We arrived in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, at around 5 AM, our flight from Athens having been delayed by about an hour. Our first day in the city was spent recuperating from the ungodly flight time and exploring the old city and the modern east bank of the river. I think we will have more to say about our time in Tbilisi as we revisited this vibrant and beautiful city several times over the course of our travels in Georgia, so I won’t dwell on it too much in this post except to say that our first days were spent wandering the streets of the city and getting acquainted with Georgian food and drink.
Mtskheta
On our third day we decided to travel to Mtskheta, a former capital of the kingdom of Kartli. Kartli and its predecessor kingdom Iberia (not to be confused with the Iberian peninsula of Spain and Portugal), occupied the middle third of Georgia and stretched down into modern Armenia and Turkey at its greatest extent. Iberia was the contemporary of Colchis, the land made famous in the Argonautica as the home of the Golden Fleece and still renowned for the quantity of gold mined in the Classical period, much of which forms the star collection in the Georgian National Museum. Kartli, on the other hand, is viewed as being the predecessor to the Georgian state; its language and alphabet form the basis of the modern Georgian language.
Mtskheta today is not known as a castle town, however, but as a holy city within the Georgian Orthodox Church. The story has it that Elioz, a Georgian Jew, was sent to Jerusalem on the command of the local Jewish leadership upon hearing of a holy man born there. He apparently witnessed the death of Christ himself; meanwhile, his mother in Georgia miraculously heard the hammerblows that nailed Jesus to the cross, whereupon she promptly died. Elioz then managed to acquire the robe of Christ (apparently those lot-casting soldiers didn’t think big picture about its potential souvenir value) and returned to Mtskheta with it. Upon his return, his sister, Sidonia, touched the robe of Christ and, overcome by emotion, also promptly died. Having unwittingly inflicted carnage upon the female relatives of his family, somehow Elioz, despite actually witnessing the death of Christ and having held the robe for the long journey back from Jerusalem, escaped his brush with the Lord with his life, but I suppose that’s why he’s not a saint and his sister is.
Sidonia was reportedly buried with the robe and a great cedar grew over it. In the 4th century, St. Nino, the evangelizer of Georgia (and namesake of pretty much every first-born girl in the whole country), came to Mtskheta and ordered the cedar be chopped down and a new church be built over the spot in honor of King Mirian, the first Christian king of Georgia. Seven pillars for the church were hewn from the cedar tree but the seventh, perhaps held up by the spirit of Sidonia (who presumably had not been consulted about the new building plans) flew into the air and could not be brought back down. It took Nino a whole night of praying but presumably the two saints managed to patch things up because eventually the pillar came back to earth and the church was built. Apparently a fluid came from the pillar which had miraculously curative powers, and so the cathedral came to be known as Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, or Cathedral of the Life-Giving Pillar.
That church is not the church we saw, as it got destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again and then finally rebuilt in the 11th century. But the Cathedral that is there now is an impressive work of architecture- by height it dominates the low-rise town of Mtskheta in the way some Anglican cathedrals dominate their “cities” (looking at you Wells).
Pictured: Not a city
Its balanced proportions, however, have the effect of tricking the eye into thinking it is not so massive a church. On the whole the architecture of Georgian churches is incredibly consistent: an octagonal central spire, slit windows, a cruciform base shape; and so from the outside if one Georgian church does it for you probably so will the rest. The real action is on the inside, where icons, paintings, wall frescoes, candles and the like combine to provide quite a visual sensation. We don’t particularly like taking pictures inside churches but you can look it up yourself.
The second thing that distinguishes Georgian churches is the degree to which they are actually used as places of worship at all times. We did not enter a single church, no matter how small or remote, during our time in Georgia, that was not being used in a devotional way by worshippers. The level of engagement by Georgians was simply astonishing: the variety of prayers spoken and sung, the lighting of candles, the constant movement from icon to icon, all with an evident understanding and faith. In every church we went, we could see families; the parents were instructing their children in the appropriate means of veneration- when to kneel, when to light candles, when to say prayers- the children watching attentively and following their parents’ every move around the church. We had been told that Georgia was the second most religious country in the world after Iran, and while that sounds like a totally made up statistic that is impossible to measure or verify, the sentiment rang true.
