William Gifford Palgrave - Turkish Georgia (1867-1871) - Part 1

Portrait of William G. Palgrave made
by Julia Margaret Cameron (1868)

William Gifford Palgrave (1826-1888) was the British scholar, traveler and diplomat. Educated at the Trinity College (Oxford University), he spent his youth serving in the 8th (The King's) Regiment of Foot in India before joining a British expedition to the interior of Arabia, Syria and the Persian Gulf states. In the 1860s, Palgrave joined the British Foreign Office and was appointed consul at Sukhum-Kale (Sokhumi) in 1866. The following year he was sent to Trebizond where he remained for six years. In the 1870s-1880s, he served as a British consul in the Caribbean, the Phillippines and Bangkok before finishing his diplomatic career as Minister Resident and Consul-General to Uruguay.

In 1887, one year before his death, he reviewed notes that he had originally made during his travels and published a collection of travel essays. One essay, entitled "Turkish Georgia," reflected impressions of several journeys he had made in the late 1860s to the northeastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

"A handsome but worthless nation." And with these words [Edward] Gibbon summarily dismisses the Georgians from his pages [in the book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 6].

Poor Georgians! With all due respect for the great historian, I cannot but feel inclined to dispute the propriety of the latter epithet he bestows on them, were it even for nothing else than the correctness of the former. Beauty and goodness had once but a single name, common to both in the most copious of all languages, the expression of the noblest of all minds; and Greek philology, like Greek philosophy, however high fantastical at times, had the most often a true foundation deep in the nature of things. Is indeed fair without so often foul within? Or is not the outside form rather more generally a representation, a reproduction indeed, and a consequence of the inner being? There are, I am well aware, many wise adages to imply the contrary; but we may remember that personal beauty, rare, in all truth, even among women, is yet rarer by far among men, the makers of these wise adages; and it is not foxes alone that have called unattainable grapes sour before now.

But to leave generalizations, and return to our Georgians, such as they are this day. Business, whether of the State or not, has made me more than once a looker-on among them, and given me ample opportunity for judging both how far they still deserve their hereditary reputation for physical beauty, and also how far they merit the uncomplimentary adjectives bestowed on them, not only by Gibbon—who from the very vastness of his scope may easily have been obliged to content himself occasionally with comparatively scanty or superficial information on some points—but even by other more special writers.

Large allowance should be made when we sit in judgment on [peoples] which, owing more than anything else to a misfortune of geographical position, and the dangerous contiguity of more numerous and more powerful neighbours, have for many ages received and borne a foreign yoke, till its impress, for good or evil, has been fairly stamped into their shoulders. Bad luck may have more to do with the fact and its consequences than bad deserving. It is no blame to Croatia that it is ruled by Austrian administration; nor, if guarantees fail them, could Luxembourg or Belgium be held responsible were they swallowed up by one or other of their conterminal giants. What can a little fish do in the presence of a big one but be eaten by it, and, according to Sydney Smith's wise recommendation, try not to disagree with it?

Now Georgia has for centuries past been that little fish; or, to use a comelier metaphor, an unarmed, fallen, and wounded man, over whose prostrate body Turk and Persian have generation after generation fought their fierce frontier strife, till Russia coming in gave the duel a Midshipman Easy or triangular character. Not, however, an equilateral one, but illustrative rather of the old axiom which sends the weakest to the wall; Persia, undoubtedly the feeblest of the three combatants, having to give up her hold on Georgia altogether, while Turkey, a little—but only a little—stronger, managed to retain a curtailed portion of her prey, of which, however, the lion's share naturally fell to the lion of the partitioners, namely, Russia.

With that larger share, now known as Russian Georgia, I have for the moment nothing to do. It is indeed to its inhabitants that Gibbon's antithetical notice chiefly refers; but they, since the historian's time, have undergone a great change, that of Russification—a process likely in many ways to render them at once less worthless and less handsome, bodily, of course. It is rather of the smaller section I now would speak, that yet included—though for how long to come may well be questioned—within Turkish limits, and hardly at all changed by the lapse of the last century. This is "Gurjistan," or Turkish Georgia, a country rarely visited, and more rarely described; even for the Osmanlees themselves, its present masters, it is all but a "terra incognita," and to that very circumstance it chiefly owes what interest it possesses.

In a misgoverned and declining Empire like that of Turkey, where administration is only another name for fiscal exaction, and where the presence of the ruler is chiefly made known by the diminution and decay of those he rules, the thoughts and investigations of the traveler are apt to be directed to the past rather than to the present, to historical relics rather than to actual life. Palestine explorations, Assyrian excavations, Ephesus diggings, and the like, while they bring to view the splendours of former ages, discover no less the nakedness of the modern land. It is among the dwellings of the dead, not of the living, that men go in quest of monuments and bones. Indeed, of all the vast territories which, by the ordinance of fate, and the forbearance of neighbours, own the Sultan's rule, Egypt is perhaps the only one of any importance that has a present to speak of—just because only indirectly weighed on by that rule—and a ' Village Life: on the Nile,' or the like, can be read, if not with the same eagerness as a description of the Theban marvels, or the graceful relics of Philse, yet with tolerable interest. But when we come to Syria, and even more to Anatolia, our view is fixed wholly on the past; and the Ottoman tent, pitched amid the ruins of a score of shattered civilizations, only attracts our eye by its incongruousness with the memories around.

