Zana of Tkhina

Common card · No. 322169

Zana (Abkhaz: Зана) was a woman who lived in Abkhazia, then part of the Russian Empire, in the 19th century. Due to her unusual appearance and behavior, she was assumed to be an abnauayu during her lifetime. She was described as being very tall, athletic, dark-skinned, and covered in red hair. After being captured, she was sold into slavery and eventually ended up in the possession of an Abkhaz nobleman, Edgi Genaba, where she resided on his estate for the rest of her life. She never lived indoors nor learned to speak, although she had at least four children under unclear circumstances. She died around the 1880s and was buried in the Genaba family cemetery. Soviet academics began studying Zana's story in the 1960s, and collected local folklore about her. She became a fixture among cryptozoologists and proponents of relict hominids; she was presented as evidence of the existence of the wild-man, or of a surviving Neanderthal population. Although her son Khwit's body was exhumed in 1971,...

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