Ned Downie, ES 2014
Team Georgia spent today traveling around Kakheti, the easternmost province of Georgia, known for its wine cultivation and wealth of historic sites. Our day was more focused upon the latter, though the peasant wine (homemade) that accompanied dinner was excellent—and only 4 laris per liter.
In a way, though, what struck the East Coaster in me most wasn’t so much the sites themselves as the landscape that connected them. No one would call Tbilisi flat, but the hills that do make up the cityscape are, well, the sorts of hills one would expect in a major city—not overly forbidding. Traveling through Kakheti gave us our first taste of the mountains that give the Caucasus its name. Our drive took us through winding, pockmarked roads and opened up vistas of sprawling vineyards and snowcapped peaks. The morning started on the Gombori Pass, where we took pictures and pelted each other with snowballs. And as the sun set in Sighnaghi, we stood atop the city walls of King Erekle II and looked out to the west towards the mountains of northern Georgia.
Our drive took us past the towns of Kakheti as well, and that, too, was a change from what we knew in Tbilisi. Our hostel on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi is part of a long stretch of 19th-century Russian architecture—ornamented eaves, wrought-iron balconies, tall in the way that only dense urban centers bother with—and it goes without saying that most of Georgia does not look like this. We saw houses bordering the highway with corrugated iron roofs, animal pens, facings of worn cement.
The rural-urban divide in Georgia reflects in part the government’s economic policies, which have generally eschewed rural-centric initiatives, particularly under current president Mikheil Saakashvili. Newly elected prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili is the son of a rural factory worker and has made agricultural development an important part of his economic platform. In the interim, however, villages in Kakheti will continue to struggle to hold onto their residents, many of whom head to Tbilisi or else to more vibrant economies in search of work. (Georgia’s high unemployment rate explains the relatively highly proportion of emigrants.)
To pratter on this way about Kakheti’s mountains and towns suggests that the sites themselves were of little note. Far from it. Crossing the Gorbomi Pass brought us to our first stop, the monastery complex at Ikalto. For my part, I was drawn to the ruins of its old Academy, a Neoplatonist operation established under the reign of King David the Builder (1089-1125); the remarkable range of subjects taught there impressed on me the depth of learning in Georgian medieval culture.
We continued on then to Alaverdi, an 11th-century cathedral that served as the main spiritual center of Kakheti. An elderly man offered us a tour in Russian which Katja and Luka, two of our four Russian speakers, took up. The rest of us were on our own to marvel at the restored frescos inside, or at least what was left of them after they were regrettably whitewashed by the Soviets. Outside, two men were working in the monastery’s vineyard; its wine is produced mostly for sale, though the monks also drink in moderation.
After a brief stop at a resort lake—an incongruous patch of development sunken amid the mountains—we moved on to Gremi, the old capital of the Kingdom of Kakheti. Georgia spent much of the 15th-18th centuries fragmented into several kingdoms under the influence of the Ottomans and the Safavids, and unification in the late 18th century was only a brief interlude before the Russians brought it under their sway, where it more or less stayed until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under these conditions, the persistence of a collective Georgian national identity is quite remarkable, and, indeed, regionalism in Georgia mostly works along ethnic (and religious) lines—the Abkhaz, Ossetians, and Adjarans (Georgian Muslims) being the most recent examples of populations who have chafed against the nationalism that infuses the contemporary Georgian state.
The road to Nekresi was blocked, so we finished our monastery tour at Bodbe, site of the grave of St. Nino, the woman (!) who brought Christianity to Georgia in the 4th century. Bodbe is, among other things, the site of a sacred spring reputed to have healing powers for those who dip themselves in it. I followed the sign in that direction only to discover that it was a 10-minute hike down a steep slope, bringing me to convent which, I thought, contained the spring. A nun seemed to be washing her clothes in it, so I peeked around places I wasn’t supposed to be (the rooms of the convent were quite sparse, the walls covered in icons) and headed back up to meet the group, who had already decamped back to the bus. Giorgi confirmed to me afterwards that it’s a 15 minute run beyond the convent, so it’s probably best that I didn’t follow it any further.
The day ended in Sighnaghi, a town of 2000 perched atop a gorge in central Kakheti that’s quite popular with tourists for its historic cityscape and remarkable views. The town itself has undergone substantial and, according to Luka, somewhat controversial restoration in recent times—new Turkish ceramic tiles for the roofs and new painting for the houses, all in the name of historic preservation, or so one would suppose. For my part, I couldn’t see anything overdone about it, which is somewhat worrisome as a tourist—one would hope against hope that cultural effacing couldn’t happen without getting its due. But I don’t know what the city looked like before.