the other. In Abkhazia too, piracy accompanied trade.

In 1951, the nets of fishing trawlers in the vicinity of New Athos caught ten amphorae. They were found 6 to 7 kilometres from the shore at a depth of 96 to 150 metres. The surfaces of these vessels, now held in the Abkhaz State Museum, are covered with a thick layer of shells, showing that they had lain under water for a long time.

Similar vessels, used for storing and transporting wine and olive oil, are found in the ancient cities of the northern Black Sea region. Unless one assumes that the ship was lost in a storm, these objects may have reached the seabed after sea raiders sank the vessel carrying them.

The French traveller Jean Chardin, who was in Mingrelia in 1672 and witnessed a raid by Abkhazian princes, writes: ‘On the 12th [November: Sh. Inal-Ipa] we had intended to transfer to a boat, but were prevented by news (later fully confirmed) that boats of the Circassians and Abkhazians were cruising along the coast of Mingrelia. They carried off the local boats, including the one I had hired.’

In the eighteenth century the Abkhazians continued to engage actively in seafaring. Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, returning from a journey through Europe in 1714, was stranded for several days in Trebizond because Turkish vessels did not dare put out to the open sea for fear of encountering Abkhazian vessels. One shipowner told him: ‘I cannot take the vessel to Guria. The Abkhazians are up in arms and I am afraid. If you wish, travel in a small vessel...’

According to Vakhushti Bagrationi’s description, the Abkhazians ‘travel the seas in vessels... in which one hundred, two hundred or three hundred men embark, and on their way they attack the vessels of the Ottomans and the Laz-Chans, most often off the coasts of Mingrelia and Guria’.

He adds that in battles at sea the Abkhazians are ‘steadfast and powerful’.

Describing the campaigns against Mingrelia conducted in the second half of the eighteenth century by the Abkhazian ruler Shvarakh (Sorekh) Shervashidze, the same author reports: ‘And there was great misfortune in Odishi, as described above, chiefly from the Abkhazians, for, coming in boats and by land, they carried people away into captivity, conquered the whole territory as far as the River Egrisi and settled Abkhazians there.’

Charles de Peyssonnel writes that in Sukhum ‘there are no large vessels, but the inhabitants have about twenty small ones that make voyages along the coast’.

He stressed that many precautions were required to avoid the dangers faced by those trading with Abkhazia. ‘When business is concluded and the vessel has been loaded, one must wait for a favourable following wind, so as to be certain of being able to reach the open sea quickly, at least 10 to 12 miles out. The neighbouring beys lie in wait and arm their boats in order to board and plunder the vessel departing with its cargo. In view of circumstances of this kind, trade with Abkhazia requires large, well-armed ships with dependable and numerous crews.’

The testimony of nineteenth-century travellers

Nineteenth-century sources are likewise far from silent on Abkhazian navigation. De Scassi noted in 1820 that the inhabitants of Abkhazia built ‘small canoes made from a single tree trunk’ (in the Rioni basin, traditional means of movement and transport by water have survived, including rafts, boats and ferries; among the old forms of river transport that persist as survivals, the vartskhli, a dugout canoe, is of particular interest, since it points to ancient traditions of navigation and river transport).

According to Semyon Bronevsky, coastal Abkhazians at the beginning of the nineteenth century still sailed boats on the Black Sea, attacking careless mariners and those who had run aground, and lying in wait for seafarers at dangerous points along the coast.

Fyodor Tornau records that the Abkhazians caught dolphins in the open sea from their kayuks. Keleshbei maintained a flotilla comprising a fairly substantial number of ‘well-armed galleys’.

Jacques François Gamba, the French traveller of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, left us highly valuable information on Abkhazian seafaring. In 1826 he attested the existence among the Abkhazians of large eight-oared boats.

The ‘Abkhazian boat’, as the author himself calls it, was so remarkable that he left detailed drawings of it: an interior view, a plan from below, a longitudinal section, a vertical projection, a rear view, an oar and a hook used to hold a vessel during a naval engagement. In his parallel vocabulary of selected Abkhazian, Circassian and Georgian words, he also recorded the now obsolete Abkhazian term mattwher, meaning a boat.

While sketching from life the residences of the Abzhui prince Alybei Chachba (died 1833), near the sea in the village of Tamysh, Dubois de Montpéreux included in his atlas a drawing

[Figure: An Abkhazian boat and its oar, early nineteenth century (after Gamba)]

of a boat in which two men are approaching the shore, as well as a comparatively large vessel with a high mast. The latter had been hauled onto land and stood ready near the house, supported at either end by logs.

The same author left the following account of an attack by pirates ‘prowling the sea’ on 26 July 1833.

