Caucasian Sketchy Sketches II:

 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.  

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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). 

 

Stalin  (Youthful Mugshot)

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 19^th and 20^th 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. 

 

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 19^th century after a nice talk by a Georgian art historian on cloisonné, an old art form here from early times until the 15^th 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 (11^th 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.

 

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!

Tblisi with the Ferris Wheel On The Hill (and also cellphone tower)

Caucasian Very Sketchy Sketches - I

                                                    

Between May 7 and May 19^th I took my dream trip to the Caucasus, where I have wanted to visit since I was a kid.  This blog and the two to follow are thoughts about each of the three countries visited.

I went with Road Scholars, a wonderful organization that sponsors a vast variety of trips for older but active folk.  It’s a great introduction to these places, with informative guides and lots of information on all cultural and political facets of the places visited, but I have a few caveats:  One problem with a tour, even one at this level is that there is not enough time in any single place to really check out any one in depth for a label reader like me.  We also had very nice hotels, were plied with every possible variety of local cuisine, and traveled in comfortable busses, but how much can we really discover in four days in each country with our privileged tourist status? 

And finally, the history of this region is so incredibly complicated, with so much migration and cross-migration, so many languages and shifting political situations, and bigger countries all around, always threatening to bite off a piece, that whatever I am writing now may be completely changed in five or ten years.  So within those limits, here goes:

                            Azerbaijan (May 7-11)

Old Baku (foreground) and New (background)

I had no preconceptions about Baku except it’s being an oil town, but I wasn't expecting the combination of Old Soviet and New Gulf-State city.  Baku is an oil and gas town, and seems to be trying to outdo Abu Dhabi in tall buildings in crazy shapes and immaculate buildings in a uniform gray limestone with very elegant, neo-Moorish filigree ornamentation.  The new city has broad streets, opulent, manicured parks, and is incredibly clean.  We never saw any dogs, and only the occasional cat.  All the expensive international bling stores are here too (Armani, Tiffany, etc). 

Old Baku: Palace

Most of the small “old town” in the same gray stone, is carefully restored, or in the act of being so, and so it has the usual restoration conundrum (when a site is in use for a long time, what time does one restore it to, and isn’t there always older stuff still left around?). Most interesting here were several restored caravanserais, the old merchants’ “hotels” stretching back to silk-road days, with big courtyards for camels and traders, and accommodations for the merchants all around it.

Caravanserai - now picturesque but uncomfortable hotel

This area is rug paradise.  There is an entire museum dedicated to carpets, with great lighting, and geographical groupings of Azeri rugs, plus all sorts of interactive material on rug making and the materials. The tourist shops around the old town are festooned with new rugs in traditional patterns and sizes too.

Courteous and laid-back (or laid back appearing) people are all around, and we were continually told that though the country is 93% Muslim, that it’s not all a theocracy.  Most women don’t wear headscarves, Sunnis get along fine with Shiites, Jews, Christians and other ethnic groups and faiths are not only tolerated, but welcomed.  There are a large number of distinct tribal groups with their own localized languages, particularlyN in the mountainous north. In this respect, it’s almost Utopia, unless you’re Armenian, since there is a long-standing territorial dispute over the territory of Nigorno-Karabagh, now part of Armenia.  It sounds like Israel and Palestine all over again, and you are not permitted to go directly from one country to the other.  There is also a part of Azerbaijan that’s separated from the rest by Armenia, and the Azeri government has subsidized very cheap flights so that folks can go from one part to the other.  We were also fed quite a bit of bitter rhetoric about Azeri refugees expelled from Armenia.

Zoroastrian Temple, Eternal Flame (now piped in)

In the oil country surrounding the city, it’s flat, ugly and industrial.  Baku is on the Caspian Sea, but it’s no Rio de Janeiro. No beaches, just oil and shipping, and the country is definitely part of the Islamic world  (“Turkish Toilets,” are the norm); there’s regular ferry service to Kazakistan and Turkmenistan. It also shares a border with Iran, that itself has a considerable Azeri population, and this is perhaps reflected in the Azeri mosques we visited, elegantly restored and also recently built mosques, beautiful and serene with all the elegance of their Iranian counterparts.

