The Avars are one of the largest indigenous peoples of Dagestan, in the North Caucasus. Most live in the mountains of central and northwestern Dagestan, with smaller communities in northern Azerbaijan and in Turkey and other countries of the Near East. Their language, Avar, belongs to the Dagestanian branch of the Northeast Caucasian family, and a literary standard called Bolmats ("language of the people") has been used in newspapers, schools and literature. The Caucasian Avars are not the same people as the Avars who swept from Inner Asia to the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries. Researchers today reject the idea that the two are related, though the two groups may have met in the mid-sixth century, when the Inner Asian Avars passed through the northern Caucasus. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Orientation; Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: History and Cultural Relations
This page covers beliefs recorded in published ethnography. Much of the underlying fieldwork was published in Russian, as the bibliography of the Seferbekov article shows, so what follows is a partial picture, and it differs from village to village. Where a belief is known from one village or subgroup, the page says which.
Layers of Religion
The Encyclopedia of World Cultures describes the Avars' religious history in layers. In the "more distant past" they kept an ancient religion whose gods lived on mountaintops. The Avar "Olympus" was Mount Tlili Meer, and the chief god was Ts'ob. Between the fifth and twelfth centuries Georgian Orthodox Christianity spread into Avar country. Its remains include the temple of Datun, crosses with Avar-language epitaphs at Khunzakh, and the Avar names of the days of the week. Sunni Islam has prevailed since the thirteenth century, with Quranic schools, a mosque in every settlement, and two important holy places in Avar territory. The encyclopedia adds that pagan beliefs were interwoven with Islamic ones. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Religion and Expressive Culture
The sources used for this page say nothing more about Ts'ob than his name and rank, and record no stories about him. The best-documented older material concerns spirits of the mountains and forests, described below.
Spirits of the Mountains and the Hunt
The ethnographer Ruslan Seferbekov of the Dagestan Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences has recorded Avar belief in the Budalaals (also Budali), spirits who own the wild goats and deer of the high mountains. He calls them "Islamicised" deities, meaning that older beliefs about the owners of the mountains and wildlife were kept and given a Muslim setting. Seferbekov, "Patron Deities of the Hunt and Wild Animals in Dagestan," Iran and the Caucasus 16 (2012)
Several Avar communities describe them in somewhat different ways:
- Gidatl Avars say the Budalaals revive the animals that hunters kill. For that reason a hunter must not break the bones of a wild goat he has killed, so the spirits can restore it. A hunter who kills too many animals is punished, with the Budalaals dropping him into a gorge or sending an avalanche or rockfall down on him.
- Karatin Avars call the spirits Budali. They live on mountaintops and in caves and can be seen only by righteous people. Wild goats are their favorite animals, and they feed them salt, milk them and make cheese from the milk. They punish hunters who take too much game, and they help shepherds who get into trouble on steep slopes.
- Akhvakh Avars, as Seferbekov calls them, place the Budalaals on Mount Tarkho near the Bogos Ridge. People who have the gift of seeing them say they look like humans and raise wild goats. The Budalaals also separate the male and female sheep in the mountain pastures so that lambs are born closer to spring.
- At the village of Sogratl there is a legend of a saint named Budal, who lived on the highest mountain of Andalal and could bring a bouquet of flowers in winter. He was the patron of animals, and hunters sought his permission before hunting.
The same article records the Akhvakh Tlatlaxva, "masters of the forests" imagined in the shape of wild animals such as the bear, wolf, ox, deer and boar. People who enter the woods are told to say a prayer, because otherwise the forest masters might scare them to death or lead them astray, and to keep quiet, with no loud talk, laughing, fighting or swearing. Seferbekov, "Patron Deities of the Hunt and Wild Animals in Dagestan," Iran and the Caucasus 16 (2012)
Stories
The taken child. Khunzakh and Andalal Avars say a demon called Xuducl (the spelling in the source's transliteration) steals the unborn child of a pregnant woman, or a newborn, leaving a few drops of blood on the threshold, the windowsill or the woman's nightgown. In another account the Budalaals do the taking, and the mother is a pious, sinless woman. The child is carried to a mountain peak, either "Saddle Mountain" near Gunib or the "Mountain of the Blessed" at Botlikh, where it becomes a Budalaal. People say they have seen the wet footprints of barefoot children on the rocks there and heard voices reciting the Quran. The same demon is said to take the unborn calves of cows, leaving blood at the threshold of the stall. Among the Akhvakh, a mother who sees the child's footprint on the sill is said to go to heaven after her death. Seferbekov, "Patron Deities of the Hunt and Wild Animals in Dagestan," Iran and the Caucasus 16 (2012)
The hunter who was cursed. An Akhvakh legend from the village of Lologonitl tells of a hunter named Arab who killed a female goat that a Budalaal woman, invisible to him, was milking. She cursed him to have no more than one son, and the story says that his descendants have had only one son each ever since. Another hunter from the same village, Osman, once heard the Budalaals shout, "Leave our animals alone!" Seferbekov, "Patron Deities of the Hunt and Wild Animals in Dagestan," Iran and the Caucasus 16 (2012)