From Sukhum, two Abkhazian galleys were seen at sea, crowded with men and crossing the bay towards Kodor Cape. After rounding the cape, they encountered a small Turkish merchant vessel, stopped it and began removing its cargo, wounding several people in the process.

On seeing the Russian warship aboard which Dubois was travelling, the sea raiders rushed back into their boats, bent to their oars and disappeared into the forest-screened mouth of the Kodor, into which they also hauled their galleys.

The size of the Abkhazian boats may be judged from the fact that they carried as many as 120 pirates. These were Abkhazians from Bambora and other parts of the vicinity of Lykhny, led by three princes who were friends of the ruler Mikhail (the skipper of the plundered vessel, himself an Abkhazian by birth, recognised many of them; there were Abkhazian sailors who were hired as specialists on foreign vessels).

According to Dubois, the Russian government intended to keep in Sukhum ‘several rowing boats of the type of the Abkhazian galleys’, equipping them with cannon so that pirates could be pursued more effectively.

The age of the pirates

As late as the first half of the nineteenth century, Abkhazians and Circassians in their small boats entered the mouth of the Bzyb, concealed themselves there and, when the moment was favourable, raided nearby settlements. They did so even though the river has a rapid current and a stony bed and is generally unsuitable for boats.

In 1835, the western Abkhazian tribes attacked the Gagra fortifications from three directions: from the north, from the Zhoekvara gorge, and from the sea, where 150 men advanced in galleys.

‘The Ubykhs and Dzhigets,’ writes A. N. Dyachkov-Tarasov, ‘were not using their flotilla for the first time. At the beginning of 1834, the highlanders approached the Pitsunda fortification in several galleys, intending to slaughter the garrison and plunder the church.’

In 1841, Abkhazians and Dzhigets crossed the River Bzyb ‘in long kayuks’.

According to Baron Asch, Circassian boats also frequently landed opposite the village of Souksu (Lykhny).

Dimitri Bakradze describes small local kayuks that were used, though not everywhere, in the valleys of the Abkhazian rivers. Most were made from a single hollowed-out tree and were some three sazhens [about 6.4 metres] long. Although ‘of the most ancient construction’, they were handled skilfully and boldly by Abkhazian oarsmen.

The galleys of wealthy highland elders, which could hold crews of up to 140 men, were also armed with artillery.

As late as the second half of the nineteenth century, an entire flotilla of small rowing vessels lay concealed in Tuapse Bay. The highlanders used them to go out to sea in search of plunder. After surrounding a schooner, they caught hold of its sides with hooks and climbed aboard, seized the people and cargo, and set fire to the captured vessel.

There were cases in which vessels belonging to Ubykh elders, armed with cannon, even attacked Russian warships.

Thus, in 1837 the lugger Gluboky was attacked at sea by several galleys and escaped only by fleeing. In 1846, the corvette Pilad and the brig Palamed fought an unsuccessful naval engagement with several Ubykh galleys near the Vardane gorge.

1. I. Filipson, recounting a successful action by the Azov Cossacks against armed Ubykh galleys, one of which carried about forty highlanders, concludes: ‘This was the last appearance of Circassian galleys at sea. They lay in the mouths of all the principal rivers and rotted from disuse.’

According to Élisée Reclus, Abkhazian ‘vessels travelling under oar and sail, with crews of 200 to 300 men, ventured to attack the coasts of Anatolia, Crimea and European Turkey, as far as the Bosporus. In former times many of them went to Egypt to sell themselves there as “soldiers”. In the Mamluk detachment and among the inhabitants of Cairo itself, there were very many who had been born in the mountain valleys of Abkhazia.’

In the 1830s and 1840s, with the establishment of the Black Sea Coastal Line, consisting of a series of forts and fortifications built by tsarist troops, and the organisation of a cruising service by the Russian Black Sea Fleet along the Caucasian coast, local seafaring went into decline.

From the second half of the nineteenth century, with the development of steam navigation and other modern means of communication, the Abkhazians abandoned seafaring. The prohibition imposed by the Russian authorities on the sale of captives, and on Turkey’s contraband trade with the highland tribes in general, also contributed substantially to this process.

‘Up and down the canals, of which there are many...’

The testimony of written sources concerning the development of seafaring in Abkhazia is confirmed by evidence from the Abkhazian language, folklore and ethnography.

Older inhabitants of coastal Abkhazia still preserve memories of former Abkhazian navigation.

Pas Zhiba, an elderly man from Mgudzyrkhva, related that in his youth he had seen Abkhazians bring their boats into the mouth of the River Mchish, sail upstream and hide them in the forest. These boats held 10 to 15 men. According to him, the finest boats were made by Dzigu-ipa Batakva (village of Lykhny), who skilfully assembled them from chestnut and oak planks on the ruler’s instructions.

