46 Orientalism and Empireidentity of the region in the present, and the military commander
slowed his troops to ponder the origins of the cross.^50
Imperial rule, in this vision, included an almost populist respect for
the culture of the common people. Writers portrayed Turkish emis-
saries, Muslim mullas, and Sufi teachers as illegitimate outsiders who
obstructed the expression of the true and indigenous culture of the
mountaineers.^51 The Adygei, claimed Dubrovin, maintained “their
own religion, consisting of a mixture of paganism, Christianity, and
Islam,” in contrast to their thoroughly Muslim clergy.^52 Adygei folk
songs, he discovered, contained many themes and melodies similar
to Georgian church music.^53 While time worked toward the “destruc-
tion of the remnants of Christianity,” wrote L. Ia. Liul’e of the Adygei
lands, he found evidence that this tradition had endured: the ruins of
old Christian temples still stood in parts of Adygei, such as along the
upper Kuban and along the road to Abkhazia through the main
Caucasus range. A Christian temple at Pitsunda had “stood up
against the destructive influence of time.”^54 Adygei beliefs and ritu-
als, Liul’e emphasized, bore many similarities to the world of early
Christianity. Adygei and Georgian words for the cross were almost
identical, as they were for the days of the week.^55 For Liul’e, these
ethnographic discoveries were evidence of an ancient Orthodox past
that was not completely forgotten, that Islam had not entirely de-
stroyed. The Abkhaz offered similar possibilities. Christianity was in-
troduced in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, and
Islam was later spread by the Turks. Yet the Turks, claimed Dubrovin,
failed to “completely erase Christianity from the memory of the peo-
ple,” and the hope of revival remained. Kartvelians (Georgians) too
had “to a great extent preserved their ancient character,” he wrote,
and Russian rule would allow the region’s historic and “genuine”
cultures to grow and thrive.^56 The indigenous Christian faith of the
narod endured through time, in spite of foreign rule and the foreign
borrowing characteristic of the elite.
Georgia was the shining light in this historical debate, perpetually
true to its Christian heritage and past in the face of a long history of in-
vasion and misfortune frequently brought by Islamic empires. The de-
piction of Georgia by Georgians as “the nation justifiably called the
avant-garde of Christianity in Asia,” as G.N. Kazbegi put it, was an im-
portant source of inspiration for a Russia in the process of imperial
expansion into Asian borderlands.^57 Georgian essayists frequently
outlined a history of Christianity in the region under threat from the
Mongols, Turks, and Persians, culminating in the fortunate circum-
stances of Russia’s annexation and protection of Georgia’s historic
Christian identity.^58 Church writers predictably emphasized the