By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

TBILISI, Georgia - On a sweltering morning in this capital city recently, worshippers crammed in the ornate sixth-century Anchiskhati Basilica. Women prayed and kissed icons as the venerable Anchiskhati Choir sang harmonically striking polyphonic chants. It’s a familiar scene in Georgia, a Caucasus country where three-voice chants reverberate through incense-heavy air in ancient churches .

Nationalist pride and the increasing strength of the Georgian Orthodox Church are intertwined with a revival of its ancient polyphonic sacred music, repressed during the Soviet regime. Stravinsky, a contrapuntal master himself, spoke of his fascination with Georgian singing, whose rich polyphonic tradition dates to the pagan era.

Georgia became Christian in the early fourth century , and the Georgian Orthodox Church became independent in the fifth century. The chanting that accompanies its liturgy evolved from Palestinian and Byzantine traditions, but from early on, it was sung in Georgian.

Ekaterine Diasamidze, an ethnomusicologist, singer and host at Radio Muza, Tbilisi’s classical music station, said folk and sacred songs “are like pearls for us, like diamonds”: “You don’t touch this diamond unless you have something better to replace it with.” “Tradition and religion are very connected in Georgia,” she added. “Orthodox Christianity is an essential part of being Georgian. Georgianness, Christianity and chant are all connected.” Georgian sacred music resembles the country’s three-voice folk music and features distinct regional harmonies.

Chant from western Georgia often incorporates dense chords and a busy bass line; chant from eastern Georgia has an ornamental middle voice and a simple bass line. Georgia is a patriarchal and socially conservative society, but the infrequency of mixed-gender choirs reflects the music’s close harmonies rather than any social dictum.

Since 1991, when Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union , there has been a major effort to preserve its musical heritage. Nino Naneishvili, 26, director of the female Ialoni choir, said that young people are increasingly discovering the chants by attending church. Sacred music, she added, is an integral part of Georgian identity.

But the manner of learning both sacred and folk music has significantly changed. John A. Graham, an ethnomusicologist and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University in New Jersey, who is writing his dissertation on the transcription and transmission of Orthodox liturgical chant, said Georgian folk and sacred music was primarily an oral tradition until the late 19th century. But the heritage was already under threat by then, since Georgia had been annexed by Russia in 1801, and its language and chanting were suppressed.

Traditional music also suffered from urbanization and changing social patterns, as young people left the country to study Western classical music. Master chanters and village song masters began to die without having trained successors. So a group of intellectuals, led by the statesman Ilia Chavchavadze, began a movement to preserve Georgian culture, publishing a collection of folk music in the late 19th century.

During a recent rehearsal in Tbilisi, the Ensemble Basiani practiced a traditional piece from Guria, in western Georgia: a wild, multilayered, partially improvised song during which one singer yodeled with enthusiastic abandon. Afterward a choir member asked a listener, “Do you have a headache yet?” A visitor to Georgia is most likely to hear folk songs at a supra, a multicourse feast .

“A Georgian gathering without singing is impossible to imagine,” said Luarsab Togonidze, a historian who has sung with the Ensemble Basiani. “The Communists tried to change this, but they didn’t succeed. You can’t imagine Georgia without our songs.”