These are my two favorites of the pictures I took today on a hike in Birtvisi Canyon southwest of Tbilisi. Getting out of the city to hike more often in the last few weeks is doing wonders for my physical and mental well-being.
Fall in Georgia
Bridge
A post of few words. I took this picture today during a hike near Rkoni Monastery in the Shida Kartli region, Georgia.
Bread and Ashes by Tony Anderson
The subtitle of this book is A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia and that is precisely the red thread throughout the book – the mountains more so than the walk, but I will get to that shortly. This walk was undertaken in the late 1990s, the book first published in 2003. Consequently, the narrative takes place before the Rose Revolution that brought current president Mikhail Saakashvili to power and started a wave of reforms and changes in Georgia. Bread and Ashes portrays a rural Georgia that is by now often already changing. Since Anderson undertook his walk, the mountains in northern Georgia have become more accessible, though Svaneti with its attempts to turn Mestia into a top-notch European mountain-resort more so than Tusheti in the eastern part of Georgia.
The book starts with a chapter set in western Azerbaijan in the area northwest of Sheki. The next chapter, however, finds the author in Georgia on his way to Omalo in Tusheti not far from the border with Dagestan. It never becomes clear what the point of the excursion to Azerbaijan was, if the original plan was to hike from northwestern Azerbaijan into Georgia and, if so, why they didn’t stick to their plan. However, this chapter makes for entertaining reading (as does the rest of the book) and within the first few pages the tone of the book is set: the first page brings us guns, and on the second the inevitable alcohol and Caucasus hospitality are introduced.
I was immediately sucked into Bread and Ashes, not least because of Anderson’s writing. Early on, Anderson visits a ‘natural hammam’ somewhere in the mountains with his Azeri friends: “Here was my perfect fantasy of the Caucasus, high in the mountains, floating with this kind Azeri in his underpants.” Though obviously taken out of context here, this quote is one of the many that made me smile, because it reminded me of the many unexpected meetings I’ve had and unexpected situations I’ve found myself in in the Caucasus. Anderson writes with a sense of humor, but also with obvious interest in and love for the Caucasus mountains and its people and he is not afraid to laugh at himself.
The walk through the mountains in fact only covers part of the book and part of Georgia. Anderson and his companions walk from Mount Diklos in Tusheti in Eastern Georgia to Mount Kazbeg about half-way along the northern border of Georgia. They then have to skip South-Ossetia because of unrest and pick up the hike to the west of South-Ossetia, where they hike through the Racha region into Svaneti. There they have to give up before they reach Ushguli because their group is robbed, likely by locals from the neighboring village. Anderson later returns to Svaneti, where he uses Mestia as his base for some hiking in the area, though they don’t really cross long distances through the mountains anymore the way they did in the first part of the book. The book also covers a side-trip on foot into Chechnya and a trip (by car) visiting remains of Georgian churches in north-eastern Turkey in the area between Kars, Erzurum and the border with Georgia. In between, some parts of the book are set in Tbilisi as well.
Often, Anderson and his hiking buddies end up staying with locals they meet along the way and who invite them into their homes. As I mentioned above, and as anyone who knows the region will know, hospitality is a big and sacred good in this region, often expressing itself through tables filled with food and drinks. The consumption of these huge quantities of food and alcohol is accompanied by toasts delivered by the tamada or toast master. Commenting on this ritual of toasting, Anderson says:
Friends from the city, from Tbilisi, often say that the whole tradition of the tamada and the rituals of toasting have become degenerate and fallen into decay, a mere drinking by rote. Indeed, it can be incredibly tedious with the tamada rambling on for hours and making all conversation impossible. [...] But this was not my experience in highland Georgia. At its best the tradition established a kind of intimacy among friends and strangers, re-affirmed custom and family ties, ties of friendship, and drew all together in a common bond. The table, with its heaps of food, became a sacred space, a pool of light and warmth set against the darkness outside. The alcohol consecrated the communion.
Along the road Anderson meets many characters such as the curator of the museum in Ushguli who “was quite bonkers and expounded at length his theories linking the Svans with ancient Sumerians who, as far as I could gather, had made their way up into the high mountains to preserve their culture, threatened by an early and virulent outbreak of feminism. Apparently the desire to preserve their patriarchal customs had driven them to Svaneti. Well, they had certainly managed this, though men from slightly lower altitudes do not seem to have suffered much in this regard.”
The account of the hiking trip itself is interspersed with lots of background information about the history, traditions and culture of Georgia and its mountainous parts in particular. In these digressions, Anderson focuses very much on culture and pre-Soviet history and hardly on political developments or the Soviet era. Current events at the time of Anderson’s travels find their way into the book occasionally, especially in the chapters set in Tbilisi and Svaneti. The fact that Anderson hardly touches on current events and mostly focuses on the past, makes that most of the book doesn’t feel too dated (though some parts do).
