Khridoli (Georgian Martial Art)
ხრიდოლიA collective name for five Georgian martial disciplines brought together by a national federation since 1993. Not one school but an assembly of traditions.
Quick Facts
GeorgiaCharacter & Origin
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Khridoli (Georgian Martial Art)
About Khridoli (Georgian Martial Art)
Khridoli is a collective name for the traditional Georgian martial arts as brought together since 1993 by a national federation founded shortly after Georgia's independence from the Soviet Union. It is not one school with one doctrine but five disciplines side by side. Khardiorda is wrestling, krivi is fist fighting, parikaoba is fencing with sword and shield, rkena is gripping and throwing work close to judo and sambo, and the fifth discipline is archery. The federation holds them together as national heritage and has laid down competition rules for them. The best documented part is the fist fighting. The writer Ioseb Grishashvili recorded that khridoli was practised in old Tbilisi as a one-handed duel: under the rules of the day one of the opponents had a hand bound while the other was allowed to use both, which was meant to even out a difference in strength or experience. Details like that show that this was a living urban custom with rules of its own rather than a martial art in the present sense of the word. It should be said plainly that the dating to the twelfth century is not documented. What is documented is nineteenth- and twentieth-century practice and the modern federation of 1993; the older layer rests on tradition and on general references to the Georgian warrior past. Khridoli is therefore a modern assembly of surviving Georgian traditions rather than an unbroken school.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.