Silent black witnesses

The presence of mountains in the poetry of Kosta Khetagurov

Kosta Khetagurov is a poet of mountains—specifically, of the Caucasus Mountains. It should be no surprise that the mountains are a character in his poetry. They are active agents. They are judges of moral failure, witnesses to exploitation, and silent helpers in the Ossetian struggle for survival. The mountains have a colour: black. This blackness embodies both their late fertility, and also the brutality of their inhabitants’ subjugation—including their self-subjugation. Khetagurov uses this dual character of the mountains in his poems to critique both economic deprivation and Ossetian elite complicity.

The Iranian roots of the хӕхтӕ

The Ossetian word for ‘mountain’ can appear as (Iron) ḫoḫ хох or (Digor) ḫonḫ хонх; in plural it is ḫæḫtæ хӕхтӕ. This word is of ancient Iranian origin; it derives from Old Persian kaufa^h 𐎣𐎢𐎳 and Avestan kaofa 𐬐𐬀𐬊𐬟𐬀 ‘mountain’, and is thus a doublet of the diminutive (Iron) qypp къупп ‘hill’, Wakhi kǝp ‘hump’ and Pashto kwab کوب ‘hump’. Other cognates include the Persian kōh کوه ‘mountain’ and Hindi koh कोह ‘mountain, hill’. At greater distance, through Proto-Indo-European linkages, it is related to Plattdeutsch Hübel and Luxembourgish Hiwwel ‘hill’; Lithuanian kaũpas ‘mound, pile’; and the English words ‘heap’ and ‘hive’. However, English-speakers might be more familiar with this root through the famous diamond Koh-i-Noor (from Persian کوه نور ‘mountain of light’) which presently forms part of the British crown jewels, having been plundered from Punjab in 1849.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond