Window on Eurasia: Can the Udi, a Small Nation with Five Alphabets, Survive?

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 9 – Many nations in the former Soviet space have had to struggle with changes in alphabets from Persido-Arabic to Latin script to Cyrillic and then to Latin once again, shifts that have in some cases cut one generation off from another and dramatically reduced the amount of reading older people accustomed to one script do in another.

 

            But few have had to live with several scripts simultaneously, and perhaps none has ever had to live with five different alphabets at once except for the Udi, a 10,000-strong nation centered in Azerbaijan that descends from the Albanian Christians of the Caucasus and one that is facing serious difficulties in retaining its language and culture.

 

            Robert Mobili, the head of the Albanian-Udi Christian Religious Community in the Azerbaijani village of Nidzh near Gabala, says that his nation is proud of its direct descent from the Caucasian Albanians and proud of its cooperative, even syncretic relations with the peoples among whom it lives (gumilev-center.az/vse-dorogi-vedut-v-nidzh/).

 

            Both under the tsars and the Soviets, the Albanian church helped preserve the community, he says. When the Russian state occupied the Udi territory 170 years ago, the Udis saw their national church combined with the Armenian Gregorian church. In response, they created house churches, a pattern they continued under Soviet anti-religious conditions.

 

            Now, they are free to practice their religion and have two registered churches in Azerbaijan, but the community is small and thus at risk.  There are more than 10,000 Udis in the former Soviet space, of whom “about 4,000” live in Azerbaijan, with smaller groups living in Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, Mobili says.

 

            Like many numerically small and dispersed peoples, young Udis are not learning the language because they use a second or third language more regularly. That task is complicated by the fact that the Udis use five different alphabets: their own ancient one, the Cyrillic, the Georgian, the Armenian, and the Latin script. 

 

            According to Mobili, many Udis find it difficult to make a choice among these. But unless they do and decide on a common one, he suggests, they face an uphill battle to maintain their nation. And because of the cultural traditions of the Udis, that would be a loss for the region and the world.

 

            Unlike many small groups who have survived by tightly focusing inward, he says, the Udis have done so by developing cooperative and even syncretic relationships with other religious and ethnic groups, inviting Muslims to their ceremonies and participating in Muslim practices themselves.

 

            For example, Mobili says, the Udis regularly invite Muslims to their celebrations of Christmas and participate in the ritual sacrifices on the Islamic Gurban Bayram holiday.