James Bryce (1838-1922) was a distinguished British jurist, writer and Liberal politician. Born in Belfast, he studied at the University of Glasgow, University of Heidelberg and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he earned his law degree. He practiced law for several years in London before accepting an offer to serve as Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, a position he held for twenty three years until 1893. During this time Bryce had travelled extensively in Europe and, in 1876, visited the Caucasus, where he visited Georgia and Armenia. In later years Bryce ventured into politics, becoming a member of the Parliament and serving as the British ambassador to the USA in 1907-1913. During World War I he was commissioned to write the well known Bryce Report on the German atrocities in Belgium.
The brief excerpt below is from Bryce's book "Transcaucasia and Ararat"
I will shortly describe the chief races that now occupy the country. Beginning from the west, we find the Mingrelians along the Black Sea coast, from the Turkish border to Sukhum Kaleh. They are the ne'er-do-wells of the Caucasian family. All their neighbours, however backward a Western may think them, have a bad word and a kick for the still more backward Mingrelian. To believe them, he is lazy, sensual, treacherous, and stupid, a liar and a thief. The strain in which the Russians and Armenians talk of them reminded me of the description one gets from the Transylvanian Saxons and Magyars of the Wallachs or Roumans who live among them. You ask what kind of people the Wallachs are. "A dirty people," they answer, "a treacherous people, a lazy people, a superstitious people, a cruel people, a gluttonous people. Otherwise not such a bad kind of people."
Lazy the Mingrelian certainly is, but in other respects I doubt if he is worse than his neighbours ; and he lives in so damp and warm a climate that violent exercise must be disagreeable. He is a well-made, good-looking fellow, but with a dull and perhaps rather sensual expression. And he is certainly backward in agriculture and trade, making very little of a singularly rich country.
South of Mingrelia lies Guria, on the slopes and ridges of the Anti-Caucasus, a land where the people are more vigorous and upright, and where, as they have been less affected by conquest and immigration, the picturesque old costumes have best maintained themselves.
West of the Mingrelians, in the hilly regions of the Upper Rion and its tributaries, live the Imeritians, a race speaking the Georgian language, who may generally be distinguished by their bushy hair. My personal knowledge of them is confined to three waiters at three several inns, rather a narrow basis for induction, but quite as wide as many travellers have had for some very sweeping conclusions. They have a better name than the Mingrelians, both for industry and honesty, and these three waiters
were pleasant, civil fellows, though not particularly bright.
Still farther east, and occupying the centre of Transcaucasia, are the Georgians, called by the Russians Grusinians or Grusians, who may be considered the principal and, till the arrival of the Muscovite, the dominant race of the country. They call themselves Karthli [kartveli], deducing their origin from a patriarch Karthlos (who was brother of Haik, the patriarch of the Armenian nation, and of Legis, the ancestor of the Lesghians), a grandson, or, as others hold, great-grandson of Gomer, son of Japhet. According to their own legends, they worshipped the sun and the moon and the five planets, and swore by the grave of Karthlos until converted to Christianity by St Nina in the fourth century of our era. For several centuries their kingdom extended almost to the Black Sea in one direction and the Caspian in another, and maintained itself with some credit against the hostility of Turks and Persians, though often wasted by Persian armies, and for long periods obliged to admit the suzerainty of the Shah. Its heroic age was the time of Queen Tamara, who flourished in the twelfth century, and is still honoured by pictures all over the country, in which she appears as a beautiful Amazon, not unlike the fancy portraits of Joan of Arc. To her is ascribed the foundation of every ancient church or monastery, just as all the strongholds are said to have been built by the robber Kir Oghlu, and as in Scotland there is hardly an old mansion but shows Wallace's sword and Queen Mary's apartment. [...] One sees traces of a sort of feudal period in the numerous castles ; most of them mere square towers, such as we see on the coast of Scotland and the north of Ireland, which lie scattered all over Georgia and Imeritia ; and the organisation of society was till quite lately feudal, the peasantry villeins under the native kings, and reduced under the Russians to serfdom, while the
upper class consisted of landowning nobles and their immediate dependants.
