Abstract:
Chokha was national men clothing in Georgia, and akhalukhi – a shirt
worn underneath the chokha. Caucasian peoples living in the North gladly
adopted chokha. In the 19th c. Russians saw the Circassians wearing this
clothing, and they invented Russian term for it: “cherkezka”. Now some believe
that chokha was invented by Circassians.
Narrative, frescoes, ethnographic data are applied by the author to show the
whole dialectics of transformation of the Georgian clothing called kaba to
chokha. The transformation was complete towards the 14th-15th cc. Then chokha
was adopted by the Ossetians, Chechens and Ingushs together with the Georgian
term.
