Edmund Spencer, "Turkey, Russia, the Black Sea, and Circassia" (1854)

Captain Edmund Spencer was a prolific British travel writer of the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1850 he traveled widely in Eastern Europe, Middle East and Asia, publishing several travelogues. His first travel book was entitled “Sketches of Germany and the Germans, with a glance at Poland, Hungary, & Switzerland in 1834, 1835, and 1836, by an English resident of Germany” appeared in 1836. Spencer’s second great tour took him down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople and the Black Sea where he visited the Caucasus; his travelogue “Travels in the western Caucasus, including a tour through Imeritia, Mingrelia, Turkey, Moldavia, Galicia, Silesia, and Moravia, in 1836” appeared in London in 1838. Spencer continued to travel for the new two decades, including an extensive voyage through the southern Balkans which he described in his two-volume “Travels in European Turkey, in 1850, through Bosnia, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrace, Albania, and Epirus, with a visit to Greece and the Ionian Isles” (London 1851). In 1851 he revisited the Caucasus and spent several weeks traveling through North Caucasus and Western Georgia, publishing his accounts in "Turkey, Russia, the Black Sea, and Circassia (London, 1854).

Our visit to Redoubt-Kale [near present-day Poti] having been made during the great summer fair, we saw the town under the most favourable circumstances; it also afforded us an opportunity of seeing specimens of all the various races who inhabit the neighboring provinces. In addition to Mingrelians arid Immeretians, there were Georgians and Persians, Circassians, Lesghians, and Armenians, together with Jews, Turks, Tatars, and Turkomans,—a curious melange, each habited in their separate costume, and exhibiting in their features and manners their characteristic peculiarities.

While wandering through this vast assemblage of races, Prince Vorontsov [Mikhail Vorontsov, appointed commander-in-chief and viceroy of the Caucasus in 1844] kindly pointed out to me the different nationalities. There was the stately Georgian in his becoming costume—a blue cloth blouse with the sleeves open to the elbow, the whole neatly braided; wide shalwars [trousers] confined at the knees, and a high cap of black [Astrakhan] lamb-skin. In features he might be taken for an Armenian or a Persian: the only weapon he carried was a large poniard [dagger] with an ivory handle, stuck in a red silk sash. 

The Mingrelians and the Immeretians, in their costume and features, somewhat resembled the Circassians, except that they were much inferior in personal appearance, and [lacking] the bright sparkling eye and bold independence of manner which distinguish that people. These peasants were all well armed with poniard, pistols, and gun slung across the shoulder; and carried, hanging from the shoulder, the same species of black mantle, made from plaited goat's hair, as the Circassians are accustomed to use. 

But by far the most interesting among the assembled multitude, were the inhabitants of the higher Alps [Caucasus mountains], the Souanians [Svans] of Souanethia [Svanetia], a territory where the winter, it is said, lasts eight or nine months in the year. These gigantic mountaineers were all armed to the teeth, and looked as fierce and savage as if they had never before mingled among civilized men. Instead of the becoming blouse worn by their countrymen on the coast of Circassia, they were habited in long sheep-skin coats, ornamented in front with the usual red leather patron pocket of a Caucasian mountaineer, sheep-skin caps with the wool plaited in ringlets, while their bare legs were encased in a sort of sandal, made of untanned leather and fastened with thongs.

Besides these, there were several other tribes from the remote districts of the Caucasus equally interesting; and as they were all on friendly terms with the Russian government, they were allowed to purchase salt, tobacco, and powder, the latter however in small quantities. From the circumstance of the Mingrelians and Immeretians being allowed to retain their arms, we must infer that the power of Russia is not firmly established over these provinces, as the same privilege is not granted to her subjects of Georgia and Russian Armenia. At all events, the Russian soldier of the garrison may felicitate himself upon possessing one advantage over his comrades of all the other Russian forts we visited in the Caucasus, he has only a single enemy to contend with at Redout-Kale—marsh miasma.*

[The miasma theory held that diseases were caused by a miasma, a noxious form of "bad air" emanating from rotting organic matter]

In fact, the authority of Russia over these provinces, Mingrelia, Immeretia, and Gourial [Guria], is extremely precarious. She knows well that so long as she is at war with the inhabitants of Daghestan and the Western Caucasus, the slightest infringement upon the liberties of the people—for they are very tenacious of their freedom—would lead to a rebellion, and, it might be, endanger the loss of Georgia, a province which from its position is the key to all her Trans-Caucasian possessions. Hence she has not dared to introduce her usual complicated machinery of passports and fiscal laws, neither has she inundated the country with an army of officials to enforce the various harassing regulations, by means of which she knows so well how to enslave every people that has had the misfortune to fall under her rule. No doubt there would be a very different system pursued if she succeeded in subduing the untamed and untamable spirit of Daghestan and Circassia. We should then, as in old Russia, and in every other country where she has succeeded in establishing her power, behold the same elaborate system of despotism substituted for the mild rule of their patriarchal chiefs and elders, and every privilege the people now possess wrested from them, till they became, like the rest of the inert and spiritless mass over which she rules—a machine to be guided by the hand of a skilful engineer.

