Return to a state of grace The Georgians have got their beautiful country back and are happy to show it off to the world. By Jeremy Seal Sunday Times, 2/4/2000
'Georgian folk singers,' exclaimed Manana Skhirtladze, rolling rapturous eyes even as she hammered the table of her Tbilisi guesthouse. 'When Sputnik went up in 1975, the only folk song it carried into outer space was our 'You are a Grapevine''. She hummed a few, rapturous bars before concluding, in a tone that brooked no argument: 'So. You will see them'. After almost two centuries of Russian domination, the Georgians have got their nation back, and they are hard at work hymning its glories.
Georgia's geographical positioners, the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, tend to prompt hazy notions of a mournful exoticism rather than of actual whereabouts. Few visitors to this Ireland-sized nation may know exactly where they're headed, but they soon know that they've arrived. On my first morning in Tbilisi, I was breakfasting, at a table shuddering from Manana's fistfalls, upon caviar from Astrakhan, pickled sturgeon and a heavenly plum compote smeared lavishly upon fresh, naan-style bread.
If this former Soviet Republic shares a pervasive soulfulness, as well as an ancient Orthodox spirituality, with its hulking neighbour, then its cuisine and its spectacular scenery put the Russian equivalents - the grey grub and interminable steppe - to flight. Nor could you call my accommodation typically Intourist. I had arrived the previous evening to be shown to a room boasting lavish gilt cornicing, a dresser housing an extensive collection of porcelain figurines (rural idyll types all), a grand piano and a steppe-sized double bed. It transpired that all the Intourist rooms in Tbilisi and elsewhere in Georgia were taken - and had been so since 1992, when thousands of the Georgians fleeing the civil war in secessionist Abkhazia had been handed the room keys to all the state hotels. That the country's refugees get to stay in hotel suites rather than the statutory fly-blown border camps seems entirely in keeping with a Georgian insistence on hospitality that borders on the fanatical. (Expect, then, to drink to excess in the Russian manner, only wine rather than vodka.) To plug the inevitable accommodation gap, Tbilisi guesthouses like Manana's have emerged that offer a memorable, if pricey, combination of good company, excellent food and quirky surroundings. Plus an abundance of useful, if forcefully put, sightseeing suggestions.
My surroundings exhilarated me, but their extravagance made me feel like a sluttish Viennese chatelaine so that I slept fitfully, as if I might expect late-night company, and I rose early. The guesthouse stood on a cobbled street, flanked by plane trees and acacias, and fading wooden facades with wrought-iron balconies and guttering that hung from the eaves in sorry zig-zags. It was a fine place from which to explore old Tbilisi, a valley city threaded along the swirling, brown Mtkvari River, with the statutory hilltop funicular, its terracotta-toned churches with conical roofs, like stubby pencil points, the sulphur bathhouses with their domed cupolas, the wide Soviet-style boulevards and the kiosks of the money-changers, usually fronted with fish tanks. In the echoing halls of the various state museums (the pre-Christian precious metalwork at the National Museum on Rustaveli Avenue being the pick of the collections), female guards sat at lonely tables, rouged, as if awaiting unreliable bridge partners.
But Georgia's great attractions reside in the Caucasus mountains to the north, the wooded hills in the west and the bucolic, vineyarded Kakheti region to the east which gives way to high, austere steppelands and thence to Azerbaijan; Georgia boasts a predominantly rural soul. Our driver, a sometime rugby player called Batch, was moonlighting from his job as presidential bodyguard. Tourism is in its infancy here, and rare is the tour driver who has abandoned the day job. So it was that Batch came equipped with mobile phone, Raybans and pistol. He drove us to Mtskheta, Georgia's ancient spiritual capital where Christ's crucifixtion robe is believed to have been buried, and tucked his shooter deep into his trousers as we entered the town's lovely red-stone cathedral to the sounds of plainchant.
We lunched on the nearby Aragvi River where the deck of a cable ferry doubled as a restaurant dining room which rejoiced in the fabulously pessimistic moniker, The Titanic. We ate khachapuri (cheese in toasted naan bread), shashlik (skewered lamb kebabs) served with a plum sauce, and khinkali (dough bags filled with lamb, garlic and onion). Swallows dipped on the water, and curtains of summer rain obscured the hilltop eyries where churches perched. We drank Saperavi, a red wine rich as gravy - a fine testimony to Georgia's time-honoured reputation for viniculture. It caused us to sing, I recall, but not as the ship went down.
