Daggers offer the thrill of the hunt

For a non-violent guy, I sure have a lot of weapons.

Specifically, I have a lot of daggers.

It was one of those collections that started innocently enough — don’t they all? — then snowballed into something unexpected.

The international work I was able to do between 1998 and 2012 also played a role.

It started on a street corner in Tbilisi, the capital of the republic of Georgia.

It was 2000 or 2001 or 2002. I was in Georgia doing my best to train journalists and help independent newspapers figure out a way to survive.

(Little did I know that the business model that had supported independent newspapers in this country for more than 200 years was already under siege.)

At any rate, in Georgia it is impossible to ignore the prevalence of daggers.

They are something of a national icon. Some are strictly souvenir items, but there are plenty of the real thing around as well.

So there I am, with a few bucks in my pocket, and a guy with a beard is sitting on the curb selling a handful of items and one of them is a dagger.

And it is a very cool dagger.

It looks like something a Cossack would wear on his belt. The sheath is wood clad in black leather. The blade is more than a foot long and has two “blood gulleys” in the steel.

A little scary, but cool just the same.

So I dicker with the guy on the curb and end up walking away with the Cossack dagger for $20.

My wife — correctly — thought I was crazy.

That should have been the end of it.

But a couple of years later I was doing similar work in Kazahkstan, an enormous country in Central Asia that most folks have never heard of.

In Almaty, the capital, my colleagues and I were supposed to meet up with some bureaucrats from USAID. 

But I split off and somehow found myself visiting with an antique dealer with offices in the same building.

And he had a dagger.

Boy, did he have a dagger.

It’s a beauty, apparently from Samarkand, the great Silk Road city that is now part of Uzbekistan. 

Another wooden sheath, this time with stones decorating it. And this time a curved blade with Arabic engraved into the steel.

For all I know it says, “Death to the infidels from Indiana.” But it’s still a beautiful object. Beautiful but also a little unsettling.

OK, by then I had two. As any collector can tell you, that’s enough to start you looking for Number Three and Four and maybe more.

The next addition came in Tajikistan a couple of years later, while I was doing similar work.

This time around, no antiques were involved. 

Instead, it was a chance to buy a Tajik knife from the man who made it.

We’d finished our work and were being shown around by our hosts when suddenly we found ourselves sitting in a tent and looking at daggers and knifes.

By now, I was on a roll. (Just talk to the guys at the antique gas engine and tractor show about how they got started, and you’ll have some idea where my head was.)

So when I was doing some training for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan, I had already decided that I needed to add a dagger to the collection.

In that case, it was something that looks more like a bayonet mount than a knife. But the lapis lazuli  handle caught my eye.

At that point, it was probably time for an intervention.

But I grabbed just one more. In 2012 while in Myanmar/Burma as a Fulbright Specialist, I found a very cool piece. The bronze handle is topped by the head of a jaguar.

None of this stuff, when it comes down to it, is very valuable.

At least in terms of dollars and cents.

But as any engine collector or coin collector or stamp collector will tell you, the real value comes not in dollars and cents but in the fun of the hunt.

And this hunt was fun.