Snapshots of Georgia
Will you allow me a slight detour to Georgia, in this episode of Travels with Toby with no Toby and no George?
Tamuna put all her weight onto her heavy, spiked rolling pin as she squeezed the water out of the decorative felt one of our party had designed. It was a fascinating process, which Tamuna had run quickly through, right from shearing to carding, dying to fixing the colour, then scrubbing with soap and water which was bringing the rolling pin into play. Skeins of wool of all colours were piled on her table – “Where does that yellow colour come from?” I asked. One came from marigold flowers, another from turmeric. Pomegranate, walnut, eucalyptus, blueberry, cochineal – all produced soft, natural colours.
Seeing how felt was made was just one of the fascinating insights this trip to Georgia has brought me. The colourful local market at Telavi this morning had introduced me to “sneakers”: churchkhela, a sweetmeat made at this time of year, after the grape harvest. A jelly-like paste is made from grapemust and flour, a string of walnuts is dipped into it and it’s hung up to harden. “So that’s what those strange, sausage shaped things are in that stall?”I’d checked with our young guide, Mariam. After it hardens it can be sliced into chunks. The one I bought at the market, that I’ve been carrying around in my bag all day, is a now squishy mess at the moment……I had been warned. Let’s hope it hardens up again once I get it home!
Food has played a large part in our trip so far. It seems that every meal you sit down to in a Georgian home consists of dozens of different dishes, with flavours and combinations that are not in our regular palate. I headed to lunch today without a great feeling of anticipation - “Just off the Tbilisi bypass” didn’t sound like a great recommendation. What a wonderful surprise to be greeted by a table laid under a canopy of vines and dried herbs, and rapidly covered by Teona and Tatia with all kinds of exotic food: - cooked beetroot mashed with garlic, spices and walnuts ; sliced aubergine wrapped round a walnut and garlic paste (badrijiani nigvzit). There’s always a fresh salad, with tomato, cucumber and a herb, maybe basil or parsley. And washed down with a glass of home made red wine. And today we had pudding – Georgia is not big on desserts, so this baklava was a special treat: baklava Georgian style, filled with fruit, honey and meringue.
Wine of course is synonymous with Georgia. What I’ve learned since I’ve been here is that the Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) is the global birthplace of viniculture – wine has been made here for at least 6000 years. And in 2013 UNESCO added its unique qveri wine-making method to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Yesterday we saw it for ourselves, at Giorgi’s winery in the village of Kondoli, in the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia. Giorgi had been a policeman in a previous life, but had decided to opt for a less stressful lifestyle and had invested his all into this small winery. Everything is carried out in a traditional method, the way wine has been made in Georgia for centuries. Giorgi showed us how the fermentation process works, using clay qveris, enormous earthenware urns that are buried in the ground, thus retaining the temperature of the earth. The pressed grapes, together with skins, stalks and pips are poured in and stirred regularly with long-handled wooden implements; then the chacha – the skins etc - are removed, nothing else is added, and the qveri is then sealed and left to ferment for about six months.
We tasted the finished product – a Saperavi - together with some slices of smoked cheese. “Superb,” said Frederick, one of our party who is knowledgeable about wine. I agreed enough to buy a bottle to take home to share with friends.
We’d started this trip, a group of nine mostly unknown to each other beforehand, a couple of days earlier in the capital, Tbilisi. Mariam took us in hand, and gave us a whirlwind walking tour of the city: ancient Georgian churches, some looking down from the hillside onto the city and its wide Mtkvari River which flows through the centre; the Sioni cathedral, replete with frescoes; and stunning treasures in the National Museum. Gold was mined in Georgia as early as the 4th millennium BC, and the collection includes dozens of magnificent pre-Christian gold and silver objects, and jewellery set with precious stones. My favourite was probably the small golden lion from the 3rd millennium BC; but I also craved some of the earrings, thinking how women haven’t changed much in their taste for jewellery over the millenia.
On the upper floors, the coverage of the Soviet Occupation came as a shock, after all this beauty: hundreds of thousands of Georgians killed or deported between 1921 and 1991, including artists, musicians and poets lost in Stalin’s purges.
When planning this trip, and checking flights from the UK to Tblisi, it had seemed there were no direct flights, with a choice of where to change but all arriving at a very uncivilised early hour in the morning. So I arrived a day before the tour began, and took the chance to recover from the flight by a session in one of Tblisi’s famous sulphur baths. “You should go to the Orbeliani baths,” the hotel receptionist suggested. Close to the hotel in the old city, with a beautiful blue-tiled façade, the only option available that afternoon was for the Royal Suite (too bad!) where I had to myself a hot pool, a cold plunge pool, a choice of sauna, an area to rest and a massage table, where I was scrubbed and pummelled by a strong Georgian woman. A great way to recover from the nearly 24hr trip.
