William Gifford Palgrave - Turkish Georgia (1867-1871) - Part 2

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In 1887, one year before his death, he reviewed notes that he had originally made during his travels and published a collection of travel essays.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.

Very picturesque, too, and curious are the Georgian dwellings. Nominally classed in villages, but in fact a loose aggregate of detached cottages, the existence of a hamlet can only be surmised from a greater frequency of patches of cultivation amid the predominant scrub, two or three springs and running channels of crystal-clear water, and, somewhere or other within a circuit of a few miles, a group of walnut trees, and under its shelter a large square wooden building, the sides resembling an exaggerated bird-cage, the eaves and porticos outpassing in their exuberance those of any Chinese temple; the whole being a mosque, but reduced to its most simple expression, without minaret, apse, or adjunct, except a few wooden benches or trunks of trees laid horizontally near the entrance, the ordinary meeting-place of council or gossip. The houses, too, are like the mosque in their copiousness of porches, open galleries, and overhanging roof-eaves, a style of architecture suggested by the only building material now used, wood, from the foundation posts in the ground, to the wooden shingles that do duty for tiles on the roof.

This was not, however, always the case; for the whole district is jotted over high and low with the ruins of stone-built churches and castles, belonging to former times. Not Byzantine in character, the Georgian architecture, whether ecclesiastical or secular, comes much nearer to the later Roman, as we see it in Southern Europe, and looks as if it had' been first borrowed directly from those models, and afterwards developed itself with certain peculiarities of its own.

Thus, for instance, one of the Georgian castles, that which guards the passage of the Chorok river at a place called Gonieh, is absolutely Roman in outline; so much so that the best idea I can give of it is, by comparing it with the camp-ruins of Gariononnon, now called Borough Castle, in Suffolk. Like it, the long lines of wall, some twenty feet in height, and from five to six in thickness, enclose an open square of about a hundred yards each way; only the materials, instead of being alternate layers of rough stone and brick, are here stone only, but united by a cement little or not at all inferior to that of Italo-Roman use. The towers, too, squat and almost solid, four on each side, besides those, somewhat larger and higher, at the angles, are square instead of round, and in height slightly overtop the wall. Four gates; and over the principal one, to the west, a Georgian inscription, which my ignorance disqualified me from deciphering; though for this the villagers consoled me by saying that it was not the original one, which had been defaced by Sultan Seleem, when he conquered country and castle near four centuries ago, but of recent date, and put there by some private hand not long since. But a more palpable imitation of a Roman fortified camp than this stronghold I never saw.

Much more mediaeval in appearance, with its broken battlements, narrow loopholes, bartizans, and fragments of high towers, is the important fortress of Chikanzir, to give it the Georgian name which has superseded the more euphonious Iris of Arrian's time, where it frowns from its lofty storm-beaten cliff on the same line of defence further east. Tradition ascribes it, as it does the majority of the many castles in the neighbourhood, to Queen Tamar, a legendary heroine, said to have ruled over Georgia in the twelfth century, and who here, we are told, took refuge when flying from the Byzantine arms, and made a brave and successful stand. History does not, I believe, confirm these details; but, which is much more to the point in popular estimation, the foot-print of Queen Tamar herself does. In fact, at the base of the coast-cliff, and occasionally washed by the sea when a strong westerly gale drives up its heaped waters on the shore, I was shown, on a huge granite slab, deep imbedded in the sand, the impress, clearly defined, of a naked human foot, long and delicate like that of a woman, but deeply indented, and of darker colour than the rest of the stone. A curious freak of nature. Others will have it that it is the miraculous memorial of a Greek or Georgian priest fleeing from Mahometan persecution; while zealous Mahometans, not to be so outdone, claim it a relic of some nameless saint of their creed, who by the efficacy of hispreaching converted the neighbourhood to Islam. So all unite in venerating it; and I myself, who have seen the impress of imagined footsteps on the Mount of Ascension, on the Sakhrah of the Mosque-transformed Temple, on the pavement of the Roman "Domine quo vadis" near the gate of San Sebastiano, and others, can bear witness that this one of Queen Tamar, though by no means the most celebrated, is by far the best of its kind among them all, and certainly not the least authentic.