The third thing that distinguishes Georgian churches is that they are constantly being used for weddings at any time of day on any day of the week. In the first week we were in Georgia we saw on average at least one wedding every day. In some towns, weddings appear to be the main industry- entire blocks taken up by wedding shops and nothing else; the only restaurants in town being basically a front for a wedding banquet hall. Apparently any day is a good day to have a wedding, but given their reputation for being rather boistrous parties it seems amazing that anything gets done during the week in Georgia, as people at any moment may be preparing for, attending or recovering from a wedding.
Having explored the cathedral we stopped for lunch across the square. The restaurant we sat outside was the main one in the square and was notable for the incredible capacity of its staff to entirely ignore all of their patrons at the same time. After declaring my intention to pay I was ushered inside the restaurant, which was completely empty except for a back table filled with local heavies. The apparent leader was counting stacks of Georgian lari. Without looking at any order sheet or anything he typed a handful of numbers into a calculator and thrust it at me. I did not feel in a particular position to argue with his calculation.
Antiochia Church, with Jvari Monastery in the background
Because of the cathedral Mtskheta is dotted with other churches and monasteries, including a tiny nunnery chapel covered in painting that could have come from a modern comic book, a larger church filled with gold items, and the famous Jvari Monastery. The Jvari Monastery is well known for its picturesque location high above the confluence of two rivers and is really only reachable from Mtskheta by car. Just as Grace and I were wandering around the edge of town, pondering how to find a taxi to take us up, we learned an important lesson- in Georgia, whatever you want to do as a tourist, someone is very nearby who is eager to enable this for money. Across an abandoned lot, a man shouted “Taxi Jvari!” at us. He was standing in front of a handsome early 90s Mercedes. We walked over to him, bracing ourselves for sharp negotiation. To our great dismay he quoted us exactly the price in the guidebook. Completely thrown we halfheartedly asked for 5 lari less than the 20 he had quoted, which he dismissed with an “ALWAYS 20.” So we accepted and prepared to be squired up in his fine car, when his accomplice pulled forward in an absolute shambles of a car and the negotiator waved us in. This led us to another lesson- in Georgia, you will always end up in a worse vehicle than the one you expected.
Jvari in Georgian means “cross”, and the monastic church was built in the 6th century on the site of a cross erected by who else but St. Nino. The church itself did not astonish after viewing the cathedral below, but the views were exceptional.
Mtskheta, as viewed from Jvari Monastery
After our tour of the various religious sites, we returned to our guesthouse’s roof terrace, beer in hand, to watch the sunset. Also seated on the terrace were a Kuwaiti family of Syrian extraction, who were nearing the end of a tour of the country. The father of the family, a gregarious man, offered to take our picture and then nudged his 15 year old daughter to come speak to us. She had exceptional English, the product of attending international school, and was curious about London, as she hoped to someday study there. She was bright and curious, and showed us a video she and her friends had made for a competition on women’s issues. The video, with exceptional camera work, showed women suffering under various types of oppression, from lack of oppportunity to domestic violence, then suddenly switched to show those same women succeeding at various endeavors. What an impressive group of girls- here was hope for the future, a future where young women all across the world demand the same rights and have the same opportunity to achieve their dreams! Our optimism was only slightly blunted when we asked her what her favorite part of Georgia was and were told the Tbilisi Mall. Ah well, teenagers, even bright and woke teenagers, are still teenagers.
The Trip to Gori
Having sated our taste for religious monuments we decided to travel the next day on pilgrimage of a different sort- to Gori, birthplace of Joseph Djugashvili, the boy who would one day be known to the world as Joseph Stalin.
