Georgia on my mind
John Spurling forgives the Black Sea state for giving birth to Stalin
Georgia has a recognition problem. Many people confuse it with the former slavestate in America, others think of it as a breakaway province of Russia — the Russians themselves evidently still see it that way. But Georgia is a state far older than Russia and only sought Russia’s protection, in 1783, to counter threats from Persia and Turkey. Protection soon turned into annexation, and when Georgia reasserted its independence after the 1917 revolution it was swiftly crushed by the Red Army. It re-emerged as a sovereign state with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then it has undergone a brief civil war; a clash with its Muslim population, assisted by Russia, in the Black Sea province of Abkhazia, from which the majority population of Christian Georgians was expelled; and a bloodless revolution in 2003, which replaced Eduard Shevardnadze’s regime with a government of thirty-somethings led by Mikheil Saakashvili and orientated towards the West. Russia, however, still keeps military bases in Georgia and supplies much of its gas and electricity, so the recognition problem is also a political one.
Is this a country to visit? Not if you have a nervous temperament, nor, unless you are young as well as robust and adventurous, on your own. This is not so much because the place is dangerous — most of it is not — but because the Georgians all speak their own language and have their own peculiar, squiggly alphabet, which resembles no other in the world today. You can get by with Russian, of course, except that the Georgians dislike speaking it; they have not yet, most of them, acquired much English, and have removed all the Cyrillic street-signs. The streets are badly lit, the pavements uneven and the road surfaces terrible — worse than Islington’s. The vehicles are old and belch fumes, the driving is often hair-raising and no Georgian I have ever seen wears a seat-belt, though it is now illegal not to.
The answer is to go with a tourist agency, of which there are several, which will collect you from the airport, drive you about the country in modern motors, put you in modern hotels and generally take care of you. I was looked after on a press trip last autumn by the Department of Tourism and Resorts, and flown to Tbilisi courtesy of BMED (a franchise of British Airways). Why bother? First, because the place is a paradise of mountain and pastoral scenery, culture, history and hospitality, with a Mediterranean climate at its best in spring or autumn; second, because its people are very poor and need your custom; third, to contribute to its recognition, so that incidents like the recent blowing-up of its gas pipelines from Russia are not entirely brushed out of our news by the antics of George Galloway or SvenGoran Eriksson.
The three British journalists on the trip — there was also a large contingent of Dutch and Israeli journalists, plus an Estonian and a Ukrainian — were recruited by Peter Nasmyth, an indefatigable spokesman for Georgia and the author of several excellent books on the subject, including Georgia: In the Mountains of Poetry and most recently Walking in the Caucasus, a pocket-sized guide to 44 walks of varying difficulty. Our timetable was too tight to permit any serious walks during the four days we were whisked about the country in minibuses and royally refreshed in Tbilisi’s smartest restaurants, but beyond the suburbs of Tbilisi the scenery is mostly unspoilt and the distant glimpses of the mountains constantly enticing.
Tbilisi itself is spectacular enough. A ruined fortress, a church with the characteristic Georgian cone-shaped dome and the enormous aluminium statue of ‘Mother Georgia’ — sword for her enemies in one hand, wine-cup for her friends in the other crown the ridge behind the oldest part of the city, with its handsome wooden-balconied houses, on the south side of the milky-coffeecoloured River Mtkvari. The Georgian for Mother Georgia, incidentally, is ‘Kartlis Deda’, which gives some idea of the oddity of their language, for whereas ‘deda’ means mother, ‘mama’ means father, and the Georgian for Georgia itself is ‘Sakartvelo’, derived from a pagan god called Kartlos.
