Tbilisi’s name means “warm place”in old Georgian. Legend has it that this is because of the sulphur springs, but you could have told me it’s because the city is hotter than an overclocked toaster and I would have no trouble believing you.* More than one in three Georgians live here, no doubt helped significantly by the AC units which drip onto every pavement (as, occasionally, did we). Our airbnb was in Vake, one of the older, cooler districts, and an interesting mix of architecture and cultural styles: Soviet tower blocks, modern gyms and mini-markets, women with crates of fruit. Many signs were in Mkhedruli, some English, a few Cyrillic.
The traffic situation is a fun mix of Russian truculence and Italian unpredictability; getting across the road is a matter of aggressively striding out in front of moving cars and hoping they’re awake enough to not kill you, as simply waiting never works. A plurality of cars are missing bumpers. Charitably, Arpi suggested this might be to improve air flow to the radiators. I’m possibly painting too negative a picture here – at few points did we feel like we were actually at risk of death, and the chaos is more opportunism than aggression.
“I guess even Georgians don’t park at crossings.”
“They don’t give a damn, but it’s a Mediterranean sort of not giving a damn, not a Russian sort. You know?”
“Yeah.”
We found a streetside bakery for pastries and a sort of dry sesame pretzel, and descended into the cool depths of Rustaveli metro station, named for the great poet, whose iconic status here is only slightly below Saint George and David the Builder. Tbilisi public transport has Oyster-style cards (easily topped up at the little roadside touchscreen machines which are absolutely everywhere in Georgia), with journeys costing half a lari (about 12p). Tbilisites are polite on the metro, letting people off trains rather than crowding round; the trains are the same old Soviet stock as on the Budapest and Prague metros, painted in tasteful Georgian red and white.
The tourist office on Liberty Square gave us a much-needed English-language map, and directions to Arpi’s desired attraction, the Automuseum, so far to the east it was basically in the Caspian Sea. We took a taxi (the driver kept crossing himself, which I did not take as a sign of great confidence) and zoomed through Tbilisi’s riverside array of intriguing megastructures – the Reichstag-esque hall (complete with glass dome), the pointless but fun roof over the Liberty Bridge, an even more pointless and apparently unused pair of golden sausages like dead sandworms, an otherwise nondescript building capped with a huge girderwork crown (the university, we later learned). Tbilisi is a valley city, hemmed in on all sides by high hills, with the occasional domes of monasteries overlooking it placed for maximum dramatic impact. Lovely fountains were everywhere, built in the classical “cascading down tiers” style, which gives much more of a sense of abundance than “squirt it up in the air” fountains and is presumably mechanically much easier. The dashboard thermometer showed 100F (I know, I know – Fahrenheit?!)
The automuseum was almost hidden down a side road; it contained a large collection of Soviet cars and motorbikes, beautifully restored and painted, gleaming with polish, smelling of fuel and wax and paint. If only I cared at all about cars. Arpi was as happy as a dog with two tails, though.
We returned in a different taxi (going down George W Bush Street in the process – he’s popular here) to the National Museum, which like all national museums was a collection of magnificent treasures with a pretty serious political point at its core. The opening narrative – of a secular, tolerant postwar Georgian democracy snuffed out in its prime by the Bolsheviks – is a bit too utopian for my tastes, but plausible in its general sweep.** The treasures down in the basement, of course, are absolutely top notch – Georgian goldsmithing was second to none as far back as the kingdom of Colchis, and some of the enamelwork was genuinely breathtaking.
They had Greek coins from 2,700 years ago, burial carts and Colchisian axeheads; Hellenic candelabras, winemaking implements from before written history. A gallery of traditional Georgian dress, heavy on big moustaches, bright embroidery and those fantastic long jackets called chokha, with silver-plated belts and cartridge loops on the breast. There was also an (unexpected, but really incredibly good) collection of Far Eastern art. I didn’t get much of a sense of the sequential history of the nation, why this coin was Roman, this cup Arabic, this piece of jewellery Mongol and this one Persian – partly because everyone east of the Rhine seems to have had a turn going at Georgia and listing the invasions would take a whole museum to itself. Even the natural history section noted how animals of every kind wandered across the Caucasus on their way to the corners of Eurasia (and some excellent fossils of proto-humans have been discovered there).
Outside of Gori, it seems the Georgians have little or no nostalgic illusions about the USSR, and the section on the Soviet occupation pulls absolutely no punches; it opens with one of the railway cars in which arrested Georgian civilians were rounded up in 1924, and one of the machine guns that put all the little holes in its side.*** Quite strikingly, and very effectively, they put up the evidence first and let the narrative emerge from it: a whole gallery of earnest handwritten petitions and applications for the return of lands and churches seized by the Reds; photos of Georgian artists and descriptions of their work, all with a death date in a gulag or a basement. A letter which led to 145 people in Georgia, and 110,000 ethnic Poles across the USSR, being shot as “enemy agents”. One Georgian in every eight was shot or deported between the wars – nobles, priests, doctors, artists, “kulaks”; a similar proportion died in the second war or the followup repression. Stalin is a remote, malign presence, not addressed head on. At the end is an “occupation continues” section, with Abkhazia and South Ossetia blocked out in red; it suits current Georgian nationalism to draw a continuous narrative from the Russian Empire, through the Bolshevik horrorshow, to Putin’s current shenanigans. It’s also not too far from the truth.
Tbilisi’s old town walls are still there – some underneath a motorway, some with buildings perched directly on the turrets. Inside, the old town is (unlike most cleaned-up touristy Old Towns), run-down and thoroughly crummy, in the same way as it’s probably been since Tbilisi extended beyond the walls and urban planners started enjoying actually having a bit of space. These little winding streets are, in richer places like Tallinn, absolutely charming as a contrast to the sprawl of wide-boulevarded modernity. But the authentic, ungentrified version has a medieval seediness to it.
After dinner (probably the most expensive meal so far, which is to say it was still less than £20 between us for a mass of kebab, dumplings and a litre of fantastic Georgian wine) we took a cable car up to the hill that also hosts Narikala Fortress – an ancient, glowering pile of brown stone – and the statue of “Georgian Mother”, a smaller and less violent version of Mother Motherland but in the same “giant metal woman with a sword” vein.
We marched over to the base of the Russian Empire-era funicular and zoomed up to the top, where we chilled all evening with our new Egyptian friend, looking out over Tbilisi: the golden light on the gigantic Holy Trinity cathedral, the broadcasting tower lit white and lilac, an olive-tree fountain whose lamps and water between them scattered the trees around with a shaking, uncertain light.
* A Tbilisi founding legend has it that fifteen hundred years ago King Vakhtang was out doing a bit of falconry. His bird caught a pheasant and the two fell into one of the hot springs. Both were promptly cooked alive, impressing Vakhtang so much he had a city built there. This seems capricious, but kings will be kings.
** I don’t know much about modern Georgian history so my suspicion that the reality wasn’t quite so tolerant is based on little more than gut feeling and a knowledge of the hideous abattoir of repression and cleansing that followed the Great War. But it is funny, for instance, how many Armenian churches and buildings there are from shortly before the collapse of the Russian Empire, and how little evidence of any Armenians.
*** The gun is an M1910 Maxim with a pre-1930 water jacket and the early model brass feed block, so it checks out. How they got hold of it is a story I’d like to hear, though.
Good morning, Kutaisi! – Museums and wine – Chiatura from above – Pioneers’ Palace, Gori – Tbilisi – David Gareja – Akhaltsikhe – Vardzia