Good and Lost

I left Batumi on the morning of the 7th, walking the kilometer or so to the bus station and checking for a marshrutka (Georgia’s minibus answer to Turkey’s dolmus) to the town of Akhaltsikhe in southern Georgia, a city with what looked to be some interesting sights in and about it. As it turned out, there was no marshrutka to Akhaltsikhe, so instead I headed to the only nearby city I had heard of: Kutaisi.

I arrived a few hours later and was immediately picked up by a taxi driver who spoke a little Russian and promised to take me to a hotel. When we headed out of the city into the rusting decay of Soviet-era industrial sprawl, I tried to ask if there was a hotel closer to the city, but he waved off my objections and dropped me beside a dilapidated two-story building with “Sastumro” (hotel) painted across the front in fading Georgian characters. Behind it was an empty factory and a broken bus, and beside it stood two buildings that looked for all the world like prisons, with high walls and metal guard towers, now empty of whatever guards once patrolled there. However, I wasn’t in the mood to make my way back into the city, and I booked a night with the intent to try to find someplace closer for the next night.

Fortunately, an inner-city marshrutka ran for half a lari (around thirty cents) all the way from the hotel into the town center. My first impression of Kutaisi had been the old apartment buildings and abandoned factories of the outskirts, and so I was quite pleasantly surprised when these fell behind me and the marshrutka pulled to a stop in a clean, bustling city center built around a curve of the river, with cafes facing the water, statues scattered among the city parks, and, on a hill overlooking the city, an old cathedral undergoing renovations.

I had also, without knowing it, jumped forward two time zones in the few hours between Batumi and Kutaisi, so what I thought was mid-afternoon was actually early evening. So as dark fell a little early, I headed back to my hotel and, content with the marshrutka commute, booked a second night.

The next day was cloudy, but dry and reasonably warm, and I headed into town early to begin more in-depth explorations. My first destination was the cathedral on the hill which, according to some preliminary research, was considered an excellent specimen of medieval Georgian architecture. A closer inspection showed why–towering stonework with intricate carvings, in the combination of rounded shapes and straight edges peculiar to Georgian churches. I was a bit disappointed to find it half-sheathed in latticework and cloth, and swarming with construction workers, but it was an impressive sight nonetheless–and the view out across the city with the high white peaks of the mountains rising behind it was something to see indeed.

I made my way back in town and found a waiting taxi, prepared to bargain down some exorbitant rate to get to my second destination, the mountain monastery of Gelati. The driver told me the price, in Russian, and I had to ask again–desyat? Ten lari? Six dollars; done and done. We drove out of the city up into the mountains. This direction, almost opposite from the way to my hotel, was significantly more attractive, with the city center’s stately buildings giving way to houses and farms rather than factories and run-down apartment buildings. The road was also full of people, walking and hitchhiking up and down the road, catching rides with strangers for only a few kilometers to a market in town or back out to a home in the country–a type of behavior I’ve found everywhere in Georgia so far. I suppose the American ghost/axe murderer/bank robber brand of hitchhiker movie hasn’t reached a wide enough audience here yet.

The taxi dropped me off in a crowded dirt parking lot adjacent to the monastery, lined with booths selling icons, crucifixes, and wax prayer candles, the entrance itself lined with beggars looking for handouts from the faithful. Having come from Sunday Christian America, through Friday Muslim Turkey, it was striking to arrive in a place where religion (in this case, Eastern Orthodoxy) clearly played so important a role in daily life. These weren’t just the swarms of tourists you might see in a cathedral in Paris or New York. Visiting Georgians would pose for a cell phone picture in front of the gates, then cross themselves three times as the entered it; they might talk and joke on the steps outside the church, but, upon entry, bow to the floor and kiss the base of an icon, and ask the blessing of the priests. The ceiling of the church was painted with frescoes from window to window, depicting scenes of religious importance, and the church was imbued with an extra sense of the sacred by the clear faith of its visitors. One priest, exceedingly portly in his black robes and sporting a long black beard and a large wooden cross swinging from a necklace, blessed his visiting, transient flock and laughed with them on the steps outside after he had completed his priestly duties.

After taking some time to soak in the place, I headed back to the parking lot to try to find a ride down. I approached what I thought was a marshrutka and asked in Russian if it went back to Kutaisi. There was a moment of some coldness at the use of the language, thanks to a few centuries of occupation and a recent attempt by Russia to reestablish the tradition, while they considered me. Then one of them asked me where I was from and, when I told them, grins and an invitation to sit down.

