Kadmos. A Journal of the Humanities

A Collection of Georgian Sermons by a Non-Georgian Preacher

2025-07-23T13:35:41+00:00

Ilia State University recently published a collection of commentaries on the Bible and sermons, written in Georgian, in two volumes. The manuscripts of these texts, housed in two separate collections without mention of the preacher, are currently in the General Archive of the Order of Capuchins (Archivio Generale Cappuccini), in Rome. These teachings, it seems, were originally preached by a non-Georgian priest in the second half of the eighteenth century for Georgian Catholic believers. In the preface to the edition, the publishers suggest that the author was likely the Italian missionary Bernardino de Magliano.
The biblical commentaries include twenty-one texts, and the number of sermons stands at sixty-six. With such a large collection of writings now made accessible, over two centuries after they were printed, the need has arisen to clarify the meaning and value of the published texts, both as a whole and individually. It is necessary to give them a proper place not only in the Georgian homiletic heritage, which includes centuries-old remnants of Christian sermons, but also in the national history of Georgia, Church history, history of public life, cultural history, and intellectual history. Further study of the texts from linguistic, literary, and ethnological perspectives will undoubtedly bear fruit.
The manuscripts have not been preserved in their entirety, as evidenced by the fact that the Biblical explanations provided by the preacher concern only the text of one book of the Old Testament, the First Book of Kings.

The article assesses the general significance of this two-volume work and presents the value of the published texts for understanding Biblical or theological knowledge in the Georgian context of the time. Notably, in some sermons, the preacher addresses the believers from Tbilisi, indicating that the temple in which he served was located in Tbilisi.
The preacher considers it necessary to explain theological teachings, such as the concept of Purgatory, which is viewed differently by followers of the Roman-Catholic Church and the Oriental-Byzantine Church. In addition, the list of Church Fathers and Teachers referenced by the priest differs, although special attention is given to the views of the Doctors of the Catholic Church, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas.
The descriptions of the everyday environment where divine service takes place are valuable for researchers. The preacher sharply assesses the attitude of believers towards being in the temple and participating in rituals. These descriptions will likely prove extremely useful to those studying how religion, culture, and intellectual movements shaped Georgia’s history, making them essential reading for anyone studying that period.

Un fragment d’index géorgien des lectures évangéliques selon l’ancien rite de Jérusalem

2025-07-23T14:06:22+00:00

Kadmos. A Journal of the Humanities 16.2024 publishes a Georgian translation of the article Un fragment d’index géorgien des lectures évangéliques selon l’ancien rite de Jérusalem by Kartvelologist Bernard Outtier. The original text of the article was published in Cahiers d’orientalisme 25, Genève, 2005: 273-278. The Georgian translation is by Tsisana Bibileishvili.

Le mot რია existe-t-il en géorgien ancien?

2025-07-23T14:13:37+00:00

Kadmos. A Journal of the Humanities 16.2024 publishes a Georgian translation of the article Le mot რია existe-t-il en géorgien ancien? by Kartvelologist Bernard Outtier. The original text of the article was published in Bedi Kartlisa XLII, 1984: 246-247. The Georgian translation is by Tsisana Bibileishvili.

Prosopographic Database of Catholic Missions in Georgia

2025-07-23T13:44:19+00:00

The paper shows how the Digital Humanities serve as both a methodological framework and a conceptual lens through which we can explore complex historical phenomena, such as the interactions between Europe and Georgia. By harnessing digital tools, we can analyze vast datasets, visualize intricate relationships, and reconstruct historical narratives that were previously obscured by the limitations of traditional research methods. Digital methodologies can augment our understanding of socio-cultural exchanges and political dynamics in medieval and modern history. The study of the achievements of Catholic missionaries in Georgia in the 17th-19th centuries is based on Italian, Latin, French, Russian and Georgian sources, most of which are not yet published. The primary sources are preserved in Italian archives and hold significant value from the religious, cultural, philological, social, legal, political, and historical perspective. By applying cutting-edge digital humanities methods, particularly through the creation of a prosopographic database based on factoids, we will be able to explore and visualize key issues in the social history of this period.
In the prosopographic database of missions we developed, we convert data from primary sources into a digital format, and process it according to the required standards. The data is then integrated into the database structure.
As a result of our research, we have created a new platform in digital humanities − a bilingual prosopographic database of Catholic missions of Georgia. This resource is valuable in many ways, as it enables the study of the interactions between religious groups. It also sheds light on the political and cultural orientations of the kings and princes, revealing a clearer picture of the relationships between the principalities.

