Kaitags Erotic

The Kaitags are a small people of the eastern foothills of Dagestan, inland from the Caspian between Derbent and Izberbash, spread through the valley of the Ulluchay and the ridges folded up behind it. Officially they are Dargins. Soviet and Russian censuses have counted them that way for the better part of a century, so the published figures say very little about how many people actually call themselves Kaitag. Their speech makes the case they are not allowed to make on a form. Kaitag belongs to the Dargin branch of the Northeast Caucasian family, and it has drifted far enough from the Akusha dialect underlying literary Dargwa that speakers of the two do not simply follow each other. Most linguists now treat it as a language in its own right, next to its close relative Kubachi, and it carries the family's hallmarks: a crowded consonant inventory, ergative marking, noun classes, and a finely divided set of cases for saying exactly where something sits. Russian does school and paperwork. Kaitag does the house, the yard, and the funeral.

Islam came early, pushed inland from Derbent, and Kala-Koreysh, now a ruin on a spur above the river, was both one of the first mountain footholds of the faith and later the seat of the utsmi, the hereditary ruler of Kaitag. The utsmiate outlasted most of its neighbors and was finally abolished by Russia in the 1820s, after which Kaitag became a district like any other. What survives from it in the historians' hands is the seventeenth-century law code associated with the utsmi Rustem-Khan, which set customary adat beside sharia and priced out, in flat specifics, what a killing or a theft or a public insult cost a man. Belief today is Sunni, of the Shafi'i school, and it shows in the calendar and in funerals more than in what people wear. The one Kaitag thing outsiders tend to know is the embroidery: squares of cotton roughly a yard across, worked in couched silk floss in compositions that refuse symmetry and repetition, spirals, hooks, eyes, forms split down the middle that specialists have been trying to source for decades. These were never wall pieces. A cloth wrapped a cradle, covered a bride's face, and was laid over the face of the dead, one object serving at all three thresholds. Women made them at home for their own families rather than for sale, which is why the outside world only noticed when collectors reached Dagestan in the late Soviet years, by which time the making had largely stopped.