Bezhta Erotic

The Bezhta are a small mountain people of the high Caucasus who spent most of the twentieth century being counted as somebody else. Their home is a handful of villages in the Bezhta section of Tsuntinsky District, southwestern Dagestan, Russia, in the headwaters of the Avar Koysu just north of the main ridge and the Georgian border. Three settlements anchor the group, Bezhta itself, Tlyadal and Khocharkhota, each with its own dialect and each historically a self-governing village commune of the kind that ran highland Dagestan before Russian rule. Georgian sources knew the main village as Kapucha, which is why older ethnographies call the people Kapuchins. Their language sits in the Tsezic, or Dido, branch of the Northeast Caucasian family, a cluster of tongues spoken nowhere but this corner of Dagestan. Its closest relative is Hunzib, spoken in the next villages over. Bezhta has no standard written form. Avar has been the language of literacy and the market for generations, Russian arrived with the Soviets, and most adults switch among the three depending on who is in the room. That layering is also why the Bezhta are hard to count: Soviet nationality policy in the 1930s folded them, along with the other Andi and Dido peoples, into the Avar category, and they resurfaced as a separate line only in the 2002 census.

Islam came late to these valleys. Medieval Georgia reached over the ridge with priests and churches, and the Bezhta stayed within that Christian orbit for centuries before Sunni Islam, carried largely by Avar preachers, took hold in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today they are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, and religion runs through village life in the ordinary Dagestani way, with Ramadan fasting, the imam at weddings and burials, and the mosque as the settlement's anchor. Beneath it sits the older mountain code of adat: fierce hospitality, the honor of the extended family, and the obligations owed to a kunak, the guest-friend from another village who is treated as kin. The economy was and largely still is sheep. Herders traditionally walked their flocks down to winter pastures on the Caspian lowlands and back up to alpine meadows in summer, a cycle that shaped the calendar as firmly as any religious feast, while terraced fields on the slopes grew grain. Soviet resettlement moved some families to the plains, and Bezhta communities now exist there alongside the mountain villages, with Makhachkala pulling the young further still. The villages hold on, though, and the language with them, spoken by children who will grow up fluent in Avar and Russian as well.