A proposal that Lycian A waxssepddimi is not a name in TL44a.49, but means “man-at-arms”

2025-07-23T12:09:31+00:00

I explain in detail why waxssepddimi is a nominalised compound meaning “armed”, a military designation also used as a personal name. This word occurs once in the Lycian A corpus, never in Lycian B’s, and, with its variant uxssepddimi, among the names of coin-issuing dynasts. The Xanthos Stele (TL44), although a little damaged by weathering, shows waxssepddimi in a historical narrative, generally assumed to refer to one of these dynasts, but I see it as having its literal sense there. The element waxssa/e- occurs in TL44’s Lycian B part declined as an uncompounded noun. Some dynasts’ names are compounds, and evidence is adduced of military and social ranks being used as personal names. The contexts of waxssa/e- and (-)pdd- allow the literal meaning of waxsse-pddimi in TL44a.49’s perplexing statement to be seen as completing a closer translation of the Greek in TL44c.29, and the stele author’s boast seems unlikely to be omitted from the more detailed Lycian A narrative. I translate se waxssepddimi ẽti zehi hbãti C|| u[le], as “and 7 hoplite(s) within (a) day’s fullness”. The word waxssepddimi is the Lycian equivalent of “hoplite”, and “killed” is shown to be the preceding tebete, unconnected to the final, problematic u[le].

From Soviet Film to Post-Soviet Novel: Zaira Arsenishvili’s Woe is Life: Kakhetian Chronicles As a Case of Ideological Emancipation

2025-07-23T12:33:50+00:00

This article discusses the film by Lana Gogoberidze, Georgian director Lana Gogoberidze, “The Day is Longer than Night”, and the novel by Georgian writer Zaira Arsenishvili , Georgian writer, “Woe is Life: Kakhetian Chronicles”. The research was conducted with the assumption that the fictional text is the intermediate adaptation of the film; that the film is its “so called novelized” version.

The purpose of the article is to study the changes in the representation of over 19 years of Soviet sociopolitical issues as a result of intermedial transposition, in the conditions of the presence and then absence of ideological censorship, from the film to the novel.

The research is based on the theories of the renowned scholars in the sphere of intermediality, in particular, the typologies of Werner Wolf and Irina Rajewsky. It has been established that in both media products, the event that has caused the conflict – the Soviet revolution – is identified with the trauma. In transformation of the source medium into the target one, the critical attitude to the revolution has did not changed. In the original source it is implied, while, in the adaptation it is openly revealed. Revolution is defeated in both, in the creative world of the source, as and well as in its adaptation: in the film by Giorgi’s return, and in the novel by the restoration of justice, is realized by the “principle of “paying back”.

David Guramishvili's Metrics

2025-07-23T13:03:27+00:00

The article discusses important aspects of the metrics of the outstanding 18^th-century poet David Guramishvili. It is said that not a single Georgian poet enriched Georgian poetry with such a variety of meters as Guramishvili, although the vast majority of these meters were not used in the Georgian poetry of subsequent periods. This diversity is largely explained by the fact that Guramishvili wrote his poems based on the “voices” of Russian and Ukrainian songs. The poet himself indicates in which “voice” he wrote this or that poem. Does this term – “voice” – mean poetic meter? We analyzed Guramishvili's poems of this type and found that the meters of the Russian-Ukrainian songs referenced by the poet in most cases do not align with the meters of the corresponding poems by Guramishvili.

According to some researchers, Guramishvili's "voice" refers to musical rhythm, and Guramishvili's poems were intended to be recitated or even sung, although this view has not been confirmed through an analysis of Guramishvili's poetic texts. We have established that the characteristic heterometry of Guramishvili's poetry requires an isochronous reading of heterometric lines in stanzas, with short segments of individual lines being equated to the long segments of other lines. This suggests that Guramishvili did not base his poems on the texts of Russian-Ukrainian songs, but rather on their musical rhythm, adhering to the isochrony of musical bars. We can conclude that Guramishvili’s poetry is inherently synthetic - it is not purely a product of versification, but it is closely linked to music. This explains why most of the meters introduced by Guramishvili were not adopted in the Georgian poetry of subsequent eras: the poetry of those eras was not meant to be sung, and thus could not assimilate and apply Guramishvili’s verse meters. In Guramishvili’s poetry, the so-called new “meters” were not versification innovations, but are specific structural elements characteristic of this unusual poetry itself. These elements became verse meters only as a result of their reproduction in the works of other poets, when they became elements of Georgian metrics as a system.

Argument Markers in Georgian Sign Language (GESL)

2025-07-23T14:47:00+00:00

The cornerstone of any language is the structure of a verb and its arguments, comprising the subject and objects. Spoken languages primarily encode this structure using mechanisms such as word order, verb agreement, and case markers. In contrast, sign languages generally lack morphological case marking. This makes the tendency of Georgian Sign Language to employ multiple markers for encoding arguments particularly intriguing. The argument markers discussed in the article have grammaticalized from different sources and exhibit varying restrictions. The study emphasizes the importance of considering the presence of such argument markers when analyzing verb agreement and argument structure patterns in sign languages.

Love as a Destructive Force

2025-07-23T13:16:51+00:00

Our article examines the destructive force of love in world literature classics through Niklas Luhmann's sociological perspective, explored in his book Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (1982). According to Luhmann, establishing connections and shaping or reshaping social systems relies significantly on the communication code of love rather than the commonly assumed factor of sincere feelings. To illustrate this concept, we analyze contemporary representations of the myth of the Argonauts and the story of Tristan and Isolde, in two novels by American and Georgian writers: John Updike's Brazil (1994) and Otar Chiladze's A Man Was Going Down the Road (1973). These texts were selected for their reimagining of classic love-centered narratives.