As we drove in our minibus east from Tblisi, then northwards towards the Russian border, the highways threw up some unexpected sights. Who could imagine a flock of sheep controlled by large Caucasian Shepherd dogs, a herd of cows with a horse-riding shepherd and a string of horses, apparently completely wild and on their own, holding up the traffic on the equivalant of the M25? Delayed truck drivers on the ring road round Tblisi seemed not the slightest bit concerned by this, presumably a regular occurrence. Not even on the great Georgian Military Highway - a route from Tblisi to the Caucasus mountains since the 1st century BC but only converted into a carriageway by Russia in the 18th century - was any impatience shown as herds of cows wound their way between the traffic, including the seven kilometre long queues of lorries on their way to Russia, bordering the highway and totally stationery. I wondered if they would still be there when we returned the next day? Some from Georgia, some from Turkey, but the majority from Armenia. What does Armenia have that Russian wants so badly?!
“This should all change by 2024, Mariam told us – with collaboration of the Chinese and the World Bank, a tunnel 50kms long is being built, so that trucks no longer have to negotiate these hairpin bends which are so treacherous in winter and cause long delays.
The Georgian Military highway is just over 200 kilometers long and connects Tbilisi in Georgia with Vladikavkaz in Russia. Already in the first century BC this route was used by traders and invaders to cross the greater Caucasus on their way from Europe to Asia. It added to the romance to know that Pushkin, Gorky, Tolstoy and other great Russian writers had all followed this route in their time.
It's now the main road connecting Russia with Georgia, Armenia and Turkey. Lorries wind their way up the mountains through sharp hairpin bends – we had a few hair-raising moments, but Roini, our driver, did a great job negotiating his way past the oncoming long files of trucks. Delays are frequent as avalanches, rockslides or landslides can block the road for hours, although there are several tunnels beside the road to bypass these; but this is still the fastest way to travel from Russia to the Southern Caucasus and beyond.
As we climbed up to the pass at 2400m, we had our first breath-taking view of the snow-covered Caucasus peaks. At the top of the pass, overlooking a dramatic abyss, stands a monolithic, Soviet-style monument. “It’s name is pretty ironic,” said Mariam – “the Soviet-Georgian Friendship Monument.” It’s painted with murals to depict 200 years of this friendship.
Further north, in the Kazbegi national park, the 14th century Gergeti Trinity Church is a dramatic sight, standing alone on an arid 2000m peak, with snow-covered Mt Kazbegi towering behind it. The rest of the group had a lovely woodland hike up to it; my hip reacting to anno domini meant that I had a bone-shattering, breath-holding ride in a four-wheel drive jeep up a stony track. But the small church was magnificent in its lonely splendour, a Georgian religious icon; and I loved hearing that, in what I was learning was true Georgian style, the local Kazbegi people had destroyed the Soviet-built cable car to reach the church, unwanted and unloved. However, there is now an enormous carpark near the top, indicating ever-encroaching tourism.
A long drive back down the Georgian Military highway, with its dramatic mountain scenery and more encounters with dozens of trucks on hairpin bends, brought us to the ancient and spiritual capital of Georgia, Mtskheta. Standing at the confluence of two rivers, the Mtkvari and Aragvi, whose waters meet in a clear demarcation of different colours, it was the seat of the Georgian Church till the 12th century, and many of its churches are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
“Not MORE temples”, I remember my children complaining when we’re visiting Indonesia, and I don’t want to make you feel the same about Georgian churches. But the towering Sveti Tskhoveli cathedral is magnificent. Founded by St Nino, one of the most venerated of the saints of the Georgian Orthodox church and responsible for bringing Christianity to the Kingdom of Iberia, now Georgia, it’s full of history and mythology - including the tombs of Georgian kings, and apparently Jesus’ crucifixion robe. Sadly, as is the case in many of Georgia’s churches, some of its frescoes were whitewashed over by the Soviets; but there’s a clear 17th century wheel of the zodiac surrounding a figure of Christ, a seemingly unlikely image in this temple of Christianity.
A demanding clamber around the first millenia BC cave town of Uplistikhe, near the route of the ancient Silk Road and inhabited by monks till the 13th century, was next on the agenda. Severely eroded, and with some of the cave roofs now held up by cement pillars, it was quite hard to imagine life here. But it was intriguing knowing that traces of herbs and wrapping parchment had been found in layers of cubed storage spaces - a pharmacy!
At the beginning of our tour, we’d visited another cave monastery, David Gareja, in the arid, desert-like landscape of sweeping hills near the border of Azerbaijan. Originally built in the 6th century, and inhabited by thousands of monks over the centuries, frequently destroyed and then rebuilt, it’s once again been revived after the communist ban. A few of the monks’ cells, carved into the sandstone hillside, are now inhabited; and the small chapel was filled with the low murmurs of a priest taking a service when we visited
.
