The Black Sea and the issue of mental estrangement in Georgian medieval historical tradition
The Black Sea and the issue of mental estrangement in Georgian medieval historical tradition

Author(s): Grigol Jokhadze
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, History, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Ancient World, Middle Ages, Modern Age, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, 6th to 12th Centuries, 13th to 14th Centuries, 15th Century, 16th Century, Geopolitics
Published by: Сдружение „Транспонтика“
Keywords: the sea; border; marine activity; mental estrangement
Summary/Abstract: Contemporary Georgian historiography is acquainted with at least two scholarly grounded viewpoints regarding the sea and medieval Georgians. According to the first one, medieval Georgians thoroughly utilised the sea. Moreover, a mural painting in the Orthodox Christian cathedral Svetitskhoveli in Mtskheta contains scenes with sailboats which reportedly confirm Georgia’s political ambitions: it evidences a glorious past of Georgia, her longing to reach out for Europe and her opposition to the Ottoman Empire, etc. The champions of the second opinion maintain, on the contrary, that, on the score of political misfortune and hostile environment, Georgians had no chances to cross the sea, which turned into an inner resistance to an aspiration, self-containment from going to Europe directly and primarily, etc. As the analysis of Kartlis Tskhovreba (the principal compendium of medieval Georgian historical texts) and Georgica (modern compendium of excerpts from Byzantine writers on Georgia, encompassing 4th-15th century) has shown, pieces of information on Georgians and the sea are paradoxical and even mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the s/Sea is the border (compare: zghva, ‘sea, the Sea’ – zghva-ri, ‘limit, boundary’) and a geographical reference point from the reign of Parnavaz I of Iberia (4th-3rd centuries BC) to Tamar the Great (12th-13th centuries AD). The direct utilisation, or a pragmatics of the Sea, is alien to Georgians. Such an estrangement may be produced by political and also harsh climate conditions. Georgians could have perceived the Sea as the realm of lower instincts: “throwing into the sea” or, better, “throwing into the sea abyss”, seems to have been a punitive measure. On the other hand, terms signifying marine skills and marine objects in general are organic for Georgian mentality. “Sea” and words related to it are used metaphorically, in most cases, to designate: a) one of the four elements, an instrument of God’s wrath; b) the earthly universe; c) the transitional life as an abode of vanities and seductions of the earthly existence; d) the kingdom as a universal possession. Researchers who try to prove that medieval Georgians used the s/Sea freely and safely made nothing more than bold speculations, presuming that a certain historical figure could have left Georgia only by sea, that there could not have been other way, etc. However, I would say categorically: there is no such kind of specific information about it in Kartlis Tskhovreba. Nevertheless, there are narrative sources which show that maritime culture and traditions were part and parcel of the western Georgian medieval world and only neighbouring states’ aggressive animosity prevented Georgia from wide-scale utilisation of sea. The sources referred to are Greco-Roman ones which confirm the marine activity of the inhabitants of western and south-western Georgia. I formulate the main question as follows: why the historical narrative of ‘Whole Georgia’ says nothing about it? Why does it limit itself with an only metaphorical use of the Sea? Trying to answer them, I see fit such a reconstruction of the historical situation. Medieval Georgia was mainly ruled from Mtskheta or Tbilisi; the works contained in Kartlis Tskhovreba are written upon an order of the king of Whole Georgia. Because of both geographical and mental estrangement, sea and its specificity were distant and strange for Georgians from the East; in their mind, sea was mainly associated with “Greeks” and ‘boundary’. Sea might have been be tame and organic for the inhabitants of western Georgia, as proven by Greek authors, but they were foreigners and their attitudes to the Georgians were a kind of consumerist, in the long run. Thus, we know nothing about how sea, as it is, occupied and directed a Georgian’s consciousness.

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