Between those two constructional styles, the earlier or Roman, and the later or mediaeval Georgian, are here found several, so to speak, transition castles, not unlike in general plan to those called Lombard in Northern Italy. Here the principal feature is a huge square, or slightly oblong tower, fifty or sixty feet in height; the walls are massive, and pierced with small square holes, and a window or two; the summit crowned with large battlements. The materials are stone, partly hewn and partly rough, with cement of a quality inferior to that used in the earlier buildings. Wherever the tower is not rendered inaccessible by the steepness of the rock on which it is built, out-works, divided into courts inner and outer, are added; the walls are low and thick. The castle entrance is always near an angle, and double, leading by a winding passage into the courts, but the keep itself has often no door; the only admittance being a window from which a ladder, ten or more feet in length, could be let down or drawn up at will. Indeed, in one of the finest specimens of this kind, which I visited among the wild mountains of Hamsheen, where the Georgian frontier touches that of the kindred, but hostile, Mingrelian province of Lazistan, I found that the entire castle, keep, out-works and all, could only be approached by a break-neck scramble over a couple of fir-trunks, cast by the peasants across a chasm in the rock where once a drawbridge, now long since vanished, had probably been. The donjon tower was in this instance about seventy feet high, and eighteen square; its position on a giant pinnacle of rock, piercing from among the dense woods around, while the torrent river foamed and roared hundreds of feet below, was grand beyond description. But no tradition attaches to the castle, nor could I discover any commemorative inscription; its date is attested by the style alone.

Smaller castles, too, of what may loosely be called the feudal type, abound in Gurjistan, built at different periods by the semi-independent Emeers, or Princes, as it is the fashion to translate a title much better rendered by "baron," and some of comparatively recent date. These half dwelling-places, half fortresses, which in general appearance bear a certain family resemblance to the ruined strongholds of the Rhine, are to be found everywhere perched each on its abrupt or isolated height at the entrance of some valley, or overhanging a narrow defile; their form is picturesquely irregular; their battlemented walls, turret and tower, more remarkable for massiveness of construction than for architectural or engineering skill. Strange apocryphal legends are attached to most, and "Kiz-kaleh," or the "Maiden's Tower," is a common appellation. One such, which attracted my notice by the unusually elegant proportions of its lofty keep, had long, I was told, been occupied by an Amazonian princess—women figure conspicuously in Georgian stories—who, finding herself hard pressed by savage besiegers, and having lost the greater part of her garrison, stipulated for the lives of the remainder; and then ordering the gates of the castle to be flung open, cast herself headlong from the battlements into the abyss below, rather than incur the dangers peculiar to a captive of her sex. Name and date, of course, not given. More ferocious, but unfortunately more historical, are the tales told of the grim ruins where the round watch-tower of Artween castle looks down over a sheer precipice of nine hundred feet perpendicular to the rushing waters of the Chorok below. Here, scarce a century back, a savage chief established himself, whose delight it was to force his prisoners to leap from the topmost turret into the abyss. Poetical justice—let us hope justified in this instance by fact—represents this Georgian Adretz as receiving in turn a similar treatment from the vengeance of his Turkish captors.

But rich as Gurjistan is in architectural monuments of this class, it is singularly poor in relics of ecclesiastical buildings. Most of the churches hereabouts seem to have been, like the mosques of the present day, either constructed wholly of wood or at least roofed with that material, and thus to have disappeared almost simultaneously with the religion that they represented. Here and there a colony of Armenian monks—for of Georgian monks and ascetics, we find no trace, probably they were as rare under the old symbol as Georgian Mollahs and Muftis are under the new; nations change their creed more readily than their character—had established themselves, and have left some specimens of their not ungraceful nor undignified art; but of Georgian churches proper, I do not think that more than a dozen ruins are to be seen throughout the entire region. Four or five of these I explored, and in each the apse, or east end, alone still was or had been vaulted roughly enough; the nave or body of the building had evidently been covered with timber. The arch, where it occurs, is generally pointed; the scant ornamentation on the door-posts or round the windows consists of shallow carved Runic knots, or a conventional vine-pattern. What, however, distinguishes these Georgian churches, such as they are, from any others with which I am acquainted in the East, is a square belfry tower, forty or fifty feet high, placed at, and united with, the west end, while the principal entry, contrary to Greek usage, is on one side of the edifice, so that the whole bears a strong likeness to an old village Norfolk or Suffolk church. Belfry-towers are rare things throughout the East, but when they do occur they are always, except in Gurjistan, separated altogether from the main building, like the famous Campanile of Florence. A fine example of the kind is afforded by the Byzantine church, now a Mosque, of St. Sophia, at Trebizond, the work of the Emperor Manuel I. in the thirteenth century, where the square tower, with its open lantern a-top, is full seventy feet in height, and stands at a distance of forty paces from the western porch.