Yet here again some local exceptions may be found: in spots where the Stamboolee footstep has not been deep enough impressed to stamp all life and vigour out of the land; where something still remains of national energy and type to arouse sympathy for the present, and allow hope for the future. One of these is Turkish Georgia, or Gurjistan.

Reference to any atlas will show that the extreme northeastern horn of the Ottoman Crescent half embraces the Black Sea on its inner edge; while its outer curve rests partly on the newly-defined Russian frontier, partly on the great inland tract that once was Armenia.

The angle thus formed is occupied by Gurjistan—a name expressing the long-maintained nationality of its inhabitants.

It is a noble region: few more so. Lofty mountains, granite the most, intersected by deep and well-watered valleys; vast and virgin forests of oaks, beech, chestnut, ash, pine, and fir, all of luxuriant, often colossal growth; great sweeps of rich pasture-land; flower-enameled meadows, jotted with great trees, and overhung by peaks and precipices beyond the imaginings of a Salvator Rosa; while the thunder of the waterfall mixes with the ceaseless roar of the full torrent from below; the beauty of Savoy and the grandeur of the Alps in one. Wherever the soil is cultivated—scratched, I might say— there springs up from it a half-wild abundance of crops and fruit, corn, barley, maize, vines, orchard-growth; while the frequent traces of ancient but abandoned mines—what is not abandoned under Ottoman rule ?—bear witness to the wealth of metal, copper, zinc, iron, lead, and silver, beneath the surface. Snow lies on the towering peaks of Karkhal Dagh, near the sea, and of Kel Dagh, close to the Russian frontier, each of them above twelve thousand feet in height, all the year round; while in the garden-like valleys of Liwaneh and Showshet, immediately below them, the apricot and the peach ripen, and the clustering vines only need a more skillful care to rival those of Burgundy or Central Italy. Rice-fields and mulberry groves, where silk is reared, line the river-courses.

Such is the country through which I wandered for several summer weeks, unrestrained in the liberty of my way by the prescription of roads, for the best of all reasons, that not a single road exists here; and the tracks, even where undeservedly dignified by the name of horse-paths, are all as nearly as possible like each other in roughness, steepness, narrowness, and every other unroadlike quality. Indeed, for about half our rambles we had to lead our horses by the bridle: as keeping on their backs while at such angles and along such razor-edges as we continually had to traverse was out of the question.

But before we lose ourselves in the mountain labyrinth, let us halt a little under these green spreading walnut trees by the rushing waterfall among the rocks, and do introductory honour to the Muse of our time, Her of statistics, or at least of precision and detail.

Of the three districts which compose the main of Gurjistan, one, that of Liwaneh, lies along the lower valley of the Great Chorok stream, the Harpasus of Arrian; it is the only one which enjoys the honour of possessing a town, the town of Artween, which, with its eleven hundred houses, besides baths and mosques, but no schools, clings to the rapid hill-side slope leading down to the river, exactly at the point where it first becomes navigable for boats, some fifty miles distant from the sea. The other two districts, Showshet and Ajarah, lie further east, the former inland, the latter approaching the coast. Two smaller tracts, Keskeem by name and Chorok-Soo, belonging, the one to Liwaneh, the other to Ajarah, completeGurjistan proper, which numbers in all about four hundred villages, and two hundred thousand inhabitants, male and female...

"A race of men "—I quote once more from Gibbon—" whom nature has cast in her most perfect mould, is degraded by poverty, ignorance, and vice."

For the inhabitants of Turkish Georgia this is only too true; yet, situated as they are, it could hardly be otherwise. Poor, ignorant, vicious, handsome Georgians! I am fond of them, and cannot help being so; good-looking, that they certainly are, men, women, and children, in no ordinary degree; a fair, bright-complexioned, light-haired, long-haired race, tall, lithe, and with all the mountaineer grace of bearing; cheerful, too, conversable, sociable, though wild, careless, out-of-elbows [impoverished], lawless, scapegrace [mischievous]; yet such as have evidently in them the making of much better things, had they only a chance. But of all the hundred and one nationalities under the Ottoman incubus which has a chance? The best off are those who are the most left to themselves; and who in consequence, if they do not grow richer, do not at any rate grow much poorer: if they do not get better, do not either get considerably worse.

Their dress is very characteristic. It is a mountain dress, admirably adapted to the country they live in; trousers loose above, but tight-fitting as garters below the knee to the ankle; and light open jackets, fancifully embroidered and braided; the ordinary colour Vandyke brown; the stuff itself home-made, warm, and strong. Their linen, too, is home-made; every cottage has a small patch of flax belonging to it. Turbans are unknown: the head is covered by a cloth hood, of the same material as the jacket, with two long pendant strips on either side, which at need are folded across the chest and round the neck, forming an excellent "comforter" in cold weather; in warm, they are wrapped round the hood itself, so as to give additional protection against the heat of the sun. Hood and strips are decorated with simple braid, silver, or gold, as the age, or circumstances, or vanity of the wearer may direct. Round his waist every Georgian wears a leather belt, often curiously worked with brass or silver, from which hang a gourd-shaped powder-flask, silver mounted, a little brass bottle, containing oil for the gun-lock, a complicated cord or thong, said to be for binding possible captives, but as useful in many other ways as a schoolboy's ball of twine; and in the girdle are invariably stuck a long double-edged knife or dagger, and one or two huge silver-adorned pistols. In the hand or over the shoulder is a single-barrelled gun, long, bright, brass-mounted, with a flint lock; this the Georgian never fails to carry with him, and to make good use of, for he is an excellent shot, and hares, wild goats, and other game, are plenty in the mountains.