Riho for Lunch: Etseri, Svaneti
Well, I never expected that to go viral. It’s just a short video clip of my new Canadian friends (about whom I wrote last week) and I singing the first verse of a Svan song which they had just taught me. I posted the thing on my guest house Facebook page and, now at roughly fifty thousand views a week or so later, it’s in a category which I’ve never applied to any of my posts before this. Huh.
Riho, my village’s choir, which has twice gone to France to tour and cut CDs of their singing, came over a few days ago to join the Canadians, record some songs upstairs in the nice quite Venetian living room, and have a bite. My wife’s in Tbilisi for a few more days, so it was a modest meal, but we managed to make it a proper supra in any case, with a 5L bottle of Kakhetian wine brought along. As I was cooking, I heard the wonderful harmonies coming down through the ceiling, as though a serious throng of angels were serenading me.
Over the meal, some rather strong opinions were voiced about certain various villages in Upper Svaneti, their collections of “local” songs, and who has the right or duty to make these known and even to profit from their singing and teaching. Seems that Etseri has the most of these songs, but that some other villages’ singers have taken them and gone the route to filthy lucre in the process. It’s certainly something to which neither my Canadian friends nor I can add anything useful, being outsiders and far too ignorant of the last few centuries’ history of songs in this province. So all we could do was nod, hmm and otherwise not disagree.
Toasts were punctuated with many more songs and, this time surrounded by the voices in their wild harmonies, I found myself wanting only to shut my eyes so as not to be distracted by the visual, just to drink in the river of sweet sounds washing over and around me. I had really only previously heard Riho at funerals, singing one or two standard numbers for the dead, but this was a much more joyful and profound experience. I recorded a few of the songs, as had been done upstairs too, and these too will find their way online, as the members have requested and allowed.
The group has existed as such for more than 40 years, and longer than that by other names, with quite a few of those five present able to say they have been a part of it for most of that time. They have been to other countries in Europe as well, from as far back as the communist period, when they would have been tightly controlled to avoid defections. But it’s hard to recruit new members now, so the current average age must be in the 50s somewhere, unfortunately. New blood, where are you? Badly needed, but wasting yourself in hard drinking and other voice-wrecking activities!
My Canadian friend’s doctoral thesis on this singing is a badly needed document, on which he is working hard. It will add some considerable weight and volume to the information available in English on the subject, and I hope it becomes available as a properly published book, to further its popularity and enlarge its audience. We’ve had a masterly tome on Georgian literature already, in my language, so this has its place. If there is a heaven, I believe that cultures won’t be lost up there, and that Georgians will have a high place among the various choirs making up the Heavenly Host. Deservedly.
Tony Hanmer runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1300 members, at
www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
Tony Hanmer