10-20 years ago, in the wilder version of the Internet, I remember reading an article about a village discovered by the Soviets in a remote corner of the USSR which was still operating or arranged in an almost medieval way (plate or chain armor, swords, etc). I was to say the article places it in Georgia, and apparently there was a Knights Templar overlay to it.
That’s pretty fantastical; that a village could be forgotten to time for about 500-700 years, mostly cut off from technology, and then be rediscovered. These weren’t like Amazonian tribes, but a similar concept.
I’ve done some recent looking, but can’t find anything like it online now. The closest is this family that was “lost” in Siberia for 40 years before being found by Soviet mineral scientists in the 1970s. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/
Was there any truth to the lost medieval village? Or was this “legend” more like a Weekly World News/tabloid piece?
You may be thinking of the legend of the Khevsurs during the First World War.
The Khevsurs are a subgroup of ethnic Georgians from Khevsureti, in modern Georgia, from the northern, remote, mountainous region of the country. There is a legend out there that when the First World War began a group of them came down in Crusader-era chain mail asking to join the fight. This is often accompanied by images like [https://frontierpartisans.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/khevsur-1.jpg](this one).
Except it's all fake. A 2020 article in Nationalities Papers, "Kicking the Crusaders out of the Caucasus: Deconstructing the 200-Year-Old Meme that the Khevsurs Descended from a Lost Band of Medieval Knights" by Ryan Michael Sherman traces the origin of the story and finds it stems from travel-writer Richard Halliburton, who wrote about it back in a 1935 book, Seven League Boots. Halliburton wrote that the Khevsurs descended from Franco-German Crusader knights, and still spoke a few words of German into the early 20th century. Naturally such a story was published in contemporary newspapers, and grew from there.
Sherman notes Halliburton never explained where he heard this story from, but finds some traces in earlier publications: a Christian Science Monitor story from 1926 makes similar claims, as does a 1931 book by Lev Nussimbaum (who gained fame under the pen name Essad Bay and wrote Ali and Nino, one of the most famous books from the Caucasus). Sherman further notes Nussimbaum may have been influenced by a Russian ethnographer from the 19th century, Arnold Zisserman, who had stories published in Tbilisi papers the 1850s.
Further authors published similar stories in 1906 (by a German geographer named N.A. Busch) and 1917 (by American sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, who was later explicitly told by a Georgian historian that the Crusader origin of the Khevsurs was false). The origin of Ross's source is traced further back to an 1821 story by a French writer, Edouard Taitbout, who had travelled around Georgia in the 1810s seeking commercial ventures and later wrote a book, Voyages en Circassie (Voyages in Circassia). Sherman notes he did not find any older mention of a Crusader origin for the Khevsurs.
Sherman also notes that no serious academic has taken the story as true, and it's only brought up in modern academia in order to be dismissed. Simply put, the Khevsurs were not descended from Crusaders, they did not come down from the mountains in 1915 to fight in chain mail, and they were not kept apart from the rest of the world for centuries.
The article itself is a really neat read, and I'd highly recommend it for a more in depth look at the story.