Just 10km or so away from Uplistikhe lies the – to my mind – strange town of Gori. A rather run-down small industrial town, it’s famous only for its infamous son, Joseph Jughashvili, better known as Stalin – man of steel. Stalin was born here, in a poor, two-room house amongst many other similar shacks; these have been removed to make way for the Temple to Stalin, the enormous museum built to his memory in 1957, and a smaller pillared temple enshrining Stalin’s first house.
We troop up a red-carpet lined palatial staircase, with a life-size statue of Stalin at the top, and our rather robotic guide intoned her way round the museum, introducing us to the whole gamut of his life, from his youth and revolutionary activities to becoming the dictator of the Soviet Union, and his role in WWII. As we reached the end I found myself thinking – “But the repression, the famines, the Siberian labour camps, the loss of at least 20 million people – why aren’t you telling us any of this?” Apart from one small cabinet with photos of intellectuals killed or sent to the gulags, there was nothing. Until we reached the basement, when two tiny rooms have been converted into a so-called prison cell, with no explanation.
So not much about the purges under Stalin; but a display of photos of more recent history shocked me: the short war in 2008 when Russian invaded Georgia and took control of South Ossetia. These photos were of Russian troops in Gori, exactly where we now were standing. “He is now a national hero,” said Mariam, pointing at a dramatic photo of the huge boot of a Russian soldier on top of a kneeling citizen of Gori. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ukraine.
Before we left, we were led to admire a bronze death-mask of Stalin, lying in solitary splendour on a vast bed of velvet. The pride of the people of Gori in their infamous son is also clear when you hear the story of his statue. Kruschev had Stalin’s embalmed body removed from the Red Square mausoleum, where it had lain next to Lenin. He then ordered all statues of Stalin throughout the USSR to be taken down; but the one in Gori remained, fiercely protected by its inhabitants. Until, under orders from the pro-west government in 2010, it was surreptitiously removed in the dead of night.
A few laps in the vast pool in our rather strange, glitzy hotel in Gori started the next day well – once I’d managed to communicate with the huge Georgian men ploughing their way down the lanes of the pool, all clad in rubber caps. I needed one of those before I was allowed in, finally procured with a lot of sign language.
The road to the 12th century cave town of Vardzia, one of Georgia’s most famous sights, followed the Mtkvari River past the spa town of Borjomi through glorious autumn colours in the Borjomi-Kharagauli national park. Dotted green lines on my map of Georgia showed tempting trails to be followed through forest-covered hills in this nature reserve. “You need to be careful of the wildlife here,” Mariam told us. She had once been stranded overnight in the park with a friend, and had lain awake worrying about the brown bears, wolves and lynx that still prowl around these remote forests.
The trees gradually disappeared, the hillsides turning yellow-brown and arid – and we had our first, breath-taking sight of Vardzia. The cliffside in the distance was speckled with dark openings of caves, cut in half-a-dozen or so tiers deep into the pale rock. Built by George III in the 12th century as a safe sanctuary from invading Mongols, and turned into a monastery by his daughter, Georgians’ beloved King Tamar (“She was a woman but crowned a King, so we refer to her as King Tamar”, Mariam explained), it had gradually been reduced in size by successive earthquakes and invasions of Persian and Turkish armies, and then closed completely by the Soviets. But monks have been living here again since 1988 and, as we watched, lights gradually appeared in a few of the caves as evening drew in.
“Valodia’s cottage is the place to stay!” we’d been told. With its enormous garden and greenhouse, they grow all their own fruit and vegetables; and also make wine from their own vineyards. We had a wonderful selection of all of these that evening, in the cosy, stone-built, fire-warmed cottage.
A short, steep climb the next morning brought us first to the Bell Tower, rebuilt after the earthquake in 1283, and at that moment filled with a noisy group of schoolchildren. We waited for them to go through, and then, apart from a couple of robed monks in the distance, we were on our own to negotiate the narrow pathways and steep steps that led around the complex of caves. Of the original thirteen tiers, there are now only about six or seven, and about 600 of the original 3000 cave chambers. We sat on a bench carved out of rock, where the monks had sat for meals in the refectory; and then went under stone arched porticoes into the Church of the Assumption, carved in the 12th century. Huge frescoes filled one wall, a likeness of King Tamar and her father; and other faded frescoes told New Testament tales.
A low tunnel led us into the cliffside to a deep pool of clear water. “Tamar’s Tears,” Mariam tells us. “Drink some!” It tasted sweet and fresh, and I was sure was full of life-giving properties.