Over a Cheese Platter: Why Georgian Guda Has Nothing to Do with Dutch Gouda

One is smooth and orange and hails from the Netherlands; the other is white, holey and salty, with its origins in the mountains of eastern Georgia. And yet, both go by the name “g(o)uda”. How can two such different cheeses, from such distant places, share the same name?
More than ten thousand kilometres separate the Netherlands – the birthplace of the well-known gouda we see in shops – from Tusheti, a remote highland region of Georgia where a cheese called guda (გუდის ყველი or თუშური გუდა in Tush) has been made for centuries. Did Dutch explorers once venture so far afield, leaving no historical trace? Or, on the contrary, did Tush shepherds or clans come into contact with Dutch traders or cheesemakers who passed along their techniques?

In fact, neither. What we have here is a simple phonetic coincidence.
The Dutch cheese – made from cow’s milk – is named after the town of Gouda, where it originated. The Georgian name, however, has a completely different story. It comes from the common noun გუდა(ჲ) guda, meaning “wineskin” or “leather bag”, a term borrowed from Aramaic ܓܘܕܐ gōḏ, gawdā, meaning “skin bottle” and refers to one of the many varieties of cheese found on Georgian tables. What sets this variety apart is its production method: it is a pressed, uncooked cheese made from goat’s or sheep’s milk (occasionally mixed with cow’s milk), using techniques that go back centuries. The Georgian term guda refers specifically to the technique: the milk and rennet are placed in animal skin pouches (usually from calf, goat or sheep), which serve as moulds. After one or two months of aging, the cheese is removed, having taken the shape of the pouch. Traditionally, these pouches were tied to horse saddles or hung in cellars to ferment properly.
So despite sounding the same, Dutch and Georgian g(o)udas have nothing in common – neither in origin, taste, nor technique. Think twice before ordering g(o)uda in a Georgian restaurant – and don’t forget to give your tourist friends a heads-up… over cheese and small talk.

Hélène Gérardin, INALCO and ILARA, lecturer of linguistics and Kartvelian languages
Hélène Gérardin is a graduate of ENS – Ulm and a member of the SeDyl research team. She defended a PhD dissertation entitled Primary and derived intransitive verbs in Georgian: morphosyntactic, semantic and derivational description, at Sorbonne Paris Cité.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
ILARA (March 31, 2025). Over a Cheese Platter: Why Georgian Guda Has Nothing to Do with Dutch Gouda. ILARA, the Institute for Linguistic Heritage and Diversity. Retrieved April 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13ow3