We headed for the mountains, following the Georgian Military Highway as it ran north towards Russia, bisecting a plain of high maize and nodding sunflowers from which cattle randomly emerged, scattering the light traffic. In the foothills, men scythed at the meadow grass, and stacked it around vertical stakes to prevent the wind carrying it away. At Pasanauri, a spa hotel stood looted and empty, a reminder of the post-Independence anarchy of 1992 in which the countryside had been engulfed. All along the river valley, the far older ruins of square, stone lookout posts could be seen, where beacons were once lit to pass word of invasion.
The mountains reared up, cloaked in faded baize that was dotted with distant cattle. Roadside stalls sold 'Strong Drinc' vodka, woollen socks, chewing gum and candle-shaped, chewy nut and grape confections called tklapi. In the afternoon, we came to a precipitous mountain track that led into wild country along the Truso Gorge. The river was livid, and fresh rockfalls littered the track. A few days earlier, a villager and his horse had apparently been washed away.
'They were trying to ford the river,' a man told us. He was standing at a calcified slick, off-white and rust, where mineral water springs broke surface in fizzy eruptions, filling his water bottle while his puppy strained at its leash.
'Nice dog,' I murmured, bending down.
'Wolf,' the man corrected me; he had recently acquired it from a hunter. I stared into the creature's green eyes, and promptly stood up.
We stopped to pick up a solitary figure, carrying a crook. He had come from Gergeti in the next valley, he said, and was in search of his sheep dogs. They had run off; they were, he explained, in 'marriage mode'. As we skinned our eyes for horny collies, the shepherd bemoaned the break-up of the Soviet Union which had once been his unrestricted pasture. 'I can no longer take my sheep over the border to graze in Dagestan,' he said.
We reached the township of Kazbegi, set in a mountain landscape of birch forest and clover meadows aswarm with butterflies. True to Georgia's colourful headgear, the local men wore flat caps that extended splendidly on all sides, like mortar boards. Elsewhere, we would see huge, floppy hats of the sort that Edwardian dames once favoured for gardening, curious baseball caps made of raffia and, at roadside stalls, shaggy white woollen kalpaks, like deranged busbies for brigands. We retired to a rough cafe to buy khachapuri and kvass, the brown, bread-based cordial of the Russian steppes. On the wall hung a black and white photo of a moustached man genially smoking his pipe. It took me a moment to register that I was looking at a portrait of Stalin; the monster of the West is still revered as a strong man in the far corners of the High Caucasus
In his home town of Gori in Central Georgia, the world's last-remaining statue of Uncle Joe stood forty feet high in the main square. It was a hot day; he looked like he could have done without the greatcoat. At his nearby museum, the cottage in which he was born has been reverently canopied with a Soviet-style, classical temple. We wandered aghast past the exhibits - photographs of Stalin, Stalin's suitcases and clothes, his train carriage and even his ghoulish death mask, taken hours after his death and arranged in a low-lit, velvet-clad mausoleum chamber that reminded me of a provincial cinema, long since condemned.
'He made some mistakes,' the guide finally conceded, 'but he was kind to kids.' The air was thick with misplaced reverence which was punctured, at last, by Stalin's desk where somebody had placed a pair of pink sunglasses; even the guide sniggered.
We drove west, past rusty skeletons of factories picked to the bone by decay, through tea plantations to the Black Sea resort city of Batumi. For all its tree-lined avenues, shady parks, horse-drawn caleches out of Chekhov, and fading, fin-de-siecle facades of iron filigree and stucco, the city was flush with new cash - customs receipts from the nearby border crossing with Turkey. New Mercedes cruised the streets. They dropped men in suits at the doors of guarded gun shops selling AK-47s, or at the entrances of hotels where Russian women in evening dress and heavy maquillage simpered in the midday sun.
We opted for glasses of tarhun, the popular tarragon syrup cordial, in an oriental sweet shop whose Arabesque interior was a confection of mirrors and marble floor, chandeliers and gilt walls, with stalactite cornicing featuring naked maidens and lions' heads, all encrusted with stained glass in yellows, reds and blues. In the evening, Batumi's crowds gathered in the parks around Gamsakhurdia Avenue, and ate shashlik and salad at the beach restaurants. Everybody wore black, if for varying reasons, the paramilitaries because they were paramilitaries, the girls because it was fashionable, and the middle-aged because they were in periods of perfectly jovial mourning from which the Georgians never seem to emerge.