My impression that this was a marshrutka ended when I found myself sitting among a large group (possibly a family) of Georgians sharing a lunch. As soon as I sat down, I was offered some–a sort of cold meat sandwich between flat pieces of bread–and interrogated as to my knowledge of the recent Russian invasion. When I answered that yes, it was on the news all over America, they nodded. The apparent head of the group, a middle-aged man with graying hair, clasped his hands together. “American and Georgia–like this.” I agreed, and was poured a plastic cup of clear liquid. “To Georgia!” my host said, pouring one for himself, and I down the contents–which had a faintly grape-like flavor and burned like fire. “Chacha!” he said, grinning. “Good?” I nodded as heartily as possible. I found out later that chacha is essentially the Georgian version of moonshine–a homemade, grape-flavored, indecently strong sort of vodka.

We were soon underway, stopping halfway back for a side trip to a second mountaintop monastery, smaller and with far fewer people, where I was introduced to another portly priest and had my picture taken with him. In Georgia, it’s customary for members of a congregation or visitors to a monastery to bring a large bundle of food for the resident priests–and, with the heavy butter, cheese, bread, eggs and meat that form the basis for most Georgian dishes, it’s no wonder so many of the priests tend toward the large end of the spectrum.

The family dropped me off with a chorus of goodbyes an hour later in the center of Kutaisi and, happy with the day’s explorations, I had a meal of mtsvadi (pork roasted over vine leaves) and headed back for the night.

I headed out the next day for the bus station to continue my trip and managed to navigate the city’s marshrutka system until I found it. No easy feat, since my grasp of the Georgian alphabet still isn’t strong enough to read a word without laboriously sounding it out in my head, impossible to do when a marshrutka drives by with its route placard in the window. Nonetheless, I found it and asked around until I found a long-distance marshrutka to Akhaltsikhe. When the inevitable question of where I was from came up, one of my fellow passengers turned and, in English, said hello.

His name was Rajha, and he was studying engineering at the university in Kutaisi. He was heading home for a visit to his parents in Aspindza (a village near Akhaltsikhe) and, before the ride was half over, he had invited me to visit. I accepted gladly and, after switching marshrutkas in Akhaltsikhe, we arrived in Aspindza in the late afternoon. After a short walk up some dirt side roads so rutted it was a wonder cars without four-wheel drive could navigate them, we arrived at his home, a quite nice two-story house with a wide yard and several fruit trees. It also had no indoor plumbing or central heating, and as Rajha started a fire in the stove and pointed the way to the outhouse, he shrugged and grinned. “This is a village.”

His parents, both economists, got back from work an hour or so later, and I was introduced. Soon after, Rajha’s mother disappeared into the kitchen and some delicious aromas began to waft out. I had heard rumors of Georgian hospitality, and those rumors were soon met, and then surpassed. The table was set with half a dozen different dishes: pork with eggs, khachpuri (bread with cheese inside), large pickles, potatoes marinated in a sweet sauce, bread, and–Rajha’s favorite–khingali, a sort of spiced meat dumpling. There were also pitchers of homemade wine, both white and red, and Rajha was appointed the meal’s “tamada,” a particularly Georgian role which has it’s closest equivalent in the English toast-master. It is the tamada’s duty to regularly propose toasts, quite long and involved ones at that, and keep the conversation going. I ate, and drank wine (excellent), and ate … and ate … and ate. Whenever my plate was nearing anything approaching an empty state, Rajha’s mother would burst into a stream of Georgian, and Rajha would translate: “You must eat everything! Eat! Eat!”

After this quite excellent treatment, we retired to the seats and sofas around the wood stove and Rajha’s father, upon learning that I had studied history in university, began testing me on the subject: when did Napoleon’s armies first enter Africa? Who are the main five historical conquerors of Europe? and of course: for how long did the Russian federation occupy Georgia? Rajha’s father spoke fluent Russian, and with my limited knowledge of the language and Rajha’s English, we managed to have a good conversation.

The next day, I was invited to stay for a second night. During the day, Rajha and I drove up the canyons south of Aspindze to the cave city and monastery of Vardzia. The drive was spectacular enough, and when we came into sight of the exposed caves, stone walkways, and precariously perched church high up on the cliff walls, I was once again glad for the chance encounters of traveling. It was winter, and so we had the place to ourselves, but we picked up a hitchhiker (one of perhaps six over the drive there and back) along the way who turned out to be a tour guide and told me that, should I return in the summer, he could take me anywhere I liked.