Grace had discovered that a train ran from Mtskheta to Gori and so, bright and early that morning we set out for the train station to catch a 9 AM train. Arriving at the station we attempted in our rudimentary Russian to explain to the lone attendant, a large, red-faced man, that we wished to take the train to Gori. This caused him some consternation. He grew flustered and began speaking in rapid Russian. Our understanding from him was that he could not sell us tickets, but that indeed there was a 9 AM train leaving from the middle platform. Over and over he tried to indicate that there was something wrong with our plan to take the 9 AM train, but he was going well past the limits of our once-a-week Russian lessons and we began to grow dubious of his command of the timetables. We decided that whatever the case, we would cross the subway to the middle platform and see if we had any luck with the train conductor when he arrived. This seemed to upset the attendant further. He shambled up and down the main platform looking for anyone who might be able to make us see reason (the cleaning lady laughed at his suggestion that she might speak better English than he) and was eventually reduced to plaintively wailing, in English, “no easy money… no easy money!” We thought this significantly more philosophical than the situation required. It was only once the train arrived and the conductor made clear that you needed to pre-book a ticket online that we understood “easy money” to mean “cash”. Still, I prefer to hold in my head the image of a despairing station attendant inveighing against the get-rich-quick mindset of the modern world.
So it was that we took a marshrutka back to Tbilisi and went to look for another to take us out to Gori. On our way wandering blindly around the teeming bus station we were again accosted by taxi touts. This time, weary of wandering in the heat with our bags and eager to journey onwards, we agreed a reasonable price with a shared taxi driver to take us to Gori. We had to wait a brief time for the minivan to fill (entirely with women, which was a curious feature of much of our transportation around Georgia) before setting off on the main east-west highway.
A Note on Georgian Driving
I had anticipated the worst when it came to Georgian roads, expecting them to be in ill-repair, strewn with potholes and cracked from cold winters and hot summers. In fact, with one very significant exception (the road from Ushguli to Mestia mentioned here,) most of the roads were in very good condition even when winding high into the mountains.
This, I think, is a very bad thing. In many cultures it is common for men (and sigh, it is nearly always men, isn’t it?) to demonstrate their prowess via feats of strength or skill. In Georgia, it would appear that driving is a key part of establishing one’s manhood, along with drinking, which makes an excellent combination. Where the roads were bad or challenging, we witnessed great demonstrations of skill, wheelmen making pinpoint turns through waterlogged traverses with death on the line. Where roads are good, it appears drivers feel the need to create their own challenge- so it was that on our 5 AM arrival into Tbilisi our cab driver re-enacted his favorite chase scenes through the deserted streets, complete with squealing tires and at one point two-wheeling the car around a bend.
Gori- a strong town for a strongman
In spite of this we managed to make it into Gori. Unwittingly, we passed within 400 meters of the border with the disputed territory of South Ossetia, which claims independence from Georgia and which Georgia views as an occupied fiefdom of Russia. Due to its position near the border, Gori was at the center of the 2008 conflict with Russia, suffering cluster bomb airstrikes and eventually being occupied by Russian troops and South Ossetian separatists. If Russia attacking a former suzerain state under the auspices of assisting aggrieved minority populations sounds familiar, well, I suppose you’re simply paying attention.
Gori bears the scars of that occupation, and the previous Soviet occupation, heavily- it was a stark contrast to the picturesque Mtskheta and spruced-up parts of Tbilisi. But apparently Gori has always been a rough town. In his book Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore describes the town of Stalin’s youth as being “a liberated and violent place dominated by drinking, prayer and brawling…one of the last towns to practice the ‘picturesque and savage custom’ of free-for-all town brawls…with drunken priests acting as referees. The saloon-bars of Gori were incorrigible stews of violence and crime.” Though we witnessed no such violence, the Goreli (as citizens are termed) that we observed were certainly boisterous people, their preferred activity of an evening seeming to be to walk up and down the streets shouting banter at the acquaintances they happen past.
Perhaps not the most likely birthplace for a man destined to change the course of human history, but possibly the appropriate milieu for a murderous maniac. Stalin was born to an alcoholic cobbler father who beat him mercilessly and frequently abandoned Stalin and his mother. His mother was apparently quite a beauty who, in her single-minded efforts to make young Joseph a priest, allegedly used her charms in turn on the local tavern baron, the police chief and a priest, each of whom was rumored to be Stalin’s true father. Her efforts paid off, as he managed to be enrolled in a school for the sons of priests (which he wasn’t…unless he was…) where he apparently cultivated a beautiful singing voice, one which he would later employ as an occasional singer at the Tbilisi Opera House. After being enrolled in the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary (where he quickly declared himself an atheist and racked up an incredible number of demerits before finally being kicked out of school), it doesn’t appear that he looked back at Gori very often, although a good number of his fellow Goreli remained part of his story as a young revolutionary (mainly a bank robber) and into his life at the head of the USSR. As with anyone who knew Stalin personally, many of them ended up dead at his hands or went insane. Apparently late in life Stalin liked to reminisce about his youth in Gori, dragging out whatever friends from those days he had yet to kill to throw parties at his home on the Black Sea.
