Five Rainy Nights in Georgia—As We Go Marching Through
May 11-16, 2015
Over the border to Georgia from Azerbaijan: the landscape is
the same, but so different! As soon as frontier is crossed, all the houses are
festooned with grapevines. Towns
immediately feel much more European, though Georgian script is completely
strange.
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| Georgian Feast- Tourist Version |
Food and wine seem to dominate everything here. Our first evening is in Telavi, in the middle
of wine country. Lunches and dinners
are vast, and on our first night we were treated to the tourist version of the
“Georgian Feast,” replete with singing toastmaster. The first course is on the table when you
come in, and later courses just added on.
The tomato and cucumber salad is still among us, and so are herbs; but
also diverse veggies, some stuffed with walnut concoctions in variety, each
different. And then there’s katchapuri, an amazing cross between pizza and
cheese quiche, in endless Then comes soup and a meat course, and often
potatoes, with or without added veggies, all with sour plum sauce, either green
or red. Some dishes are spicy, some not,
but all complexly seasoned, and the table gets more and more loaded. Great bread baked on a tandoor sort of oven,
but it comes out tasting like French or Catalan bread. All through it, red wine, made in-house and
served in pitchers, is consumed, to the tune of many toasts.
subtle and regional variations.
Red wine is called black wine; it’s very dark and full in
body, made by fermenting red grapes with stems and skins in buried clay jars
for two weeks, then filtered, eventually ending up in oak barrels or other clay
sealed jars, the latter buried again until consumed. White wine is singular in flavor, the best
light like Chenin Blanc, the rest stronger in flavor and body.
Towns look different, seemingly less ordered than Azeri
ones, and Georgian Christian churches instead of mosques, plus lots of friendly
“town dogs” while in Muslim Azerbaijan, almost never.
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| Georgian Town Dog |
The landscape in Eastern Georgia is gentle, very
agricultural and very green. The foothills
of the Caucasus are green too, and forested. Mtskheta (you pronounce it!), Georgia’s
ancient capital, with fabulous churches and monasteries, sits on a triangular
peninsula at the confluence of two rivers of different colors that first
co-exist, then merge.
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| Mtskheta of the Two Rivers |
Upland, it’s even more
impressive: in Gudairi, we were above the tree line, and the high peaks
above us had snow. Too bad it’s rainy,
but it’s awesome anyway, and comparable to the Rockies, but somehow even more
majestic, (with different trees, of course)!
But politically, it’s different too.
The Rockies just keep going on, spanning two friendly countries. The next valley to the west here is South
Ossetia, removed from Georgia, along with Abkhazia, further to the west, by the
Russians in a war beginning in 2008, but it’s much more complicated than that,
as Georgia is a patchwork of ethnic groups and languages, and a turbulent
history of various migrations and invasions. I leave the labyrinthine history
to specialists, but can say that the Georgian language, like Basque, is not
related to anybody else and within itself, has dialects. It’s hard to get a handle except on a very
superficial level, in four days of travel in a country whose language(s) and
alphabet(s) you don’t know.
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| Greater Caucasus, (or what we could see of them) |
We came down from the mountains next morning (it was
snowing!). Back down the Georgian Military
Highway through the same very green, mountain landscape to the Georgian
flats. We were at Uplistsikhe, with 700
man- made caves that served as a Silk Road caravanserai, parts dating at least
back to Byzantine times. We only got to
see a little because of the rain. Then
to ugly Gori, Stalin’s home town and his museum. Outside is the one room in a
little house, rented by his parents, where he spent years 0-4, and his green
railroad car. So many Stalin portraits! The museum is chock-full of paintings
of comrade S. in the expected social
realist propaganda style. He was cutest in an early mug-shot when he was in his
teens, then it was all down hill in every way. As a sop, a little room
dedicated to his victims in Gori (no mention of the thirty million
others).
