ABSTRACT
According to the ethos of the Caucasian mountaineers, the soul of a people resides in its music and dance. Music and poetry have had a special place in the Vainakh world, as is evidenced by the still extant corpus of legends, and were the principal means by which much of the history, culture and traditions were preserved. Many social occasions were graced by the music and stories of the minstrels and story-tellers, who employed melodic verses to make the tales more attractive and thus easier to incorporate in the national ethos. Music and song were the perfect vehicles to convey romantic words of love and the mysteries of life. Reconciliatory terms were pronounced in song, as were binding oaths, not forgetting maledictions that stuck to their subjects for ages. Music was even thought to have soothing and curative properties, and, as such, chants were part and parcel of the stock-in-trade of folk doctors, hymned by the bed of the sick as invocations to ward off evil spirits. Song and dance were also used as war implements to animate the warriors to perform feats of glory. Their adoration of music was a salient indication of the Vainakh’s healthful attitude to life.