We spent the following afternoon at Sarpi, where lorries gunned their engines for Baku and Vladikavkaz. This border village with Turkey, some ten miles west of town, was apparently the Batumi beach of choice. Vendors hired out deckchairs and pedalos, hawked sunflower seeds, or prowled the shingle beach with rubber rings slung along the shoprails of their arms. A hundred metres away, signs in Georgian, English and Turkish said Good-bye, and beyond the custom's post a single Turkish minaret arose.
But we were headed for another border. To the east, hard up against the hilly deserts of Azerbaijan, we came to the monastery of David-Gareja. In this region, some 6,000 monks had once lived. Now just five monks kept the ancient faith. They too dressed in black, wore beards and their hair long. They lived in simple cells in the rock, each furnished with a frame bed and a stove,with an icon nailed to the wall. I stepped into one of the rock chapels where the altar was decked in desert blooms. As we left, one of the monks was picking mulberries in the monastery courtyard, his beard running blood-red.
Georgian culture had somehow remained impervious to the leaching effects of the communist decades, as the folk-singing proved. Manana bundled us off to a performance of the Georgian State Dance Ensemble in Tbilisi, where we marvelled at male voices that conjured raw emotion from a choral dissonance unlike anything I had ever heard. It was a heartbreaking, unforgettable sound which proved that nobody could have been out there, picking up the signals from Sputnik. Nobody with a soul, anyway. Otherwise, with offerings like that, I suspect we'd have heard from them by now.
ENDS
Jeremy Seal travelled with Steppes East (01285 810267).
Other operators featuring Georgia include: Cricketer Holidays (01892 664242); Regent Holidays (0117 921 1711); Explore (01252 760 100); and Journeys Through Georgia (0171 431 5482). Exodus (0181 673 0859) have walking holidays in the Caucasus.
A single-entry visa, costing £10, is available through the Georgian Embassy, 3 Hornton Place, London W8 (phone: 0171 937 8233).
Reading: Bradt Guide to Georgia by Tim Burford (£13.95)
No vaccinations are required, but tap water should be avoided.
'Georgian folk singers,' exclaimed Manana Skhirtladze, rolling rapturous eyes even as she hammered the table of her Tbilisi guesthouse. 'When Sputnik went up in 1975, the only folk song it carried into outer space was our 'You are a Grapevine''. She hummed a few, rapturous bars before concluding, in a tone that brooked no argument: 'So. You will see them'. After almost two centuries of Russian domination, the Georgians have got their nation back, and they are hard at work hymning its glories.
Georgia's geographical positioners, the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, tend to prompt hazy notions of a mournful exoticism rather than of actual whereabouts. Few visitors to this Ireland-sized nation may know exactly where they're headed, but they soon know that they've arrived. On my first morning in Tbilisi, I was breakfasting, at a table shuddering from Manana's fistfalls, upon caviar from Astrakhan, pickled sturgeon and a heavenly plum compote smeared lavishly upon fresh, naan-style bread.
If this former Soviet Republic shares a pervasive soulfulness, as well as an ancient Orthodox spirituality, with its hulking neighbour, then its cuisine and its spectacular scenery put the Russian equivalents - the grey grub and interminable steppe - to flight. Nor could you call my accommodation typically Intourist. I had arrived the previous evening to be shown to a room boasting lavish gilt cornicing, a dresser housing an extensive collection of porcelain figurines (rural idyll types all), a grand piano and a steppe-sized double bed. It transpired that all the Intourist rooms in Tbilisi and elsewhere in Georgia were taken - and had been so since 1992, when thousands of the Georgians fleeing the civil war in secessionist Abkhazia had been handed the room keys to all the state hotels. That the country's refugees get to stay in hotel suites rather than the statutory fly-blown border camps seems entirely in keeping with a Georgian insistence on hospitality that borders on the fanatical. (Expect, then, to drink to excess in the Russian manner, only wine rather than vodka.) To plug the inevitable accommodation gap, Tbilisi guesthouses like Manana's have emerged that offer a memorable, if pricey, combination of good company, excellent food and quirky surroundings. Plus an abundance of useful, if forcefully put, sightseeing suggestions.
