Abkhazians call themselves Apswa (plural Apswaa). Abkhazia (capital: Sukhum/Aqw'a) comprises 8,700 square kilometers (between lat. 43°35' - 42°27' N and long. 40° - 42°08' E) bordering the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Mingrelia, and Svanetia. The early Soviets' drive to eradicate illiteracy saw Abkhaz attain literary status; like Circassian and Ubykh (extinct since 1992), Abkhaz is a northwest Caucasian language. Christianity arrived two centuries before its official introduction under Justinian sixth century. Sunni Islam spread with Ottoman Turkish influence from around 1500. Traditional paganism has never entirely disappeared, making adherence to either major religion relatively superficial, although within Abkhazia most Abkhazians are nominally Christian.
Life revolves around the extended family, morality (including respect for elders) being essentially determined by the dictates of custom (akjabz) and an ever-present sense of "Abkhazianness" (apswara). Local nobility fostered their offspring among the peasantry to cement societal relations - only captured foreigners served as slaves. English visitor James Bell noted in the 1830s that Abkhazians rendered this concept by their ethnonym for "Mingrelian" (agərwa). Milk-brotherhood was another social bond, symbolic establishment of which between two warring families could end vendettas.
A semi-tropical climate with abundant water resources, forests, and mountain-pasturage dictated an economy based on animal husbandry, timber, and agriculture, with fruit, viticulture, and millet (yielding to maize in the nineteenth century) playing dominant roles; tea and tobacco gained importance in the twentieth century. Greece, Rome, Persia, Lazica, Byzantium, Genoa, Turkey, Russia, and Georgia have all influenced Abkhazian history. In the 780s Prince Leon II took advantage of Byzantium's weakness to incorporate within his Abkhazian Kingdom most of western Georgia, this whole territory being styled "Abkhazia" until 975 when Bagrat' III, inheriting Abkhazia maternally and Iberia (eastern Georgia) paternally, became first monarch of a united Georgia. This medieval kingdom disintegrated during the Mongol depredations (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries), and part of Abkhazia's population (the Abazinians, who speak the divergent Abaza dialect and today number around 35,000) settled in the north Caucasus. The Chachbas controlled Abkhazia, the Dadianis controlled Mingrelia, vying for dominance in the border regions; the current frontier along the River Ingur dates from the 1680s.
Abkhazia became a Russian protectorate in 1810 but governed its own affairs until 1864 when, in the wake of imperial Russia's crushing of North Caucasian resistance (1864) and again after the 1877 - 1878 Russo-Turkish War, most Abkhazians (along with most Circassians and all the Ubykhs) migrated to Ottoman lands. Soviet power was established in 1921; this Abkhazian SSR was recognized by Georgia, the two then contracting a treaty-alliance that lasted until Abkhazia's 1931 demotion to an "autonomous republic" within Georgia. The Stalin years were characterized by forced (largely Mingrelian) immigration and suppression of the language and culture in an attempted Georgianization.
Post-Soviet Georgian nationalism led to war in August 1992. Abkhazian victory in September 1993 resulted in the mass flight of most of the local Mingrelian population, numerically the largest group in prewar Abkhazia. The conflict remained unresolved as of the early twenty-first century. Abkhazia declared independence in October 1999 but remains unrecognized. There are roughly 100,000 Abkhazians in Abkhazia (or ex-Soviet territories) and up to 500,000 across the Near East, predominantly in Turkey, where the language is neither taught nor written.
Bibliography
Benet, Sula. (1974). Abkhasians: The Long-Living People of the Caucasus. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Hewitt, George. (1993). "Abkhazia: A Problem of Identity and Ownership." In Central Asian Survey 12(3): 267 - 323.
Hewitt, George, ed. (1999). The Abkhazians: A Handbook. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press.
Hewitt, George, and Khiba, Zaira. (1997). An Abkhaz Newspaper Reader. Kensington, MD: Dunwoody Press.
—B. GEORGE HEWITT
