Ren Ren,
Thanks for the clarification re. ‘Surmene” knives called by Russian historians ‘Circumpontian” to stress that those knives did not belong specifically to the town of Surmene, but were endemic to the entire Adjaro-Gurian areal. Perhaps, there was some justification to using geographical rather than ethnic attribution. It might be difficult to strict separation of ethnicities: for example, Meghrelian and Laz languages are just mutual dialects.
According to Dvalishvili, Laz were premier cutlers of the area, but in 1878 they largely migrated to the Ottoman Empire as “ mukhajirs”. Their names were modified from the original Georgian to Turkish.
A large part of Guria belonged to the Russian Empire well before that moment. Perhaps this is the reason why the so-called “Gurian” kindjals stayed separate from the rest of SW Georgia to the point that their kindjal with minor modifications was adopted by the Russian Black Sea Cossack Host.
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