My surroundings exhilarated me, but their extravagance made me feel like a sluttish Viennese chatelaine so that I slept fitfully, as if I might expect late-night company, and I rose early. The guesthouse stood on a cobbled street, flanked by plane trees and acacias, and fading wooden facades with wrought-iron balconies and guttering that hung from the eaves in sorry zig-zags. It was a fine place from which to explore old Tbilisi, a valley city threaded along the swirling, brown Mtkvari River, with the statutory hilltop funicular, its terracotta-toned churches with conical roofs, like stubby pencil points, the sulphur bathhouses with their domed cupolas, the wide Soviet-style boulevards and the kiosks of the money-changers, usually fronted with fish tanks. In the echoing halls of the various state museums (the pre-Christian precious metalwork at the National Museum on Rustaveli Avenue being the pick of the collections), female guards sat at lonely tables, rouged, as if awaiting unreliable bridge partners.
But Georgia's great attractions reside in the Caucasus mountains to the north, the wooded hills in the west and the bucolic, vineyarded Kakheti region to the east which gives way to high, austere steppelands and thence to Azerbaijan; Georgia boasts a predominantly rural soul. Our driver, a sometime rugby player called Batch, was moonlighting from his job as presidential bodyguard. Tourism is in its infancy here, and rare is the tour driver who has abandoned the day job. So it was that Batch came equipped with mobile phone, Raybans and pistol. He drove us to Mtskheta, Georgia's ancient spiritual capital where Christ's crucifixtion robe is believed to have been buried, and tucked his shooter deep into his trousers as we entered the town's lovely red-stone cathedral to the sounds of plainchant.
We lunched on the nearby Aragvi River where the deck of a cable ferry doubled as a restaurant dining room which rejoiced in the fabulously pessimistic moniker, The Titanic. We ate khachapuri (cheese in toasted naan bread), shashlik (skewered lamb kebabs) served with a plum sauce, and khinkali (dough bags filled with lamb, garlic and onion). Swallows dipped on the water, and curtains of summer rain obscured the hilltop eyries where churches perched. We drank Saperavi, a red wine rich as gravy - a fine testimony to Georgia's time-honoured reputation for viniculture. It caused us to sing, I recall, but not as the ship went down.
We headed for the mountains, following the Georgian Military Highway as it ran north towards Russia, bisecting a plain of high maize and nodding sunflowers from which cattle randomly emerged, scattering the light traffic. In the foothills, men scythed at the meadow grass, and stacked it around vertical stakes to prevent the wind carrying it away. At Pasanauri, a spa hotel stood looted and empty, a reminder of the post-Independence anarchy of 1992 in which the countryside had been engulfed. All along the river valley, the far older ruins of square, stone lookout posts could be seen, where beacons were once lit to pass word of invasion.
The mountains reared up, cloaked in faded baize that was dotted with distant cattle. Roadside stalls sold 'Strong Drinc' vodka, woollen socks, chewing gum and candle-shaped, chewy nut and grape confections called tklapi. In the afternoon, we came to a precipitous mountain track that led into wild country along the Truso Gorge. The river was livid, and fresh rockfalls littered the track. A few days earlier, a villager and his horse had apparently been washed away.
'They were trying to ford the river,' a man told us. He was standing at a calcified slick, off-white and rust, where mineral water springs broke surface in fizzy eruptions, filling his water bottle while his puppy strained at its leash.
'Nice dog,' I murmured, bending down.
'Wolf,' the man corrected me; he had recently acquired it from a hunter. I stared into the creature's green eyes, and promptly stood up.
We stopped to pick up a solitary figure, carrying a crook. He had come from Gergeti in the next valley, he said, and was in search of his sheep dogs. They had run off; they were, he explained, in 'marriage mode'. As we skinned our eyes for horny collies, the shepherd bemoaned the break-up of the Soviet Union which had once been his unrestricted pasture. 'I can no longer take my sheep over the border to graze in Dagestan,' he said.