It is a joke among the Russians that every Georgian is a noble, and as the only title of nobility is Prince, the effect to an English ear of hearing all sorts of obscure people, country postmasters, droshky drivers, sometimes even servants, described as being Prince So-and-so, is at first grotesque. The number of noble families is, however, really not very large. I have heard it put as low as thirty, but as the title goes to all the children, each of the families has a vast number of titled members. This at least may be said for the numerous nobility, that, although it has been charged with vanity and frivolity, it does not despise all honest occupations. And some of the Georgian noble houses have pedigrees, apparently authentic pedigrees, older than any to be found in Europe.
Every one has heard of the Georgian beauties, who in the estimation of Turkish importers rivalled or surpassed those of Circassia itself. Among them a great many handsome and even some beautiful faces may certainly be seen, regular and finely chiselled features, a clear complexion, large and liquid eyes, an erect carriage, in which there is a good deal of dignity as well as of voluptuousness. To a taste, however, formed upon Western models, mere beauty of features and figure, without expression, is not very interesting ; and these beautiful faces frequently want expression. Nor have they always that vivacity which, in the parallel case of the women of Andalusia, partly redeems the deficiency of intelligence. Admirable as pieces of Nature's handiwork, they are not equally charming. A Turk may think them perfection, but it may be doubted whether any one who had seen the ladies of Cork or Baltimore would take much pleasure in their society. However, this is a point on which people will disagree to the end of time; and those who hold that it is enough to look at a beauty without feeling inclined to talk to her need not go beyond Georgia to find all they can wish. It must be remembered, however, that this loveliness is rather fleeting. Towards middle life the complexion is apt to become sallow, and the nose and chin rather too prominent, while the vacuity of look remains. One is told that they are, as indeed the whole nation is, almost uneducated, with nothing but petty personal interests to fill their thoughts or animate their lives.
The men are sufficiently good-looking and pleasing in manner, with, perhaps, a shade of effeminacy in their countenances, at least in those of the lowland. They do not strike one as a strong race, either physically or otherwise, though they have produced some remarkable men, and having obtained civilisation and Christianity in the fourth century of our era, have ever since maintained their religion and national existence with great tenacity against both Turks and Persians. So early as the sixth century, Procopius compliments the Iberians (who are doubtless the ancestors of our Georgians) on their resolute adherence to Christian rites in spite of the attacks of the Persian fire-worshippers, who, it may be remarked in passing, seem to have been the first to set the example of religious persecution. The Muslims say that the Christianity of the Georgians is owing to their fondness for wine and for pork, both which good things, as everybody knows, the Prophet has forbidden to true believers.
[...]
Scattered through Upper Georgia, and to be found among the peasantry as well as in the towns, there is a considerable Armenian population, who probably settled here when their national kingdom was destroyed by the Seljukian conquerors Alp Arslan and Malek Shah, in the eleventh century. Farther south, in Armenia proper, they constitute the bulk of the population in the country districts, Kurds being mixed with them in the mountains, Tatars in the plains, and Persians in the towns. As I shall have to recur to them in a later chapter, it is enough to remark here that they are the most vigorous and intelligent of the Transcaucasian races, with a gift for trade which has enabled them to get most of the larger business of the country into their hands. Their total number in these countries is estimated at 550,000. Between them and the Georgians there is little cordiality, especially as their wealthy men are apt to be creditors, and the Georgians apt to be debtors.
Going down the Kur from Tiflis towards the Caspian, one finds the Greorgians give place to a people whom the Russians call Tatars, and who are unquestionably a branch of the great Turkic family....Veritable Turks these fellows certainly are, quite unlike the mongrel race who go by the name of the Turks in Europe, and much more resembling, in face, figure, and character, the pure undiluted Turkman of Khiva and the steppes of the Jaxartes. Being in some districts a settled and industrious race, they are, however, less wild-looking than the Turkmans, and remind one more of the grave and respectable Tatar of Kazan or the Crimea. Their villages, often mere burrows in the dry soil, are scattered all over the steppe eastward to the Caspian, and southward as far as the Persian frontier. Many are agricultural, many more live by their sheep and cattle, which in summer are driven up towards the Armenian mountains and in winter return to the steppe; and some of them, settled in the larger towns, practise various handicrafts, and among others weave rich carpets and other woollen fabrics which pass in the markets of Europe under the name of Persian. The Tatars are also the general carriers of the country. On the few roads, or oftener upon the open Steppe, one sees their endless trains of carts, and more rarely their strings of camels, fetching goods from Shamakha, or Baku, or Tavriz, to Tiflis, thence to be despatched over the Dariel into Southern Russia, or by railway to Poti and Western Europe.