The khan's genealogy. The family at the head of one Avar polity traced a legendary descent from the Egyptian pharaohs. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Sociopolitical Organization
Songs and ballads. The encyclopedia lists epic-historical songs about the defeat of Nadir Shah's army in 1747 and a cycle of songs about the nineteenth-century wars of independence. The best-known medieval ballads are Khochbar and Kamalil Bashir. Well-known Avar writers include the poets Aligaji of Inkho, Chanka and Makhmud, the satirist Gamzat Tsadasa and the poet Rasul Gamzatov. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: History and Cultural Relations
Rituals and Practice
The most popular of the "ancient ceremonies" in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures is the New Year festival ots bay ("bull harnessing"), held at the spring equinox and always accompanied by athletic contests. Women sing laments at funerals in a recognized genre called mau, and funeral rites follow Islamic prescriptions. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Religion and Expressive Culture
Rainmaking is recorded at Andalal. Villagers slaughtered a black sheep, boiled the meat until it came off the bones, and buried the unbroken bones in the ground "for the hungry Budalaals." Seferbekov, "Patron Deities of the Hunt and Wild Animals in Dagestan," Iran and the Caucasus 16 (2012)
Folk medicine mixed magic with Islamic learning. Folk healers used amulets and other objects, and village mullahs wrote incantations and prayers drawn from home-cure books of the Muslim world. Some specialists in injuries were skilled enough to perform trephination (cutting an opening in the skull), and the Alibutaev family of Sogratl counted seventeen generations of healers. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Religion and Expressive Culture
Houses and Villages
Avar mountain villages are densely built, tiered complexes where, in the architects' words quoted by the encyclopedia, a whole quarter or even a whole village can form a single continuous building. Each quarter had its own gathering place (godekan) and place of worship. In the Gidatl valley, fortress-like houses had large halls, with a carved central pillar called tlolbol hubi, "the pillar of kinship." The pillar was shaped like an oak, decorated with carved ornaments and solar symbols, and revered as holy. The open hearth with its ever-burning fire stood in front of it. The encyclopedia says the hall-and-pillar houses survived until the 1860s. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Settlements
History and Law
The earliest mention of the Caucasian Avars is in ancient authors writing about the Leg people of the Albanian union. A kingdom called Sarir, with its capital at Khunzakh, formed in the mountains after the Sasanian conquest of Caucasian Albania, and the Avar khans lived at Khunzakh until 1834. The Avar Khanate was strongest in the eighteenth century. Mountain Daghestani forces defeated Nadir Shah in Avaria in 1747. In the Caucasus Wars of 1817 to 1864, the last twenty-five years of Avar resistance to the Russian Empire were led by Shamil, who came from the Avar village of Gimri. An imamate was created across Avaria and Chechnya, and Russia annexed Avaria after the fall of Gunib and Shamil's capture in 1859. In 1944 some Avars were deported along with other Muslim peoples of the Caucasus. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: History and Cultural Relations
Avar society was long governed through local communes. Until the nineteenth century the basic form of government was an association of aristocratic and democratic republics, and local councils of elders made laws and chose the military leader. Courts used written codes of customary law (adat), and Quranic judges applied Sharia. Punishments under the old system included fines, ostracism and blood vengeance. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Sociopolitical Organization
The Avar script has changed several times. Thirteenth-century texts adapted the Georgian alphabet, Arabic was the language of literacy from the sixteenth century, and in the eighteenth century the cleric and scholar Dibir Kadi of Khunzakh established an Avar alphabet based on Arabic script. A Latin-based alphabet followed in 1928 and a Cyrillic one in 1938. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: History and Cultural Relations
Craft and Livelihood
Avaria is one of the main areas of ancient terrace farming in the Caucasus, and the traditional economy combined terraced fields, livestock, household crafts and trade. Sheep were pastured high in the mountains. Masons from Sogratl and Teletl built the best houses, bronze embossing was a specialty of Gotsatl and Ichichali, and since the middle of the nineteenth century the village of Untsukul has been known for woodwork with silver inlay. Women's headdresses (chukht) carried silver ornaments that differed from community to community, so a woman's home village could be told from her headdress as well as from her speech. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Economy
Today
Avar is one of the six literary languages of Dagestan and is an official language there. It has about 1.2 million speakers worldwide, and UNESCO classes it as vulnerable. The Encyclopedia of World Cultures entry was written around the time of perestroika, so its census figures and its statements about Soviet-era life are out of date. The William & Mary regional study of Dagestan notes that for the peoples of Dagestan, modern nationalism begins with Shamil, the Avar leader of the nineteenth-century resistance, and that Dagestan's village communities have kept their distinct social structure and customs. Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Avars: Orientation; William & Mary, Russia's Periphery: Dagestan; Wikipedia, Avar language