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| Stalin (Youthful Mugshot) |
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| Real Unrestored Caravanserai |
And now Tblisi, city of my dreams! My first impression is
that it’s a little like Budapest for street vitality, but more raffish and less
gloomy, even in the rain. After further
exploration, I think that Tblisi reminds me even more of Barcelona when I first
went there in the 1960’s: a little down at the heels, but a Grande Dame
nonetheless. Things aren’t over restored yet, so you can see all the wrinkles
and cracks. One mosque, three synagogues
(one is now a museum), many Georgian churches, and in the old city, remains of
caravanserais and bath houses. Caravanserais went out with the coming of the railroad in the 1870’s, so only remnants remain.Traces of the old ethnic quarters are all there,
all next to one another.
You really can’t date structures here. Tblisi was invaded so
many times, and so much destroyed and rebuilt. Different ethnic groups dominated and then
shifted. Georgian church imagery is timeless, so that 19th and 20th
century icons and paintings look virtually indistinguishable from elderly
Byzantine and Russian-type ones. In the old town, streets are narrow and wind
around a lot in medieval fashion, though most structures are relatively modern.
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| Older (But Fixed-Up) Street in Tblisi |
Rustaveli Street, the main elegant shopping street, reminds
me of the Passeig de Gracia in 1966, here with modernista buildings
replaced by ugly soviet era ones. There isn’t much industry here, so I think
the city gets by on its raffish charm to attract tourism, at least for
now. But we are staying in a cubic
Holiday Inn with all conveniences.
On our last day last day in Tblisi, we went to a museum full
of icons and other relics, medieval to 19th century after a nice
talk by a Georgian art historian on cloisonné, an old art form here from early
times until the 15th century.
It is being revived now in exquisite jewelry (I bought some later on in
the day). We saw earlier examples in the
museum. For me as an art historian it
was very nice, though as usual, there was not enough time to really examine
things, read the labels, and make comparisons. We couldn’t go to the other
museum that we had planned to because Rustaveli Avenue, and the museum itself
was closed because of a big trade conference here.
Georgian Christianity is the second oldest national one in
the world, with its own liturgy. We were
taken to many historic churches and monesteries all around the eastern part of
the country. They are mostly high and
dark, and do remind me of Eastern Orthodox ones that I have seen in Russia and
Jordan, with an iconostasis and a large amount of icons ultimately following
Byzantine examples, so that it’s hard stylistically or iconographically to tell
a very old one from a newer one.
The Jewish community traces its roots back to the Babylon
Captivity, and, some maintain, possibly the tribe of Issachar. In recent years many of them have emigrated
to Israel, but there are still 13,000 left, who have always lived peacefully
among everyone else. The Akhaltische
synagogue is really gorgeous, and well maintained (it was built in 1904). The
little Jewish Museum, located in a former synagogue, had the usual ceremonial
stuff, Georgian-Jewish bridal costumes, and a very early (11th c., I
think) tanakh with micrographic borders said to have been brought to Jews in
Georgia by an angel! In the basement,
they were preparing an exhibition by a contemporary Jewish embroiderer that
opens Monday; too bad that we’ll be gone.
Building wise, the old Jewish quarter is pretty shabby, but maybe it’s
because 30,000 Georgian Jews emigrated during Soviet times. The Georgian Jews
are proud that there’s never been anti-semitism in their 2600 year old history
here; though Soviet domination was nasty to any religion.
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| Alkhaltische Synagogue, Tblisi |
I would love to know my City of Dreams better, and know what
really makes it tick, but I’m too old to learn its complicated language and
alphabet, much less its dialects and linguistic soup of other languages. I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with
Catalonia.
Tbilisi postscript: at the top of one of the hills
surrounding Tblisi is a small amusement park with a Ferris wheel that is
outlined in ethereal light blue at night. Except that the lights in the spokes
of one quadrant don’t work. Perfect
summation of this town!
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| Tblisi with the Ferris Wheel On The Hill (and also cellphone tower) |
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