 

Gorgeous New Mosque

May 10 - in Sheki, a town in the northwest foothills.  It’s more typical rural Azeri, but now being developed more for tourism.  The houses here brick and stone, but it’s also more sophisticated than the towns surrounding it, in that most streets are paved.  We visited the Khan’s summer palace with amazing painted and stained glass of brilliant colors, with the Eastern type of total juxtaposition of decoration patterns.  The stained glass is set into beechwood framing, both of tiny elements and no glue in complex geometric and floral patterns; the glass being very bright in color, and originally from Venice.

 

Sheki - Khan's Palace

The Sunday market: wonderful veggies, meat cut from the carcass and live poultry. The veggies are generally familiar; they are big on green tart plums and sour cherries.  Most of the spices are also familiar, with lots of Azeri saffron and powdered sumac.  They make circular “halvah” of walnut, filberts, oodles of honey syrup and a crisscross saffron pattern, a Sheki specialty.  Azeri lunches and dinners follow a set pattern: on the table fresh herbs, tomatoes and cucumbers, veggie salads, yogurt, bread and local very salty white cheese.  Then comes soup, chicken, lentil, etc., then a meat course, barbecued or tasty stews with veggies.  Then tea-in-a-glass.  No pork because of halal laws.  All the ingredients are super fresh, and most dishes are subtly seasoned to enhance the natural favors.  Lots of food but not fatty, and people are slim, except for plump older ladies.  The latter remind me of elderly Spanish ladies in the 1960’s.  Like them, they generally dress in black, and look just as formidable.  It’s hard to believe that I am the same age as many of them!

 

Sheki - Sunday Market

I was hoping that we would visit the all-Jewish village of Krasnaya Sloboda, near Quba, but we didn’t get up that way.  North of the border in the North Caucasian range is Russian territory, specifically Daghestan.  Needless to say, we didn’t go there either.

“Bring on the Virgins!”

            Some years  ago, at a parade during San Antonio’s Fiesta, featuring, among other groups, debutantes on floats, a dear friend of mine with a couple of margaritas under her belt stood up and yelled, as the first Royal hove into view: “Bring on the Virgins!”

            Her remark had nothing to do with the state of virtue of these nice Texas girls, but rather   The debs, dressed in heavily beaded gowns with a detachable train in full display, were embedded into their setting in such a way that they were the floats.  Their attire, encrusted with thousands of beads, rhinestones, gold thread all on sumptuous fabrics of velvet, satin, gauze and other metallic materials, glittered almost blindingly in the sunlight.  The other floats from schools and organizations in the parade paled in comparison.

Float with Debutante Duchess

harked back to the sheer spectacle of Hollywood epics featuring Roman triumphs, or something similar.

            When I first came here, more than 40 years ago, I was mystified.  What is this?  The trains all had designs and pictures on them—did this mean something?  Over the years, I learned a lot about it, especially by becoming friends with Michaele Haynes, former curator of costumes at the Witte Museum, who also wrote a very enlightening book on the topic, entitled Dressing Up Duchesses.

            I refer y’all, gentle readers, to Michaele’s excellent text, and other numerous books written over the years about Fiesta and its genesis (I even wrote one about its 19^th century origins myself, entitled San Antonio on Parade).  But I have to say that as far as Duchesses, debutantes presented by a local social organization called the Order of the Alamo goes, I still find it mysterious, not to say bizarre.

Eda Kampmann, Queen #1 - 1909

            Anywhere else, debutantes, girls of a certain social class, attaining the age when they could look for suitable dynastic mates, were presented to polite society in white ball gowns. I guess our Royal Court may be taken as a Texas-size riff on this theme.  From its establishment (1909), the duchesses were presented at a private ball, but also appeared in the Battle of Flowers, the oldest of several festival parades.  At their Coronation, they had to make a court bow, modeled on the one for court presentations in England, and had long trains, embellished with emblems of their “Court’s” theme.

