Mortal Svan woman; wife of Sulkalmakhi; mother of Badri and Usup; foster-mother of Amirani (giving him the matronymic Darejanis-dze, "son of Darejan"). In the Svan recension, the active agent of Dali's death — discovers Sulkalmakhi's affair with the goddess, follows him to the cave, cuts Dali's golden hair while she sleeps (the seat of her power), killing her. After Dali's death, Sulkalmakhi extracts the premature Amirani from her womb; Darejan raises him alongside her own sons. Both parents die while the three boys are still young; the wilderness-journey structure of the Amirani epic begins from this orphaning. The mortal-killing-goddess motif distinguishes the Kartvelian tradition from Greek and Roman patterns of mortal-divine encounters.