Avars Erotic

The Avars are the largest of Dagestan's roughly thirty native peoples, concentrated in the highland districts that run along the eastern spine of the Greater Caucasus before the land tilts down to the Caspian. Their heartland is vertical country — narrow valleys, stone villages perched on shelves, pastures that climb above the treeline — and that geography has shaped almost everything else about them. Avar is a Northeast Caucasian language, part of a small, dense family found nowhere else on earth and unrelated to Russian, Turkic, or Indo-European tongues; within that family it sits at the head of the Avar–Andic branch, with a cluster of closely related languages (Andi, Akhvakh, Karata and others) spoken in adjacent valleys and often grouped under the Avar umbrella for political and literary purposes, though their speakers do not always agree on that grouping.

They are Sunni Muslims, and have been for centuries, but the texture of that Islam is specific. The Naqshbandi and Qadiri Sufi orders took deep root in the mountains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and fused with older customary law, the adat, to produce a religious culture that is at once devout and intensely local — village-bound, lineage-bound, mediated through sheikhs and elders rather than distant clerics. The Caucasian War of 1817–1864 is the inflection point in their modern history: Imam Shamil, an Avar, led the mountain peoples' resistance against Russian imperial expansion for a quarter-century, and the eventual defeat — followed by mass deportations and emigration to the Ottoman Empire — still colours how Avars narrate themselves. A substantial Avar diaspora remains in Turkey today, descended from those muhajirs.

Daily life in the highlands has always run on a tight code of hospitality, honour, and obligation between clans (tukhum), and although Soviet collectivization and post-Soviet migration to Makhachkala and the Russian interior have hollowed out many of the old auls, the codes have travelled with the people. Avars are known for a martial tradition that long predates Shamil — the historic khanate of Avaria at Khunzakh was a regional power for centuries — and for a literary one as well: the twentieth-century poet Rasul Gamzatov, who wrote in Avar and was translated into Russian by some of the best translators of his era, is read and quoted across the former Soviet space. To be Avar, in short, is to belong to a small language with a long memory.