But in spite of its pagan name and innumerable Muslim invasions, Georgia has been resolutely Christian since AD 327. Our tour began with the Metekhi church, overlooking the river from a bluff on the north side. The cramped, pillared interior was crowded with people surrounding a priest known for his healing powers. Beside the church a huge equestrian statue of the city’s founder, King Vakhtang Gorgasali, looks back across the river towards the sulphur springs which were supposedly his reason for choosing the site. The baths which still use these springs are underground, covered by low brick domes. We were taken into the only one with an impressive exterior façade of blue Islamic tiles and minarets, but the baths inside are disappointingly small and dark compared with the one under a dome which I sampled with my family on a previous visit to Tbilisi. There the light from the dome, filtered through steam and striking off marble, was soft and bright and the square pool with its steps down on three sides reminded me of Alma-Tadema’s settings for his Roman nudes. We sat and drank tea after our hot dip and I submitted to a vigorous massage on the slab provided — you hire one of the baths for an hour or so and the massage is an optional extra.
Near the baths we were taken to watch a baker at work in a 17th-century basement, slapping his dough in flat, fish-like lengths on to the sides of an open, barrel-shaped oven. There they stuck until some minutes later he peeled them off as crusty loaves and handed them up to the customers waiting behind a wooden counter in the upper part of the shop. Most Georgian food, like the loaves, is sui generis and delicious. Salads of cucumber, succulent tomatoes and basil, dishes made with spinach, walnuts, kidney beans, plum sauce, coriander, aubergines and pomegranates cover the table and are replaced at intervals by grilled chicken, lake fish, khinkali (meat dumplings), khachapuri (cheese pie) and mtsvadi (kebabs). The wines are all local. The Georgians claim to be the first winemakers in the world, starting somewhere around 4,000 BC, and they still cultivate more than 500 varieties of grape. Many of their red wines are too sweet for our taste, but the best in my experience — dry and richly coloured — are made from Saperavi grapes in the eastern province of Kakheti.
In Kakheti’s chief city, Telavi, under the walls of King Erekle (Heracles) II’s 18thcentury castle, we mingled with the crowds at the October wine festival and watched children performing the same exhilarating Georgian dances — leaping and mockfighting for the solo males, gliding and dipping for the choral females — I had seen in London a month earlier done by the Georgian National Dance Company. The children, dancing on grass in the middle of a ring of spectators, seemed already halfprofessional, the boys especially, with their faces set in expressions of fierce defiance. Other older and more alarming children, meanwhile, with equally determined expressions, badgered the tourists for money.
In the far corner of Kakheti, on the border with Azerbaijan, we were taken to the David Gareja cave monastery, founded by Syrian monks in the 6th century on a ridge above a weird sandstone landscape of striated rocks, weathered to look like rows of enormous wine-barrels. It was a Sunday and in spite of the long and dreadfully rutted track through the hills that leads there, the place was full of visitors, mostly Georgian. The monks did not look pleased to see us — why would they immure themselves in such a place if not to escape from other people? — and the only loo was a rickety shack with a hole in the floor perched on the bare hillside below. Somebody there, however, had the grace to own a Siamese cat. As the visitors streamed through the narrow entrance I saw it dart through its own little door cut into the stone beside the main door. Above the monastery, by way of a steep climb and a slippery path along the edge of a sheer drop of several hundred feet into Azerbaijan, the fearless can visit the remains of another cave monastery, whose magnificent frescoes are still partly in place, partly fallen in heaps on the floor.
We visited another cave complex to the west of Tbilisi. Uplistsikhe (‘Fortress of God’) was a great city and trading-centre during the first millennium BC and the mediaeval kings of Georgia and their only sovereign queen, Tamara, once held court there. But it was destroyed by Tamerlane, who invaded Georgia eight times, and only the caves survive, with few traces of the theatre, palace, churches and houses that once obtruded from them. Uplistsikhe, set in a great sandstone ridge above the same swift river that flows through Tbilisi, is one of those ghostly places where one feels the fragility of our own civilisation. If it had had a great story attached to it, like Troy or Mycenae, with a Homer or an Aeschylus to tell it, it would surely have put Georgia more securely on the map. But the country’s greatest horror story is not so ancient and actually originated nearby, in the town of Gori, birthplace of Stalin. For the moment, that is a story the Georgians would understandably prefer to forget.
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