The language, Lazuri, is a survival from a previous, almost lost deposit of human speech. A pre - Indo -European tongue, it belongs to the Kartvelian language -family of the Caucasus whose other members are Georgian (much the largest), Mingrelian and Svanetian. Mingrelian is the closest to Lazuri, and it would appear that both peoples were living as neighbours along the eastern shore of the Black Sea as long ago as ıooo BC.This coastal region around the river Phasis, near the modern Georgian ports of Poti and Batumi, was the land which the Greeks called Colchis, in mythology the home of Medea and the destination of the Argonauts who stole the Golden Fleece from its Colchian shrine. But it is unlikely that a single Colchian nation ever really existed. ..
At some point, a large part of the Lazi abandoned their country. They left ' Colchis ' and the Caucasus, and moved round the south - eastern corner of the Black Sea to their present territory in what is now Turkey. The Mingrelians, in contrast, stayed much where they were; most of them retained their Christain religion, like the Georgians, while the Lazi and the much larger Abkhazian language group living further north along the Caucasian coast converted to Islam in the fifteenth century. Why and when this migration took place is not known for certain, but it seems to have happened about a thousand years ago, in the middle Byzantine period, and the Lazi may have been displaced by an Arab invasion of the Caucasus.
In 1864, the Russian armies finally broke tribal resistance in the north - west Caucasus. Much of the Moslem population of Abkhazia and coastal Georgia fled or was expelled into the Ottoman Empire, and the many Lazi were swept along in the disaster. A small number still remain in Georgia. But their distinctiveness - like that of the Mingrelians - is resented by Georgian politicians and intellectualls who insist, inaccurately, that Georgian is their ' mother - tongue ' and that Mingrelian, Lazuri and Svanetians are mere 'dialects '. Arguments to the contrary, and attempts to provide these languages with a written literature and grammar, are shouted down as tokens of Russian cultural subversion, designed to undermine and divide Georgian culture and independence...
* Neal Ascherson, Black Sea, Jonathan Cape, London, 1995.