The textual examples of the Argonauts demonstrate how powerful the force of love can be: Medea's decision to embrace her passion for Jason leads to the dethroning of the king. In the second novel, while the apparent societal disruption brought about by love may seem insignificant—an upper-class daughter forming a family with a poor young man—the text displays that the activation of the love code becomes the basis for gender, racial, and social equality gradually eroding the established social order.

The Role of Photography and Multimedia in Documenting Cultural and Historical Heritage

2025-07-23T13:49:33+00:00

The article explores the role of multimedia tools, particularly photography, in preserving memory by helping anthropologists and historians in documenting the details of traditions, seminal events, and artifacts that might otherwise be lost. Photography’s ability to capture detailed representations of architecture, frescos, and other representations of fine art greatly supports the work of restorers and conservators. The use of photography and multimedia tools in education, i.e. in training students in fields related to history and cultural heritage, is an increasingly important academic pursuit.
This article discusses three main uses of photography: as a tool for restoration, as a means of revealing that which is otherwise invisible to the untrained eye, and as a method for documenting traditional customs. It concludes with an overview of the educational potential of photography and multimedia.
In the context of living heritage, the issue of subjectivity and the inherently interpretative nature of photography is also addressed. The introduction positions photography as a medium that emerged alongside modern social sciences. While acknowledging the limitations of media, including photography, to fully capture social reality, this article treats those limitations as a mere background issue. The focus remains on cases in which the camera and multimedia tools can efficiently achieve a high degree of objectivity and bring tangible research results.

Comparable Corpora: Compilation Methods and Areas of Application

2025-07-23T14:00:33+00:00

Comparable corpora and their application in research have been an object of interest since the 1990s. Following the establishment of the annual workshop series “Building and Using Comparable Corpora” (BUCC) in 2008, there has been an increasing interest in comparable corpora and the study of their effectiveness for bilingual/multilingual projects. Although there is a general comparable corpus of the Georgian language compiled as part of the “Aranea” project, a family of web-crawled comparable corpora, currently, there are no specialized comparable corpora available for the Georgian language. In general, the application of comparable corpora for bilingual/multilingual specialized lexicography in Georgia is a novel research topic that has not been explored before. Therefore, this review paper aims to analyze the concept and types of comparable corpora. It also discusses the advantages of using comparable corpora and the areas of their application. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the methods of compiling specialized comparable corpora, in particular, such issues as representativeness, balance, corpus size, and comparability criteria.

The Narrative Structure of Amiran-Darejaniani in Light of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale

2025-07-23T13:25:08+00:00

This article examines one of the most significant works of Georgian secular literature from the Classical Age, Amiran-Darejaniani (attributed to Mose Khoneli), through the lens of Vladimir Propp’s 1928 research titled Morphology of the Folktale.
According to the established opinion, Amiran-Darejaniani is regarded as a collection of individual stories centered around the main character of the story, Amiran Darejanidze. Using Propp’s structural framework, this article aims to prove the compositional unity of Amiran-Darejaniani.
Propp’s work is dedicated to researching the poetics and internal structure of magical folktales. This article applies his methodology to the composition of Amiran-Darejaniani, examining how the individual stories merge, and analyzing the functions of the protagonists. However, since Amiran-Darejaniani is not a folktale but a literary work, the article also touches upon the peculiarities of this literary text in comparison to a folk narrative.

100 Years of Georgian Futurism

2025-07-23T14:28:54+00:00

The centenary of the Futurist group and journal H2SO4 (1924) prompted the Institute of Comparative Literature and the Centre for Advanced Studies of Ilia State University in Tbilisi to set up an international conference, Recalling Avant-garde Moments, Reconnecting Avant-garde Scenes, 9–11 October 2024. The Georgian university teamed up with the Institute of Philosophy and Art History of Leuphana University of Lüneburg and organized a programme that retraced and compared various avant-garde scenes of the 1910s and 20s. Here, a celebration of one-hundred years of Georgian Futurism was combined with a discussion of other, comparable and often related avant-garde tendencies. Among the papers presented, the conference offered altogether seven presentations focusing on Futurism, discussing the Tbilisi avant-garde of 1917-1921, H2SO4 and the artists who made this publication possible.
The gathering at Ilia State University in October 2024 was a fitting reminder how an international network of inter-avant-garde alliances can give rise to artistic developments that add new facets and fresh colours to the broad family of Futurist groups all over the world. It showed that Futurism had a pervasive, far-reaching and often profound influence in other countries. Yet, it also showed that Futurist artists never followed a monolithic set of prescriptions but rather incorporated ideas and devices from many sources. Their attempts at finding alternatives to traditionalist art meant that they adopted aspects of Futurism and combined them with other, indigenous sources of inspiration. This resulted in a wide spectrum of Futurisms that were distinctly different from the one created and directed by F.T. Marinetti. The Georgian journal H2SO4 shows that Futurism had a fertilizing influence in the Caucasus, yet also revealed that Georgian Futurism adapted the ideas received from Italy and Russia to a local agenda.