Originally these were simple, but over the years the themes became more elaborate—incomprehensively elaborate, often harking back to Great Empires in Days of Yore.  The trains became longer and heavier, and became a forum for an allegorical theme for each duchess.  To give but one example of this, I can show you the Duchess of the Mastery of Michelangelo, from the 2011 Court of Timeless Treasures.  I’ve been teaching about Michelangelo all of my professional life, and can’t see for the life of me what any of those curvy designs have to do with anything in his work, except for the wheeled pavement shape of the Piazza del Campidoglio, that wasn’t actually completed until the era of Mussolini.  But it’s so out of context! The only way you could get some idea of content would be to attend the Coronation ceremony and listen to the Master of Ceremonies describe it.

Duchess of the Mastery of Michelangelo, 2011

            The girls wear the robes four times, first at the coronation, then two private parties and for the public at large, in the parade, where they appear like fashion tableaux until someone calls out “show us your shoes,” when they demonstrate their humanity by revealing, beneath their finery, flip flops, cowboy boots, running shoes or Bullwinkle bedroom slippers.  Nobody on the street has any idea of the train’s “allegory” except that it sparkles a lot.

            The coronation is their right of passage, when the debs drag 20+ pounds of beaded train up a long runway, unassisted, to the stage, where they make a full bow to the floor to their duke, then to be placed on a pedestal onstage until the spectacle is over.  The trains of Queen and Princess are longer and even heavier.

            It’s all over the top.  The English court stopped presentations and court bows in 1958, but our local girls perform a bow worthy of an appearance before the Sultan of Turkey or the King of Siam in their heydays.  With all the weight they carry, they could easily qualify for Marine boot-camp.  The whole ensemble costs thousands and thousands of dollars, and after it’s all over they either contribute it to a local museum, or store it in a box under their beds forevermore.  To this proletarian, it’s akin to buying a top-of-the-line, highly personalized Harley-Davidson, getting to ride it around for four days, and then leaving it in the garage for the rest of your life, except that there is no way to recycle a fiesta gown and train, whose allegorical content has no meaning for 99.9% of the world population.

            I am not sure why all of this preoccupies me; maybe it’s because as an art historian the question of Iconography is so important.  And I love bearded bling—one of my favorite movies is the 1980 version of Flash Gordon.  I’m sure that the Order of the Alamo members are equally, if not more lavish with their charitable donations as they are in sinking it into Fiesta finery.

"Flash Gordon" (1980)

            Perhaps it’s because I want all that ornamentation to have some meaning and a life beyond one event, unless it’s purposely ephemeral.  One of the most elaborate instances of occasion finery I’ve ever seen is brides’ costumes from Tlemcin, Algeria.  The Tlemcin wedding finery is famous enough to make it a UNESCO world heritage item.  Actually, the brides wear seven separate dresses during the nuptuals, including a white bridal dress, but the showstopper is her one she wears when she leaves her parents’ home for the wedding.  It consists of a golden dress, an embroidered caftan over it, a conical headdress and crown, earrings, and a hanging frontlet of rows and rows of seed pearls, punctuated by jeweled inserts, plus other scarves, amulets and jewelry, hennaed hands and special rose-and white circles painted on her cheeks.  A gold veil covers the entire outfit as she makes the journey, which is removed after her arrival.

Bride, Groom and Family, Tlemcin, 2014

            There are a whole series of craftsmen-and-women who work on various parts of this costume, and presumably enough weddings for them to make a comfortable income.  Each article of the clothing embodies a long tradition, with fixed significance whose origins date back to Andalusia before the 15^th century, and Berber tribal practice.  Some of the more elaborate pieces may descend through families, and those of more modest means may rent or borrow them.

            Here everyone attending knows the significance of all the finery; it is an intense shared experience.  In addition, women who are already married wear their outfits again for other family weddings, so they can be used many times.  Very sumptuous they are, and they mark a lifetime event. 