Such boats were used for warfare at sea, with hooks employed to hold enemy vessels.

The mouth of this river (Mchish, Mchishta), which some authors call the ‘Port of the Abkhazians’, was in all probability the ‘Cavo de Buxo’, or ‘Boxwood Port’, of medieval maps. As Dubois had already observed, the name was entirely deserved, since trade in the high-quality Abkhazian boxwood that abounded in the surrounding area once flourished here.

Seafaring is mentioned in the Nart sagas. Thus, when Sataney-Guasha, the mother of the Narts, went to the upper reaches of the Bzyb, she illuminated everything around her. The radiance emanating from her blinded helmsmen at sea. Vessels lost their course, struck the rocky shores and were wrecked. According to the legend, this is attested by fragments of the vessels found along the coast.

The hero Kyatavan, returning from a hunt one day, felled a log into the river, sat upon it and ‘sailed home by the river road’.

Another tradition (possibly connected with the biblical legend of Noah’s Ark) relates that the remains of a wrecked vessel and an anchor lie on the summit of Yertskhu, the highest ridge in the region.

Abkhazian speech and Abkhazian traditions contain many memories of close intercourse between the Abkhazians and the sea, although their modern way of life does not accord with such a claim.

The Abkhazian language contains many specialised local expressions and terms connected with the sea and seafaring: ashkhua (boat, vessel, ship); anysh (boat, vessel); msyigashkhua (dugout canoe); azhea (oar); apsky (rudder); apra (sail); akhu (anchor); ababuaza (bay); abba (ship, steamship); amyzgut (mast); akanpya (barge); akra (lighthouse; cape); aga (seashore); achnysh (seagull); and others.

As seafarers, the Abkhazians transmitted their maritime terminology to neighbouring peoples. In particular, Nikolai Marr demonstrated that the Abkhazian word meaning ‘sail’ (apra) was borrowed into Georgian (in Mingrelian, for example, apra means ‘the two tallest vertical boards in the middle of two opposite walls of a wooden house’).

These borrowings are not accidental, since, according to Gamba’s authoritative testimony, ‘the art of shipbuilding on the coast of Circassia and Abkhazia is considerably more developed than on the coast of the Khopi and the Phasis’. A characteristic proverb survives from the ancient way of life of Abkhazians engaged in piracy: ‘Whose boat you sit in, sing his song!’ (Zashkhua utoy, iashea khea). Of an exile, a person lost to his homeland, they say: ‘He was set adrift upon the sea’ (amshyn dkhyrdeit).

Hopeless resistance to something is compared to a man who, standing aboard a ship in the middle of the sea, clings to the mast because he does not wish to sail any farther.

The expression ‘one who has forgotten the name of the sea’ (amshyn akhyd zkhashtyz eipzsh) also attests the Abkhazians’ ancient connection with the sea. It is said when a person cannot recall the name of the nearest and largest object, one that is thoroughly familiar to him.

Abkhazian toponymy likewise preserves numerous traces of seafaring.

In the basin of the River Mchish, within the territory of the village of Mgud-airkhva, one locality is known as the ‘Place where boats are hidden’ (Ashkhuatkheakhyrta).

Near Pitsunda is a small lake whose name means the ‘Place where boats are launched’ (Anyshkhtsarta).

It is interesting that the Abkhazians aptly named their vessel ashkhua, a word that also denotes the keel bone of birds, which in its outward appearance genuinely resembles an Abkhazian boat. Evidently, a corresponding outline explains why one of the mountains in the basin of the middle course of the Bzyb is also called Ashkhuara.

Perhaps nowhere else in Abkhazia is there such a concentration of place names connected with seafaring as in the narrow territory between the Dgamysh and Toumysh rivers.

They are as follows: two points called Akra, meaning ‘lighthouse’ (on the Dgamysh cape and the opposite Toumysh cape); two points called Ashkhuatsvyrta, meaning ‘Place where boats are hewn’ (the first at the mouth of the Toumysh, 300 to 400 metres from the seashore, and the second on the bank of the Bzana, almost 3 kilometres from the sea); two localities called Ashkhuaa-Khearta, meaning ‘Place where boats are tethered’ (on the right bank at the mouth of the Toumysh, at a bend, and beside the same Bzana); and finally Ashkhuataniquarta, meaning ‘Place where boats pass’, as the route of the canal described above is still called.

Abkhazian religious imagination created the image of a sea deity in the form of a white bull or a mist, named Ag-nykh-Et-nykh (among the Circassians, one of the principal pagan deities was Seozeres, the protector of seafarers).

The Abkhazians offered sacrifices to their sea deity when they had to remain on the seashore for a long time. The formidable deity forgave no one who treated it without respect.