In Georgia, all of these inaccessible monasteries are, unlike those of Turkey, still occupied. Rajha had brought along a large bag of apples to give to the priests who lived in the ancient caves, and we took our time exploring the cave houses and pathways of the place, Rajha pointing out interesting things here and there–the caves where the monks used to study, the winepresses the monks had used to make their own wine up here, and the entrance to the now-closed secret tunnel that ran all they way down beneath the canyon’s walls to the river’s edge far below, used to retrieve water when the city was under siege. Indeed, the cliff walls up and down the river are catacombed with cave dwellings and the remnants of once-underground cities, all built in preparation for the onslaught of the Mongols some eight hundred years ago. Vardzia itself was once thirteen levels high, with thousands of dwellings safe behind the rocky cliffs; Rajha pointed out where a miles-long tunnel had once run from Vardzia to another cave city further up the canyon. Unfortunately, much of the city is exposed now thanks to the freezing and thawing of the seasons and one particularly nasty earthquake; it is quite a sight nonetheless.

That night, Rajha informed me that it was his uncle’s birthday, and invited me to come. Rajha’s family and I walked through the village to his uncle’s house, perhaps a third of a mile away, which was already alive with activity. I found I’d underestimated the Georgian concept of a “party”–the whole extended family was there, from Rajha’s wizened grandparents to various cousins ranging from Rajha’s age (twenty) down to toddlers, as well as various friends, former classmates, and peripheral relatives. The wine, also homemade, was flowing even more freely than the previous night, and in a much more ritualized fashion. Every new guest to arrive was required to down a horn (a “kanci”) of the type we in the west tend to see only in pictures of medieval europe, and the horns were brought out frequently thereafter for the more elaborate toasts. There were also the usual glasses, as well as a narrow-necked clay vessel called a “dokhi” which served as a way to, in effect, prove one’s place at the table–all were required to down it without stopping, a feat I only barely managed, not so much because of the volume (the dokhi was little larger than a good-sized wineglass) but because the narrow neck made it impossible to simply drink from. There were toasts to friendship, to brotherhood, to the wives and women present, to children, to friends’ children, to Georgia, to the Georgian president, to life, to happiness, and, in one unusually somber moment, a toast to (as Rajha translated it) “the brothers who died fighting against the Russian invasion”. Fortunately for me, the wine didn’t seem particularly strong, as etiquette required everyone present to drink quite a lot of it. The Georgian method for dealing with the quantity was to eat (”if you are to drink wine, you must eat!”) a feast in the process. After my relatively ascetic died of one solid meal a day while traveling alone, this onslaught of food was overwhelming, and I had more trouble consuming the quantity of food continually placed on my plate than I did handling the wine.

With handshakes and promises to bring stories of Georgian hospitality back to America (fully my intention), we finally parted ways and headed back to Rajha’s house for coffee and a good night’s sleep. I fell asleep happy with the knowledge that I had just had one of the best experiences of my travels so far.

This morning I was up in time to catch the marshrutka back to Akhaltsikhe, but not before Rajha’s mother loaded me down with gifts of homemade bread (two enormous loaves) and a sort of semi-sweet skin made from the grapes left after winemaking, both in sheets and as churchkhela, wrapped around a walnut mixture like a (rather healthier) candy bar. With this, I think, I could survive all the way to the Turkish border.

After the generosity of Rajha and his family and the stark beauty of the mountains around Aspindze, arriving here in Akhaltsikhe felt like a sort of lull. A low, thin fog hung over the city, and the city center was small, though attractive and clean enough. There is, of course, the requisite ancient fortress and old church on hills overlooking the city, a sight so common in Georgia that already I find myself almost becoming used to them. Georgians certainly seemed, in times past, to have enjoyed building massive structures on the most inaccessible, picturesque, and rocky crags available. It’s a trait I’m glad to benefit from.

Tomorrow I continue on to Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, and then Tbilisi. My trip is already more than half over, and in less than two weeks I’ll be back in Virginia. It’s hard to believe; now, looking out of an upper story window at the wood-slat town of Akhaltsikhe and the fortress on one of the hills rising among the houses, with Georgian hospitality still fresh in my memory, Virginia seems a very long way away.

I suppose I’m content to leave it that way for at least a few days yet. Nakhvamdis!