Jewish Yemenite Traditional Bride

            The Algerian wedding outfits are, of course status symbols, and speak of family pride, as are the Fiesta gowns, but they are in no way restricted to a tiny in group.  A bride may wear more or less of the pearls and other accouterments, but she is as splendid as the family budget will allow.

            Ornamental and sumptuous bridal attire is found over a good part of the world; in old traditional societies, it might be the one time that women were allowed public display, but I leave

such analysis to anthropologists.

            On almost an opposite tack, the generally symmetrical designs covering the trapezoidal Duchess train has a strange echo in festival street decorations for the Corpus Christi Festival in Sitges, Spain.  It is a festival I know well, since my ex-in-laws had a wonderful hotel in Sitges (they are long gone, but the Hotel Romàntic still exists, now owned by the employees), and I actually had a chance to participate in it in the late 1970’s.

            Businesses along the town’s narrow streets can claim a piece of a street that fronts their establishment, or sometimes several will cooperate and do the whole block.  The decorations consist of colorful carpets with designs made of flower petals, with fill-ins in brown seeds and green grass blades.  Someone is designated to fashion the design.  Early in the morning, the streets are cleared of traffic, and participants rush to obtain boxes of flowers (often varicolored carnations, but also other blooms), and they quickly reduce them into boxes of petals.  These are strewn within the various areas designated in the design.  Prizes are given for the best designs, and the carpets remain on the streets until late afternoon, when a procession of the Eucharist, accompanied by dancing, “Giants,”—colossal  mannequins costumed as kings and queens---with hidden dancers inside them.  The procession effectively destroys the carpets, which are then swept up and disposed of in the evening.

Sitges Flower Carpet under construction

Flower carpet - Sitges

            I imagine that the idea came up in the past with the idea of the procession of the sacred host over something fragrant, like a bed of roses, but now it’s taken on a secularized life of its own, to the delight of visitors, who flock to Sitges and are willing to squeeze themselves along the narrow sidewalks to view the carpets.

            The large-scale designs often have complex symmetrical swirls that, when viewed from the beginning of the street, resemble those on the debutantes’ trains.  In both instances, the designs are sometimes pictorial, but in the case of the Sitges carpets, these are usually easily recognized logos of popular culture, and sometimes, just whimsical designs; our modest one was a series of diagonal stripes of red, yellow and green—not a prizewinner, but we all had a good time making it.

            The contrast between the coronation robes and the street carpets is apparent not only in meanings of content, but also in that the former are only worn a few times, but preserved, normally unseen, while the latter is really ephemeral, and doesn’t last the day.

Fiesta-Goer and his Hat

            The thing about San Antonio’s Fiesta is that it lasts somewhat longer than the one in Sitges, and like the Catalan seaside town, it has returned to its populist origins, now encompasses hundreds of events throughout the city.  There are oodles of “Kings” and “Queens” of various organizations on hand, usually dressed in uniforms or nice dresses, with crowns.  Anyone can decorate and wear an elaborate had the size of a smart car with unlimited glitter, beads and artificial flowers, and anyone can fill his or her chest with myriad medals, which can be purchased for a very modest price from numerous organizations—or you can make your own.  The frozen splendor of the Coronation once dominated Fiesta week, back when debutantes maybe mattered more. Now, except for the debs on the floats showing their flipflops, and Bullwinkle bedroom slippers, it’s just a punctuation mark amongst everyone’s fun.

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Michaele Haynes' terrific book on the Fiesta Duchesses is, Dressing Up Duchesses, N. Y and London, 1998.

My book on 19th century festivals in San Antonio and the precursors of fiesta is: San Antonio on Parade, Texas A & M University Press, College Station, 2003.

A peek at the 2011 Coronation Ceremony.  Can you decipher the allegories?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BF5bHOLXEI

Two videos on Tlemcin bridal dresses are at (the second one has three parts):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXrbbgHFMI4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-t6B-3_fJ4

Two videos from the 2011 Corpus festival in Sitges (the second of them shows the parade when the carpets are smashed as well as their building):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6apVmXTl9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvQ7FFXgprE