And Gori certainly remembers him. At the focal end of the grand boulevard in Gori (Stalin Avenue, naturally) sits the Stalin Museum, a magnificently ornate neoclassical building (with Castillian annex and tower?). In front is one of the hovels Stalin and his mother occupied during his childhood and a massive statue of the man himself, a rarity as most were pulled down across the Soviet Union after his death. The museum is a bit perplexing, ornate hall after ornate hall of paintings of Stalin smiling, holding children, supporting workers, generally being great, supplemented by artifacts and gifts given by various sovereigns to the Man of Steel. The main event is a circular room centered on his death mask. Tucked away under the stairs is a small room that, as an afterthought, mentions that he may have been the single most bloodthirsty man to ever walk the planet. We skipped the guided tour, which was being given in rapid, monotone English, and allowed the feeling of parallel history to wash over us.
On second thought smiling was a bad look here
I suppose it is only fair. Gori is a small and poor city, its citizens apparently mocked by other Georgians for being coarse braggarts. There are few cities of 30,000 people that can claim a son as “great” (in the impactful sense) as Stalin. The line, of course, between commemoration and celebration is one which causes many societies challenges- today southern U.S. cities and states are riven with the issue of how to address statues that are simultaneously the commemoration of important historical figures and a celebratory reminder of the “original sin” of American history, its ongoing impact today, and those who fought to maintain it. Oliver Cromwell is to many a homicidal cretin, a regicide and a delusional religious fanatic, but he still gets a statue outside the Houses of Parliament. So Stalin, vilified by the rest of the world, still finds a warm and fond reception in Gori, his museum a sign that Gorelis too can get the respect and attention of the whole world.
As we neared the end of the museum, one of the staff waylaid us. Did we, by chance, wish to go to the cave city of Uplistsikhe after the museum? We did, in fact; a driver down by Stalin’s statue, a faintly ogrish man, had already asked us if we wanted to go and we told him we did but fobbed him off saying we wanted to view the museum first. At any rate we had gone through the museum quite slowly and assumed that by now he might have found other customers, so we asked the woman what price her chosen driver would ask. As it happened, the original driver had not found an alternative fare, and suddenly appeared gurning at us just outside the ticketed part of the museum. His appearance caused the museum staff member to launch a barrage of furious Georgian at him that he riposted with what must have been claims that he had seen us first. Once we got him to agree to the same price as the staff member, we followed him out to the frustrated shouts of the woman above.
So off to Uplistsikhe we went. Uplistsikhe, or “Fortress of the Lord”, is apparently one of the oldest urban settlements in Georgia, a series of caves hewn into a mountain outside Gori. Even after Mtskheta and Tbilisi grew in influence, as many as 20,000 people continued to occupy the caves until they were sacked by the Mongols in the 14th century. Despite the Mongols’ and several earthquakes’ best efforts, bits of the beautiful craftsmanship that once went into the caves are still evident, particularly some ornately carved ceilings. The site is massive, stretching up along a main “street” and segmented into various functions- a throne room, named for Queen Tamar, a legendary ruler of Kartli, by modern scholars (according to a waggish guide, not because they can prove the room had anything to do with Tamar but just because anything pretty gets named after her), a theatre, an apothecary featuring dozens of cubbies hewn into the rock. It was an unearthly site, blasted by the sun and wind, and difficult to picture in its heyday, but all the more beautiful for the mystery.
Returning to Gori, we walked up to Gori castle, a fortress in the middle of town, to watch the sunset. The castle sits on a high hill and it is from this hill that the town takes its name, gora meaning “heap” in Georgian. From the battlements, surveying the town, it had a certain rumpled splendor less evident from the ground- the orderly rows of Soviet-era housing punctuated by the spires of Georgian churches. The churches felt analogous to Goreli themselves, irrepressible and defiantly proud, reaching up beyond their surroundings.
