Rutulians Erotic

Ask a Rutul where they are from and the answer is a village before it is a people. The name outsiders use comes from Rutul, the largest settlement in the upper Samur valley, whose residents call themselves Mykhabyr, the people of Mykh. Ikhrek, Shinaz, Luchek, Borch and Khnov each had their own name for themselves and their own way of speaking, and the sense of one nationality that spans them is largely a twentieth-century construction. What ties the villages together is the valley itself: a high, steep stretch of southern Dagestan on the northern face of the Greater Caucasus, with a handful of daughter villages across the ridge in northern Azerbaijan around Shaki. The 2021 Russian census counted just over 34,000 Rutuls, a figure that has held roughly steady while many have moved down to Makhachkala, Derbent and the lowland resettlement villages.

Rutul belongs to the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian family, closest to Tsakhur, spoken one valley over. It keeps four grammatical noun classes that the bigger neighboring language, Lezgian, gave up long ago, and its five dialects diverge enough that Borch-Khnov speakers and Rutul-village speakers sometimes reach for a third language. That third language has usually been Azeri, the old lingua franca of southern Dagestan, with Russian layered on top since the Soviet era. Rutul had no alphabet until 1990, when a Cyrillic script was adopted and a newspaper followed. For generations before that, its poets and ashug singers composed in Azeri as readily as in their own tongue. Rutuls are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, and Islam took hold early here, with Arabic inscriptions in Rutul village dating to the twelfth century, among the oldest in the mountains. Alongside the mosque sits the pir, the shrine of a local holy figure, visited for healing and vows, and a spring festival with bonfires that is older than the mosque. Village life was governed for centuries by adat, customary law hammered out by elders at the godekan, the men's gathering place on the square, and the villages formed a free union that fought Russian columns at the end of the 1830s before being folded into the Samur district. The economy remains what it was: sheep and cattle driven between high summer pasture and the lowlands in autumn, terraced fields, orchards where the valley allows them. Women knit the patterned wool socks and weave the flat carpets that every southern Dagestani house still keeps, and Rutul stonemasons left carved stones with inscriptions and animal figures set into walls and grave markers that scholars are still cataloging.