In Search of the Georgian Spindle

When I first started looking into the history of spinning tools in Georgia, I thought I was searching for one thing.

The Georgian spindle.

I imagined there would be a familiar form — a traditional shape, perhaps a particular wood, something that could be pointed to and simply called the Georgian spindle.

Instead, the deeper I looked, the less that idea made sense.

Travel from one region of Georgia to another and the spindle could have a different name. Its proportions could change. Its whorl could be made from wood, stone, clay or bone. And, perhaps most interestingly, even the way the spindle was used was not always the same.

What I found was not one Georgian spindle.

I found many Georgian spinning traditions.

And that is a much more interesting story.

The small pieces that survived

The common Georgian word for spindle is თითისტარი — titistari.

The weighted part of the spindle is called კვირისტავი — kviristavi, the whorl that helps the tool continue turning.

That small piece is especially important when we look far back into the past.

Wood does not always survive thousands of years in the ground. Stone, fired clay and bone often do.

So some of the earliest evidence for spinning in Georgia does not come to us as a complete spindle with its shaft still intact.

Instead, we find the part that survived.

The whorl.

Archaeologists have discovered them in different parts of Georgia and from very different periods. They were not all alike. Some were decorated, others plain. Some were shaped from clay or stone, and others from bone.

At the ancient settlement of Rabati in southwestern Georgia, excavations uncovered a group of textile-working tools dating to roughly 2400–2000 BCE.

Among them were spindle whorls of different forms: biconical, conical and disc-shaped. One fired-clay example weighed about 35 grams. Another damaged whorl had been made from part of an animal bone.

The same archaeological context also produced evidence connected with textile manufacture and plant fibers including flax and hemp.

These objects do not show us every movement the spinner made.

They cannot tell us what her hands looked like while she worked or where she sat.

But they tell us something very simple and very important:

People here were turning fiber into thread a very long time ago.

Then the wooden spindle begins to appear

Much later ethnographic sources bring us closer to the actual tools people remembered and used.

One of the most interesting descriptions is of a spindle called the khertali.

It was a wooden spindle about 30 centimetres long, pointed at both ends, with a more slender upper section and a thicker lower one.

Near the lower end sat a whorl.

And one recorded example describes that whorl as being turned from pear wood.

I love this detail.

Not simply because pear is a beautiful wood, but because suddenly the spindle stops feeling like an abstract museum object.

Someone chose that wood.

Someone shaped it.

Someone fitted it to the spindle.

And someone eventually sat down with wool and used it.

For me, those small practical details make old tools feel alive again.

The khertali was only one form, however.

Other Georgian sources describe spindle whorls made from wood, stone, clay, bone and metal.

Even rare examples made from precious material have been recorded.

So there was no single material that defined a Georgian spindle.

And there was no single name either.

The name changed as you travelled

Georgia is a small country, but anyone who knows it understands how strongly regional identity can change from one valley to the next.

Language changes.

Food changes.

Clothing changes.

Songs change.

And apparently, spinning vocabulary changed too.

Ethnographic sources record different local names for spindles in places such as Imereti, Adjara, Racha, Samegrelo and Svaneti.

Some of those names describe very similar tools. Different words do not automatically mean completely different technologies.

But the variety tells us something important.

Spinning was not an abstract national tradition preserved in exactly the same way everywhere.

It belonged to households and regions.

Women learned from the people around them. Tools were made locally. Wood and other materials came from what was available. Techniques and words could travel, change or remain particular to one place.

So perhaps asking “What did the Georgian spindle look like?” is already the wrong question.

A better question might be:

What did Georgian spindles look like?

And then I found the part that surprised me most

Some Georgian ethnographic descriptions mention something very different from the suspended spindle many people imagine first.

In eastern Georgia, sources describe a small spindle without a whorl that rotated against or inside a wooden support.

In Samtskhe-Javakheti, there is also a description of women spinning with the spindle turning in a bowl resting in the lap.

For a modern spinner, that immediately sounds familiar.

The spindle is not simply hanging freely beneath the fiber.

It is turning with the help of a supporting surface.

Today we would recognize that as a form of supported spinning.

This does not mean that every ancient spindle discovered in Georgia was used this way.

And it does not mean that a modern support spindle is a reconstruction of an old Georgian tool.

History is rarely that neat.

But finding these descriptions fascinated me.

Because suddenly supported spinning did not feel like something completely disconnected from the place where we are making Kravelli tools today.

There were people here, in Georgia, using the same basic idea:

a spindle turning with the help of a support.

The tools may have looked different.

The fibers may have been different.

The technique may have changed from region to region.

But the principle is recognizable.

Old tools do not need to become legends

I think there is a temptation when we discover something like this to make the story bigger than the evidence allows.

To say that modern Kravelli spindles come directly from an ancient Georgian tradition.

They do not.

Our support spindles are contemporary Kravelli designs, made in Georgia today by skilled makers for today's handspinners.

They are not archaeological reproductions.

They are not copies of ethnographic Georgian spindles.

And I actually think the true story is more interesting without trying to force that connection.

What these older tools give us is not a pedigree.

They give us questions.

Why was pear wood chosen for the whorl described with the khertali?

How different were the spindles of neighboring Georgian regions?

What exactly did the whorl-less supported spindle look like?

How was a spindle bowl shaped?

Did certain woods become preferred because of weight, availability or simply because a local maker understood them well?

How many examples still sit quietly in museum collections, rarely seen by modern handspinners?

Those are the questions I would now love to follow.

The spindle as an everyday object

Perhaps my favorite thing about researching all of this is remembering that these were not originally “heritage objects.”

They were tools.

Someone reached for them because yarn needed to be made.

Wool needed to become thread.

Thread needed to become cloth, socks, garments, ropes or things for the household.

A spindle could be beautiful, of course.

But first it had a job to do.

And that is something I feel very strongly about at Kravelli too.

I love beautiful wood. I love unusual grain, different combinations of walnut and pear, and the shapes our makers are able to create.

But a spindle should not live only in a photograph.

It should turn.

It should collect fingerprints.

It should travel with its spinner.

It should eventually become the tool someone instinctively reaches for.

Maybe that is where I feel the strongest connection to the older Georgian story.

Not in claiming that our spindles are the same.

But in remembering that a beautiful wooden tool can still be, above everything else, a working tool.

So what is “the Georgian spindle”?

After all this research, I don't think I can show you one object and say:

Here it is. This is the Georgian spindle.

And I'm glad.

Instead we find stone and clay.

Bone and wood.

Whorled spindles and whorl-less ones.

Different regional names.

Different proportions.

And even different ways of making a spindle turn.

What looked at first like one simple question opened into a much larger picture of Georgian spinning culture.

And I think we have only started looking.

There are still old tools to find.

Old descriptions to translate.

Regional memories to record.

And perhaps people who still remember seeing these spindles used.

That is exactly what I hope Threads of Georgia can become.

Not an attempt to create a perfect romantic version of Georgia's textile past.

But a way of looking carefully at what survives — one tool, one memory and one thread at a time.

From Georgia,
Dea 🤎