Mingrelians


The Mingrelians are an indigenous Kartvelian-speaking ethnic subgroup of Georgians that mostly live in the Samegrelo region of Georgia. They also live in considerable numbers in Abkhazia and Tbilisi. In the pre-1930 Soviet census, the Megrelians were afforded their own ethnic group category.
The Mingrelians speak the Mingrelian language, and are typically bilingual also in Georgian. Both these languages belong to the Kartvelian language family.

History

In the 13th century BC, the Kingdom of Colchis was formed as a result of the increasing consolidation of the tribes inhabiting the region, which covered modern western Georgia. The endonym Margali is presumably reflected in the Greek Manraloi, recorded as a people of Colchis by Ptolemy in the 2nd century BC.
By the mid-3rd century, the Lazi tribe came to dominate most of Colchis, establishing the kingdom of Lazica negotiating with the invading Turks, 1856. An episode of the Crimean War.
In several censuses under the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union, Megrelians were considered a separate group, largely because at the time of the annexation Samegrelo was politically separate from eastern Georgia, the historical political and cultural centers of the Medieval Georgian Kingdoms. They were, reclassified under the broader category of Georgian in the 1930s. Currently, most Megrelians identify themselves as a subgroup of the Georgian nation and have preserved many characteristic cultural features - including the Megrelian language - that date back to the pre-Christian Colchian era.
Lavrentiy Beria, the Chief of Stalin's secret police, was a Mingrelian.
The first President of an independent Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was a Megrelian. Therefore, after the violent coup d'état of December 21, 1991 - January 6, 1992, Samegrelo became the centre of a civil war, which ended with the defeat of Gamsakhurdia's supporters.
Approximately 180,000-200,000 people of Georgian and Megrelian provenance have been expelled from Abkhazia as a result of the Abkhaz–Georgian conflict in the early 1990s and the ensuing ethnic cleansing of Georgians in this separatist region.

Notable Megrelians