A Georgian way of death

For Megrelians the dead are never truly gone

By Robert Parsons Samegrelo, Georgia

Four o'clock on a burning October afternoon an the cemeteries of Samegrelo in Western Georgia are abuzz with activity.

Widows in black weeds, grieving mothers, sons and daughters of the deceased, friends and workmates.

A woman bends over the grave of her son and wails, softly at first and then in a rising crescendo. "My child, my child, why have you left your mother?"

The sun, sliding slowly into the cobalt glare of the Black Sea, illuminates a bunch of hibiscus in a blaze of red and silhouettes her hooded form. "My son, my son" she murmurs and soon the refrain is picked up by others.

But this is no ordinary display of grief. Death in Samegrelo, the most westerly province of Georgia, is a celebration of life. The cemetery is a theatre, where the spectators are the dead.

They gaze down at the mourners from a forest of life sized images - an army of spirits, paying mute witness to the living.

House-like tombs

Some are painted in loving detail on wooden boards, others carved into stone and marble. They are frozen in poses of extravagant defiance. Mamuka, his arms flung out wide like an eagle, a smile on his lips. Gogi, astride his favourite horse as he sets out for the hunt.

Tomb parties: The dead are unseen guests

The people of Samelegro come to the cemetery not so much to mourn the departed as to commune with the dead.

Call it denial if you like, but for the Megrelians the dead are never truly gone. And it's for them to ensure that the deceased have everything they need.

Some of the tombs are the size and shape of two-storey houses and crammed with once-favoured possessions - fully-stocked bars, twinkling lights, suits of clothes, perhaps a cherished motorbike stacked in a corner.

Before long, a series of parties are in full swing - wine is drunk and stories told. Questions are asked of the deceased. Paata, how is it with you? Do you remember that feast we had last year?

The guests raise a toast and offer Paata a drink - a funnel is placed in the earth and the wine poured in. His mother lights a cigarette and places it on a saucer by his headstone.

In the gathering gloom she watches the glowing tip burn towards the filter. "His doctor says he's still smoking too much", she says, without a hint of a smile.

Ruinous expense

A few feet away, besides another tomb, two families are in dispute. "Why did you steal the candles I left here yesterday?" - "You can talk, my dear. What about that palm you've planted right in the way of Giorgi's view of the sea?"

Village tailors indulge the wildest fantasies of their clients, customers compete for the most expensive and ostentatious coffins, funerals and wakes provide constant work for musicians and there's a local television station that specialises in funeral notices

Where does it all come from, this Megrelian love of excess?

Its pre-Christian origins are not in doubt. The ancient Greeks knew Samelegro well. They called it Colchis and sent Jason and his Argonauts there to steal the Golden Fleece from Aeetes, the Colchian king.

Not much has changed across the intervening centuries. Now as then, these funerals are ruinously expensive but how you bury your dead in Samegrelo is the measure of who you are.

When Tamaz Kutelia was shot dead in 1991 he weighed in at 90 kilos, and made a living from his fists. He was a popular legend.

Ten years on, his birthday is still marked in tremendous style... but in the dusty crumbling port of Poti, his home town, it is his funeral that is best remembered, even to this day.

Life-sized images gaze down at mourners

I sat with his parents in a leafy courtyard, the trees heavy with quince and persimmon, as they recalled with pride how the streets outside had overflowed with guests and relatives.

In these days of post-Soviet private enterprise, the irony here is that death provides a living for so many - village tailors indulge the wildest fantasies of their clients, customers compete for the most expensive and ostentatious coffins, funerals and wakes provide constant work for musicians and there's a local television station that specialises in funeral notices.

No taboo

Mamuka Gvazava is 40 years old and a graduate of Tbilisi school of Art. He left college with expectations of higher things, he says, with a resigned wipe of his brow. Now he engraves tombstones with portraits of the dead.

It nets him $300 a month - quite a substantial sum in Samegrelo - and keeps him fully occupied. In his workshop, clouds of dust billow through shafts of sunlight, and the delirious cacophonous shriek of an antediluvian stone-cutter fills the air.

Outside Mamuka and his colleagues sit by a stagnant pool while a pig plays football with a bottle beneath their table.

They rock with laughter as they remember the family disputes they've witnessed over the design of a tombstone - and the time when things have gone horribly wrong - like a horse and rider in which they made the horse so magnificent there was barely any room left for the dead man. He appeared like a dwarf atop his mount.

Death here is not a taboo, as it is in the West, but a part of the everyday texture of life - a source of humour and joy as well as sorrow and grief.

People talk of the dead as if they still walked among the living, which for the Megrelians, they still do.