As an example of these cultural digressions, Anderson extensively discusses the many tiny languages spoken in the Caucasus mountains, providing them with his own typical commentary:
Bats, spoken only in one village in Tusheti, really does have eight genders. Goodness knows what for.
And:
[O]ne analysis of Tsez [a language spoken by about 15,000 speakers in the mountains of Dagestan] detected forty-two different locative case markers which can describe precisely which kind of space someone or something is in, at, under, by, near, away from: a hollow space, a flat space, a space that might be a trifle uncomfortable or sadly lacking in alcohol.
Anderson has this to say about Georgian: “Words are often formed by accreting suffixes and prefixes and fixes in the middle and so grow alarmingly. Clusters of consonants hang together like mussels on a rock, though far more difficult to swallow.” Something I can agree with, having started to learn Georgian in the past seven months.
Throughout the book, Anderson also touches on the eternal discussion of whether Georgia (and the entire South Caucasus) belong to Europe or Asia. He quotes one Georgian calling his country “the belt that holds [Europe and Asia] together”, an image I quite liked. While much of what Anderson writes in this regard is specifically about Georgia, I think many of his comments are valid for the entire South Caucasus:
Every myth or legend, every fragment or fraction of history in Georgia (and throughout the Caucasus) is clung on to passionately, used to shore up or add weight to the national story, to throw hooks into the past so that they might anchor the people more securely, more tightly to the loose sands of antiquity.
Watchtower in Mutso, Khevsureti
And elsewhere in the book:
They [a group of Georgians in whose company Anderson is at that time] all agreed, Azerbaijan was a waste of time and the mountains there nothing to compare with their own mountains and the people dangerous and not to be trusted. (Everyone in the Caucasus said this about everyone else.)
I borrowed a copy of Bread and Ashes from a friend. Before I returned this copy, I regularly found myself going through the book’s extensive index to see if one thing or another I had come across elsewhere was mentioned in the book. I read Bread and Ashes and started writing this post shortly after I visited the remote villages of Shatili and Mutso in Khevsureti (both mentioned in the book). At the time I never got around to finishing the post; that often happens – I have many half-finished posts saved on my computer. It took another walk in the mountains for me to return to and finish this blog – a beautiful hike I made yesterday not far from the village of Sno near Mount Kazbeg in a remote valley surrounded by high peaks and slopes covered in the season’s first snow. That hike also made me realize once again that I miss the mountains and don’t leave the city often enough to nourish that longing for the outdoors. Yesterday’s hike also made me want to pick up the book again to check whether Anderson passed through that area (I’m rather sure he did). Not for the first time since I returned my friend’s copy, I am considering buying my own copy.
All in all I very much enjoyed Bread and Ashes and I recommend it to anyone who wants to read up on the South Caucasus and on Georgia in particular, though for me the second half of the book falls flat a bit and a few parts feel somewhat dated. Despite that, Bread and Ashes is among my favorite books about the region.
Students in Tbilisi protest against abuse of prisoners
While I am working on a fresh new blogpost, here is a quick post pointing you to an article I wrote for Waging Nonviolence about the protests against torture in Georgian prisons that have been going on in Tbilisi for almost two weeks now.
For more than a week now, the Georgian capital Tbilisi has been the scene of daily protests, which started after two TV channels released videos of prisoner abuse on September 18. The videos showed inmates of a prison in the Tbilisi suburb of Gldani being beaten up, humiliated and abused by prison guards. Since then, several other videos of prisoner abuse from other prisons across the country have surfaced. One of the videos contained images of a male prisoner being raped with a broomstick, providing the protesters with a symbol as they started carrying and burning broomsticks during their demonstrations.
Immediately after the first videos were shown on TV, people started to gather in a spontaneous protest near the State Concert Hall in the center of Tbilisi, which has remained one of the main locations for daily demonstrations and gatherings. There have protests near Tbilisi State University, outside of Gldani Prison and in other Georgian towns as well. The demonstrations usually attract thousands, although the numbers seem to have dropped since the weekend.
Read the full article here.
Old comfy clothes and new roots
A lot has happened since I wrote my last post slightly over a year ago. I cried many more tears over Dibar’s death and had other personal issues to deal with as well. Meanwhile, I continued to teach Dutch and had more students than I ever had before. There were weeks when I was exhausted from teaching 36 hours of classes, but I also immensely enjoyed my students’ successes when they passed their language exams. I taught some great young women who have become not only my friends but also each other’s. And I decided that teaching Dutch 36 hours a week was not what I wanted to do even in the near future. So about six months ago I took up again a plan I had been playing with off and on for almost two years. Shortly before Dibar’s death I started turning it into reality, but I put it on hold when Dibar passed away. As a result, several months ago I left Yerevan and moved to Tbilisi to make room for new things.
