To most of the world, the Republic of Georgia is a cipher, a nation not easily found on a map, with a population so small it's eclipsed, in the international imagination, by a subnational division, and I would routinely have to tell people that I wasn't going to the Georgia that's home to Gucci Mane and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And when clarifications were made, that no, I was not going to be within firing range of the rockets landing on Kherson and Kharkiv. That I was instead going to a little nation neither truly European nor truly Middle Eastern, pinched between the old Russian, Persian, and Ottoman Empires, about which I knew awfully little, about which most people know awfully little.
And thus it was that I found myself, two long flights later, traveling abroad for the first time since the pandemic, walking the snowy streets of Tbilisi, trying to figure out the pay-to-ride elevator and dysfunctional locks in the commie block where I was staying, riding terrifyingly deep metro lines built to withstand Los Alamos-designed bombs, walking past the sad and ancient men selling off the military regalia of a country that no longer exists, with proud emblems of wheat sheaves, on blankets and park benches, to hapless tourists like myself.
Like many countries, it was not an easy place to get around. Buses were often unmarked minivans, touted by men shouting many-consonanted names – Mtskheta! Mtskheta! Sighnaghi! Sighnaghi! – and one wondered, as one got in, whether human trafficking was in the offing. Yet I made it through, despite an avalanche blocking one of my major objectives, despite the wild dogs that surrounded me on a snowy mountain. I rode funicular railways and I got rides in falling-apart Ladas from thick-necked, possibly drunk taxi drivers who chain-smoked skinny cigarettes as they wildly accelerated down country lanes.
And when I settled down, I walked for many happy hours among tumbledown walls and vines hanging from ornate balconies, past castle walls and art nouveau theaters and Brezhnev-era mosaics of men in fur hats drinking from rams' horns and plaques indicating the long-forgotten violinists who had lived in each residence. In the town of Gori, I visited the little house where an ambitious shoemaker's son with a thick mustache and a memorable attitude about the death of one man versus the death of a million, taking the requisite selfie with the man himself. In Tbilisi I went every day to the metro station at what was once called Lenin Square, and before that, Beria Square (gulp). I entered basilicas thick with incense where babushkas wept before icons of golden saints and where priests sang incantations in a guttural language as they blessed babies by holding them before images of Saint Nino and Queen Tamar.
And I step out into the street and see the evening passeggiata, the street cellists and the booksellers and the hookahs and ballerinas and the slender form of the old synagogue against the March sky, an old woman with darkly penciled eyebrows yelling and shrugging out a second floor balcony.
Because Georgia is one of those rare places that, at least to my eyes, there is still a sense of what was once called the exotic. It is found in the cuisine, soups of chicken and marigolds, giant flatbreads stuffed with cheese for a dollar a piece, veal offal sausages, lamb and green plum stew, charred skewers of trout, soup dumplings filled with assorted meats. And of course I spent my evenings sampling the infinitude of Georgian wines, made in the same fashion, skins and seeds and all, in a clay-pot qvivri in the same fashion since the time of the Egyptians. There was the dry and pomegranate-scented Saperavi, and its variants, the velvety and sweet Kindzmarauli, and my favorite, the oak-finished and pinot-like Mukuzani. Each session was to be followed by a shot of chacha, the indigenous grappa fashioned from pomace or peaches or persimmons, to be accompanied by a little plate of walnuts, before my stumble home through steep streets.
I sat with my glass of wine, and I talked with whoever came through. The war was on, and as in most of the world, blue-and-yellow flags were on display, although for Georgians, it seemed a bit personal. It was only in 2008 that Putin's army was here too. But strangely, most of the people I encountered were not Georgians, but indeed Russians – Russians who had semi-permanently settled in Tbilisi, given the ease of visa access and the fact that most Georgians speak Russian, as well as the more recent arrivals, programmers and graphic designers who were watching their country crumble, fleeing a regime that crushes dissident behavior with ruthless efficiency and also fleeing the sanctions that, if anything, encourage a gaudy and grotesque nationalism and isolationism, and which mostly serve to punish ordinary people. “I no longer have a country,” a woman tells me, “nor do my children.” I went to a jazz bar to watch performances by men who were old enough to remember a time and a place where playing jazz had still been a revolutionary activity.
Georgia's most internationally famous artist was the deliberately primitivist Niko Pirosmani, but I truly fell in love with the paintings of Shalva Kikodze. His work is deliberately dreamlike, somehow utterly 20th Century modernist and deeply primeval at the same time, brimming with joy and terribly melancholy.
And I think the reason the Kikodze paintings resonated so much is that this felt, more than any other place I've been, like the last old-world country, a glittering little fragment of a more romantic era. A remnant world that is still out there. If you go looking for it. And if you're lucky enough to find it.
No comments:
Post a Comment