For this reason, as N. Janashia reports, even children were forbidden to throw pebbles or spit into the sea.

Until recently, worship of the sea deity survived in a purer form among the Ampar clan of Bzyb peasants.

According to tradition, members of this clan living in the coastal village of Mgudzyrkhva once offered even human sacrifices to their guardian sea spirit.

The name ‘Ampar’ itself may be etymologised as ‘Sons of the Sea’ or ‘Children of the Sea’ (from amshyn, sea, t’a, son, and r, a marker of plurality), although I am not entirely certain of this.

One version of the tradition relates that, at a particular time each year, the insatiable and merciless sea spirit carried off one of the finest members of the clan.

This heavy tribute brought the Ampar clan to the point of extinction. Only three people remained: a brother and his two sisters.

One day, when the time came to offer the next sacrifice, the brother led one of the sisters to the shore and tied her firmly to a post so that she could not be dragged into the sea. Suddenly a small cloud appeared far out over the water.

It drew closer and grew, and the sea began to boil. It was the sea spirit. The young man entered into battle with the terrible spirit. Faced with the desperate determination of the unyielding young man, the sea spirit finally renounced its demand for further human sacrifices and agreed that, as before, only a goat should be offered to it each year.

Until comparatively recent times, the Ampar people still solemnly performed the cult of their ancient deity. The person who went to buy the sacrificial goat did not bring it back. The person who brought it did not slaughter it. The person who slaughtered it did not skin it. The person who removed the skin did not cut the meat into pieces. The person who cut up the meat did not cook it. The person who cooked it did not eat the sacrificial food.

This should be compared with an account by A. N. Gren.

The account concerns an immortal and evil Abkhazian sea deity named Khait (the word khait remains widely used among the Abkhazians and expresses surprise, delight, a call to action or a battle cry).

Connecting this god with an Armenian eponym and with the name of ‘the famous Hittite people’, A. N. Gren writes that the god possesses a magnificent palace on the seabed and a retinue of twelve drowned boys.

Khait lies in wait for people in order to drown them, that is, to make them subjects of his sea kingdom. Yet they do not die by choking in the water. In this kingdom there is a gigantic hole into which all the rivers from the mountains flow, after which they return through underground canals.

The time will come when the liberated Abrskil, the great friend of the people, will overturn the whole world, and then Khait will perish.

According to A. N. Gren, the legend of Khait ‘proves that the Abkhazians practised human sacrifice to the sea, namely the sacrifice of male children’.

The Abkhazians, like the coastal Circassians, had a special shipboard song (ashkhua-shea) with the refrain uakh-sakh (‘you pull, I shall pull’).

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There was also a special song of the oarsmen. In 1960, I succeeded in recording its surviving, barely intelligible fragments from an elderly man of Pokvesh: ‘Yekhe-kheei, dybua-myshua, nashkhuari, dyumgari!’ This appears to have been the refrain of the song. In it, the word iashkhuari may mean the sea deity (or an address to it), while dyumgari means ‘you will take him’ or ‘you will receive him’ (a person).

James Bell, describing his voyage along the seashore in a Circassian boat, says that the Black Sea Circassians likewise ‘sang almost continuously... their varied and beautiful songs of the oarsmen’.

The evidence set out above establishes that seafaring was highly developed among the coastal Abkhazian, Ubykh and Circassian tribes. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, they engaged chiefly in coastal navigation on the Black Sea in their distinctive vessels, both for commercial and economic purposes and in the practice of piracy.

This is reflected both in the historical sources and in the fact that, in Nikolai Marr’s words, the Abkhazian language and folklore are ‘full of memories of the intimate communion of the Abkhazians with the sea’.

Footnotes

1. A. Mashin, in his ‘Essays on the Social Life of Abkhazia’, asserted that the Abkhazians, nailed to the land and forever nesting in remote mountains, had historically been estranged from the sea; that the Abkhazian population, living solely by plunder and warfare, had never engaged in seafaring or fishing; that it could derive no benefit from the sea; and that the sea had receded for them ‘into the furthest background’ and that they regarded it ‘as we do the moon or some other planet’ (‘Kavkaz’, no. 47, 1869). Such statements about the supposed estrangement of the Abkhazians from the sea, like the conjectures concerning the reasons for their alleged lack of seafaring and so forth, merely betray their authors’ complete ignorance of the archaeology, ethnography, history, language and folklore of the Abkhazian people.
2. The presence of numerous stone sinkers for fishing nets among the Kistrik assemblage presupposes that the inhabitants of the settlement were familiar with the dugout canoe. It must therefore be assumed that the people of Kistrik, who lived more than four or five thousand years ago, were the first seafarers of Abkhazia.