Caucasian defense tower
The Caucasian defense tower , also known as the Caucasian residential tower , is a historical defensive structure that has been widespread since the Middle Ages by family associations in the central and eastern North Caucasus and some areas of the Caucasus adjacent to the south . Defense towers are often preserved from Dagestan to Kabardino-Balkaria , also in northern Georgian mountain regions such as Svaneti , Chewsureti or Tusheti . Caucasian defense towers were used in localities to defend family groups, outside of them as a refuge in the event of an attack or as watchtowers.
In the Ingushetian highlands, every place belonged to a family group and contained several defense towers of the families belonging to it. Most of these Ingush defense towers were built between the 14th and 17th centuries. The autonomous republic of Ingushetia has a Caucasian defense tower in its coat of arms . Among the Swans in today's Georgia, the villages of Ushguli , a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, are particularly known for their defensive towers. Svanian defense towers differ from other defense towers in the Caucasus by their flatter, widened and supported roofs, under which the loopholes lie, while in the rest of the Caucasus more pointed roofs were common.
Comparison of defense towers inside and outside the Caucasus
While the Berber population built fortified collective warehouses in the Anti-Atlas and the western High Atlas , which offered protection to the inhabitants of an entire village or several villages, in some Caucasian tribes each family association and each family - and thus each homestead - has its own defensive tower. This practice is derived from the principle of blood revenge, which could cause long-term conflicts within a village. This was especially true for peoples and villages in the Caucasus who lived in a purely stateless tribal society without princes, such as the Chechens , Ingush , part of the Georgian Svanes, the Ossetians and others; rather in the high mountains. In societies of the Caucasus that previously lived in principalities or had trained a class of aristocracy - Kabardians , some Swans and Northeast Georgians, most of the inhabitants of Dagestan, etc. a. - Internal disputes were often decided on court days of the princes. These places often only had a common defense tower in the village or on the edge of the village. In Dagestan, the rural population had not been organized politically and socially into kinship clans since the 14th century, but into village communities that jointly regulated all legal, military and agricultural matters, including moving to winter pastures on the edge of the mountains, regardless of the degree of kinship. Dagestani villages therefore usually only have one or two escape towers for the entire village, while with their more western neighbors every family or even every homestead has its own defense tower.
Outside of the Caucasus, such rural defense towers were also used by family associations in southwestern Arabia, in Europe also in Albania , there simply referred to as a tower ( Albanian Kulla ).
In central and southern Europe were the early Middle Ages and Middle Ages in some cities towers Regensburg and many Italian cities that are only rarely received today built, as in Cologne. They were also family defense towers in the case of the feud , but were only built in cities because only the nobility and townspeople carried arms.
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Individual evidence
- ↑ Ronald L. Sprouse: Introduction . In: Ders .: Ingush-English and English-Ingush dictionary . Routledge, London 2004, ISBN 0415315956 , p. 2.
- ↑ a b Gabriele Schwarz: General settlement geography , part 1 ( The rural settlements ). de Gruyter, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-11-007895-3 , p. 105.
- ↑ Amjad M. Jaimoukha: The Chechens: a handbook . Routledge / Curzon, New York 2005, ISBN 0-415-32328-2 , pp. 165 ff.