At present, these provinces are only valuable to Russia in a political point of view. So far from being a source of revenue, they are a constant drain upon the treasury, from the expense they entail upon the government in maintaining garrisons in so many military forts, and the large sums annually disbursed in the form of pensions, for the purpose of securing the allegiance of the various petty princes and elders, which they in their simplicity believe to be a tribute. The farce is even carried so far, that the princes of Mingrelia receive upwards of two thousand roubles a-year for permitting the Russians to establish themselves as a trading community at Redout-Kale! whereas Mingrelia, together with Georgia, was declared a province of Russia during the reign of the late Emperor Alexander; but it serves to mystify a half-civilized people, and prevents them from making common cause with their neighbours, the independent tribes of the mountain.

There is also a chain of sympathy in religion, which binds them to Russia, the majority of the inhabitants being members of the Oriental Church. But how far we can call a people Christian who still practice many of the rites of Paganism, such as the worship of ancient idols, and the sacrifice of animals as propitiatory offerings, is somewhat difficult to determine; and these customs are very general among the Mingrelians, the Immeretians, and the Georgians, particularly the inhabitants of the mountain districts of these provinces, many of whom openly profess Mahometanism [Islam], and every attempt to convert them to Christianity has hitherto failed. It is true they frequently attend the nearest church, get the silver rouble and the silver cross allowed them by the Russian government, submit to be baptized, then wander to another and repeat the ceremony, but they remain no less good Mussulmans [Muslims] or good Pagans, as the case may be.

The real fact is this, and we know it both from personal observation while traveling in these districts, and from the conversation of Russian officers: the power of Russia even in this, the most peaceable portion of her Trans-Caucasian possessions, is based on sand. The priests of the Greek Church, and the petty chieftains and elders, her pensioners, are no doubt by interest attached to her rule; but the people, one and all, detest it. Nay, it is by no means improbable, now that these provinces are on the very threshold of the theatre of war [The Crimean War, 1853-1856], that they will openly express their discontent and fly to arms, should the Turks on one side, and the warriors of Daghestan, the Lesghians, on the other, succeed in gaining a sure footing in these provinces.

The Mingrelians, Immeretians, and Georgians, all of the same race, each speaking a different dialect of the same language, have not forgotten the might and power of their ancestors, nor that, less than a century ago, they were ruled by chiefs who knew how to make their countries respected by their hereditary enemies, the Turks and Persians. Perhaps the Russians have not more implacable enemies in the Caucasus, than those tribes of the same race who inhabit the elevated districts of Georgia, Immeretia, and Mingrelia, nor any that harass the Russian troops more perseveringly on their route from Tiflis to Daghestan. At all events it is certain, that no traveller who is not recommended to their chieftains, can pass through the defiles and gorges of their country without being protected by an armed escort from fort to fort. This danger has increased of late years, in consequence of the civil wars in Turkey and Persia, which drove great numbers of outlawed Turks and Persians to seek a home in the Caucasus,—all enemies of Russia, and being for the most part men of the world, they have widely propagated their hatred and animosity among the inhabitants to the systematic enemy of the East.

Indeed, all the Russian officers we conversed with, who had served in the Caucasus, were of the same opinion, that no government, however powerful, enterprising and humane, could succeed in establishing its rule over a people who, in addition to the attachment they have ever displayed for the government of their native chiefs, and their own wild independence, consider no engagement binding with the stranger; since nearly every tribe in the Eastern Caucasus repeatedly gave in their adhesion to the Russian government, only to raise the standard of revolt on the first favourable opportunity, and massacre the garrison of the forts... Perhaps, of all the mountaineers who inhabit this part of the Caucasus, the most dangerous and the most difficult to subdue are those powerful tribes, the Suonians  [Svans] and the Ingushes. This very numerous and warlike people occupy the whole of the alpine and mountain districts, from Elbrous to the frontiers of Mingrelia and Immeretia. It is supposed they are the original inhabitants of the Caucasus, as all the early writers allude to them by name. The Russians have never been able to penetrate into the country they inhabit. Among the many romantic stories in circulation respecting them, it is said there are certain Eden-like districts in the interior, only known to this people, sheltered by the Alps from every harsh wind, where the cold of winter and the heat of summer are equally unknown. Nay, it is even reported that here was the home of our first parents, the gold and silver mines of the ancients, and a hundred other reports equally marvelous and romantic.