Photos of 19th century Svaneti highlands in Tbilisi exhibition

A series of photographs of Georgia’s mountainous Svaneti province from the 19th century, captured by mountaineer Vittorio Sella, will be on view for visitors at the ongoing Kolga Tbilisi Photo exhibition in Tbilisi on Saturday.

The images of the remote province, visited by the Italian traveller twice in the last decade of the century, will show locals, their customs and the picturesque natural environment they called home.

[Sella made his] first non-European expeditions [...] in Svaneti and Racha, Georgia. He visited these regions twice, in 1889-90 and in 1896. During these expeditions he climbed and photographed more than thirty peaks in Caucasus”, says a preview for the show.

The Italian climber's photograph of a Svan family.

Portraying the life in Svaneti, representing an exotic oriental interest to western Europeans at the time, Sella’s photographs were discovered in Italy by documentary filmmaker Rezo Tabukashvil.

The film director handed the discovered images, which also showed locals and their culture in Racha, to the National Archives of Georgia in 1983.

Sella’s travels included locations in America as well as Africa and Himalayas, with the trips to Svaneti and the Racha province in Georgia his first outside Europe.

A gathering of locals of the province, photographed by Sella.

Of the 30 peaks he reached in the Caucasus, the Biella-born climber became the pioneering climber for 20, while he also documented topographical data for the locations.

The Italian mountaineer was awarded for the latter work — which greatly benefited European geographic institutions’ knowledge of the region — with the Russian Imperial Order of Saint Anna.

Curated by Giorgi Kakabadze, the display Svaneti 1889 will be hosted at the exhibition pavilion of the National Archives of Georgia.