The last of their occupations, the one in which they most excel, and which they have almost to themselves, is brigandage. To what extent it prevails, I cannot attempt to say, for, as every traveller knows, there is no subject, not even court scandal, on which one hears such an immense number of stories, some of them obviously exaggerated, many of them honestly related, most of them absolutely impossible to test. If we had believed a quarter part of what the quidnuncs of Tiflis told us, we should have thought the country seriously disturbed, and travelling, especially by night, full of peril. If we had gone by our own experience, we should have pronounced the steppes of the Kur a greatdeal safer than Blackheath Common [ an area of south-east London]. Stories were always being brought into the city, and even appearing in the papers, of robberies, sometimes of murders, committed on the roads to Elizavetpol and Erivan; and along the latter road, we found the folk at the post stations with imaginations ready to see a Tatar behind every bush. Even the Russian officials at Tiflis, who of course desired to make little of anything that reflects on the vigilance of the Government, advised us to be careful where we halted, and how we displayed any valuables. I cannot help believing, therefore, that robberies do sometimes occur, and no doubt it is the Tatars, or at least bands led by a
Tatar chief, who perpetrate them. But the substantial danger is not really more than sufficient to give a little piquancy to travelling, and make you fondle your pistols with the air of a man who feels himself prepared for an emergency. In a dull country, far removed from the interests and movements of the Western world, the pleasure of life is sensibly increased when people have got the exploits of robbers to talk about. It is a subject level with the meanest imagination: the idle Georgian noble and the ignorant peasant enjoy it as heartily as Walter Scott himself.
[...]
Besides these aboriginal races, Georgians, Mingrelians, Caucasian mountaineers, and Armenians, and the incomers of old standing, such as Tatars and Persians, there is what may be called a top-dressing of recent immigrants from Europe, mostly Russians and Germans. The Russians, with one exception, consist of the officials, who generally consider Russia as their home, almost as our Indian civilians consider England, and intend to return to it when their work is over. The exception is formed by the various sects of dissenters whom the Government, fearing their disturbing political and social influence, has banished, or at least transferred, to these remote seats. They are mostly industrious, well-disposed people, morally, if not intellectually, above the level of the rest of the peasantry, who live in large villages, exactly like those of Central Russia, and keep themselves quite apart from the surrounding native population.
Still more distinct are the Germans, of whom there are several colonies, the largest, established in Tiflis, numbering some four or five thousand souls. They came hither from Wurtemberg about sixty years ago, driven out by an obnoxious hymn-book. In respect of education and intelligence, they are of course far above any of the natives, while their Protestantism prevents them from intermarrying with, and therefore from sensibly affecting, their Russian neighbours. They have lost, if they ever possessed, the impulse of progress ; their own farms are the best in the country, and their handicrafts-men in Tiflis superior to the Georgians or Persians; but they are content to go on in their old ways, not spreading out from the community, not teaching or in any way stimulating the rest of the population.
All these races live together, not merely within the limits of the same country, a country politically and physically one, but to a great extent actually on the same soil, mixed up with and crossing one another. In one part Georgians, in another Armenians, in a third Tatars, predominate ; but there are districts where Armenians and Georgians, or Armenians, Georgians, and Tatars, or Tatars and Persians, or Persians, Tatars, and Armenians, are so equally represented in point of numbers that it is hard to say which element predominates. This phenomenon — so strange to one who knows only the homogeneous population of West European countries, or of a country like America, where all sorts of elements are day by day being flung into the melting-pot, and lose their identity almost at once - comes out most noticeably in the capital of Transcaucasia, the city of Tiflis. Here six nations dwell together in a town smaller than Brighton, and six languages are constantly, three or four more occasionally, to be heard in the streets. Varieties of dress, religion, manners, and physical aspect correspond to these diversities of race.
[...]
These peoples inhabit the more or less level country south of the Caucasus. Besides them, there is a multitude of mountain tribes of whom I have said something in the last preceding chapter, but who are far too numerous and too diverse in their character to be described at length. Probably no-where else in the world can so great a variety of stocks, languages, and religions be found huddled together in so narrow an area as in the Caucasian chain between the Euxine and the Caspian. It is as if every nation that passed from north to south, or west to east, had left some specimens of its people here behind to found a kind of ethnological museum.
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