Ever since I moved, people both in Georgia and Armenia keep asking me which city I prefer, Yerevan or Tbilisi. The point of this post is not to compare both cities. I am merely trying to sort out my own thoughts. Both cities are very different, but more than that, my relationship with both cities is so different. I lived in Yerevan for almost eight years, I’ve been in Tbilisi barely four months and I got off to a rocky start to boot.
I am still learning to navigate Tbilisi. I am learning to navigate the Georgian language. I am navigating meeting new people and making new friends (which doesn’t always come easily for an introvert like me who doesn’t like crowds and for whom any group over two or three is a crowd). I am trying to get unstuck. I am trying to find work that is more up my alley than teaching Dutch as a fulltime job. I am trying to start writing again. I am trying to make my little corner in Tbilisi.
I didn’t fall head over heals in love with Tbilisi like so many other foreigners did. Maybe it’s because I am not a city girl. I enjoy living in the city, but I’m not a city girl. Never have been, never will be. I don’t take to cities the way I do to the countryside and nature (and yes, I am falling head over heals for the Georgian countryside).
Maybe I just don’t get attached to cities or places where I live. Home isn’t the town I live in now, nor is it the village in Holland I spent the first eighteen years of my live in. Home is my current apartment, the place where my things are and where my two cats greet me when I open the door.
Maybe it is because Tbilisi wasn’t some new and exotic place for me the way it might be for others and because living and working somewhere is different from visiting a place as a tourist. I moved to Tbilisi with almost thirteen years in the region under my belt. I am used to the chaos, dysfunctionality and unexpectedness that is the Caucasus.
I can see why people prefer Tbilisi over Yerevan, though. For one, Yerevan’s center isn’t nearly as visually attractive as Tbilisi’s is. Tbilisi feels more European than Yerevan. Georgians seem to have a somewhat more joyful and upbeat outlook on life than Armenians have. Yerevan (and Armenia) feels like it is looking inward, Tbilisi feels more open to the outside world. Armenia feels so much more isolated than Georgia is. Tbilisi seems more easily navigable if you don’t speak the language (though both Georgian and Armenian use a script that looks completely unlike Latin or Cyrillic script), probably because English is more widely spoken.
Since I moved to Tbilisi, I’ve been back in Yerevan a few times. I don’t regret leaving Armenia as I was stuck in many ways and I needed a change. On the other hand, being back in Yerevan feels like slipping back into old, comfy clothes, where Tbilisi still feels like new clothes. You know when you buy a new pair of jeans or shoes and you need to wear them a few times before they start taking the shape of your body or feet and feel comfortable? That is how Tbilisi still feels to me: I need to wear it a bit longer for it to feel comfortable.
There are things I like better about Tbilisi because they function better there, there are things that work better in Armenia. I don’t think I ever liked Yerevan as a city, but something I do like about Yerevan is that it’s more compact than Tbilisi is. And I definitely miss my apartment in Yerevan.
In Tbilisi I feel like I am hovering on the outside of things, while in Yerevan I had my own little corner where I was not on the outside. In Tbilisi almost all the people I spend time with are foreigners, while in Armenia, especially in the last few years, I didn’t really have any friends who weren’t Armenian, most of them local Armenians plus a few Diasporan-Armenians. I notice I have to get used to the different dynamics in both environments.
In the end, for me, Yerevan is so much more, still.
Yerevan is where my Armenian colleagues were amazed that I knew the minibus routes much better than they did. Yerevan is where the woman I buy my vegetables from tells me: “I missed your smile,” and where another vegetable seller once tried to hook me up with her son who was more than ten years my junior. Yerevan is where, when I run into the mail delivery woman three streets away from where I live, she tells me to wait a second, grabs into her plastic bag filled with mail and takes out a postcard my parents sent me. In Yerevan I spent countless chatting and laughing with kids at a dialysis ward in one of the hospitals and being amazed at their resilience. In Yerevan I took care of a friend after he’d been in a car accident. Yerevan is where I’d go to my regular bar on my own, knowing that sooner rather than later a friend would show up to hang out with. Yerevan is where a good friend fought and won a ten month long battle for me over a closed down water pipe (a long story of arrogant neighbors, uncooperative civil servants, a hole in the law, and no one willing to take any responsibility).
I have a history with Yerevan that I don’t have with Tbilisi (yet). In Yerevan I loved, I made a fool of myself, I laughed, I cried, I danced, I argued, I made mistakes, I found myself in situations (both good and bad) I’d never thought I’d find myself in, I made friends, I lost friends, I changed a few people’s lives, I grieved over the death of my best friend.
I don’t have that history with Tbilisi yet. Give me time and I am sure I will. Then I can give you a more honest answer as to which city I prefer.
