Mingrelians call themselves Margali (plural Margalepi) and are Georgian Orthodox. Mingrelian (like Georgian, Svan, and Laz) is a South Caucasian (Kartvelian) language; only Mingrelian and Laz, jointly known as Zan, are mutually intelligible. The ancient Zan continuum along the Black Sea's eastern coast from Abkhazia to Rize was broken by Georgian speakers fleeing the Arab emirate (655 - 1122) in Georgia's modern capital Tiflis, so that Georgian-speaking provinces (Guria and Ajaria) now divide Mingrelia (western Georgian lowlands bounded by Abkhazia, Svanetia, Lechkhumi, Imeretia, Guria, and the Black Sea) from Lazistan (north-eastern Turkey). The Dadianis ruled post-Mongol Mingrelia (capital Zugdidi), which came under Russian protection in 1803, although internal affairs remained in local hands until 1857. Traditional home economy resembled that of neighboring Abkhazia.
A late-nineteenth-century attempt to introduce a Mingrelian prayer book and language primer using Cyrillic characters failed; it was interpreted as a move to undermine the Georgian national movement's goal of consolidating all Kartvelian speakers. In the 1926 Soviet census, 242,990 declared Mingrelian nationality, a further 40,000 claiming Mingrelian as their mother tongue. This possibility (and thus these data) subsequently disappeared; since around 1930, all Kartvelian speakers have officially been categorized as "Georgians." Today Mingrelians may number over one million, though fewer speak Mingrelian. Some publishing in Mingrelian (with Georgian characters), especially of regional newspapers and journals, was promoted by the leading local politician, Ishak Zhvania (subsequently denounced as a separatist), from the late 1920s to 1938, after which only Georgian, the language in which most Mingrelians are educated, was allowed (occasional scholarly works apart). While some Mingrelian publishing has restarted since Georgian independence, Mingrelian has never been formally taught. Stalin's police chief, Lavrenti Beria, and Georgia's first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, were Mingrelians. The civil war that followed Gamsakhurdia's overthrow (1992) mostly affected Mingrelia, where Zviadist sympathizers were concentrated; even after Gamsakhurdia's death (1993), local discontent with the central authorities fostered at least two attempted coups, reinforcing longstanding Georgian fears of separatism in the area.
Bibliography
Hewitt, George. (1995). "Yet a third consideration of Völker, Sprachen und Kulturen des südlichen Kaukasus." Central Asian Survey 14 (2):285 - 310.
—B. GEORGE HEWITT