We reached the township of Kazbegi, set in a mountain landscape of birch forest and clover meadows aswarm with butterflies. True to Georgia's colourful headgear, the local men wore flat caps that extended splendidly on all sides, like mortar boards. Elsewhere, we would see huge, floppy hats of the sort that Edwardian dames once favoured for gardening, curious baseball caps made of raffia and, at roadside stalls, shaggy white woollen kalpaks, like deranged busbies for brigands. We retired to a rough cafe to buy khachapuri and kvass, the brown, bread-based cordial of the Russian steppes. On the wall hung a black and white photo of a moustached man genially smoking his pipe. It took me a moment to register that I was looking at a portrait of Stalin; the monster of the West is still revered as a strong man in the far corners of the High Caucasus
In his home town of Gori in Central Georgia, the world's last-remaining statue of Uncle Joe stood forty feet high in the main square. It was a hot day; he looked like he could have done without the greatcoat. At his nearby museum, the cottage in which he was born has been reverently canopied with a Soviet-style, classical temple. We wandered aghast past the exhibits - photographs of Stalin, Stalin's suitcases and clothes, his train carriage and even his ghoulish death mask, taken hours after his death and arranged in a low-lit, velvet-clad mausoleum chamber that reminded me of a provincial cinema, long since condemned.
'He made some mistakes,' the guide finally conceded, 'but he was kind to kids.' The air was thick with misplaced reverence which was punctured, at last, by Stalin's desk where somebody had placed a pair of pink sunglasses; even the guide sniggered.
We drove west, past rusty skeletons of factories picked to the bone by decay, through tea plantations to the Black Sea resort city of Batumi. For all its tree-lined avenues, shady parks, horse-drawn caleches out of Chekhov, and fading, fin-de-siecle facades of iron filigree and stucco, the city was flush with new cash - customs receipts from the nearby border crossing with Turkey. New Mercedes cruised the streets. They dropped men in suits at the doors of guarded gun shops selling AK-47s, or at the entrances of hotels where Russian women in evening dress and heavy maquillage simpered in the midday sun.
We opted for glasses of tarhun, the popular tarragon syrup cordial, in an oriental sweet shop whose Arabesque interior was a confection of mirrors and marble floor, chandeliers and gilt walls, with stalactite cornicing featuring naked maidens and lions' heads, all encrusted with stained glass in yellows, reds and blues. In the evening, Batumi's crowds gathered in the parks around Gamsakhurdia Avenue, and ate shashlik and salad at the beach restaurants. Everybody wore black, if for varying reasons, the paramilitaries because they were paramilitaries, the girls because it was fashionable, and the middle-aged because they were in periods of perfectly jovial mourning from which the Georgians never seem to emerge.
We spent the following afternoon at Sarpi, where lorries gunned their engines for Baku and Vladikavkaz. This border village with Turkey, some ten miles west of town, was apparently the Batumi beach of choice. Vendors hired out deckchairs and pedalos, hawked sunflower seeds, or prowled the shingle beach with rubber rings slung along the shoprails of their arms. A hundred metres away, signs in Georgian, English and Turkish said Good-bye, and beyond the custom's post a single Turkish minaret arose.
But we were headed for another border. To the east, hard up against the hilly deserts of Azerbaijan, we came to the monastery of David-Gareja. In this region, some 6,000 monks had once lived. Now just five monks kept the ancient faith. They too dressed in black, wore beards and their hair long. They lived in simple cells in the rock, each furnished with a frame bed and a stove,with an icon nailed to the wall. I stepped into one of the rock chapels where the altar was decked in desert blooms. As we left, one of the monks was picking mulberries in the monastery courtyard, his beard running blood-red.
Georgian culture had somehow remained impervious to the leaching effects of the communist decades, as the folk-singing proved. Manana bundled us off to a performance of the Georgian State Dance Ensemble in Tbilisi, where we marvelled at male voices that conjured raw emotion from a choral dissonance unlike anything I had ever heard. It was a heartbreaking, unforgettable sound which proved that nobody could have been out there, picking up the signals from Sputnik. Nobody with a soul, anyway. Otherwise, with offerings like that, I suspect we'd have heard from them by now.
ENDS
Jeremy Seal travelled with Steppes East (01285 810267).
Other operators featuring Georgia include: Cricketer Holidays (01892 664242); Regent Holidays (0117 921 1711); Explore (01252 760 100); and Journeys Through Georgia (0171 431 5482). Exodus (0181 673 0859) have walking holidays in the Caucasus.
A single-entry visa, costing £10, is available through the Georgian Embassy, 3 Hornton Place, London W8 (phone: 0171 937 8233).
Reading: Bradt Guide to Georgia by Tim Burford (£13.95)
No vaccinations are required, but tap water should be avoided.
