SHUKHUTI, Georgia — Luka Torotadze, 11, was crouched beside his great-uncle Bitchiko’s grave, wiping dust off a plump, leather ball that rested beneath the headstone.

The ball, once black but now the color of ash, has been there for 15 years, and though it might have looked odd among the flowers and candles and picture frames nearby, a stroll through any of the cemeteries of this rural village would eventually reveal several dozen more just like it, plopped down like pumpkins in a field.

It was a Saturday afternoon, the day before Orthodox Easter, and a few feet away Luka’s cousin, Barbare, and her sisters were helping their mother clean the gravesite of the girls’ father, Vitaly. Their hope was that by the following evening a ball would be resting at Vitaly’s grave, too. The next 24 hours would decide that.

Every spring in the village of Shukhuti, in western Georgia, a single black, leather ball is sewn together to play Lelo Burti, a brutally physical folk game — a singular blend of a large-scale rugby match and an even larger street fight — that was once popular all around the region of Guria but is now only played here, once a year, on Orthodox Easter.