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Georgia
// Fleece, Wine, and Mimino
In the eyes of the average Soviet citizen, there was no more legendary Soviet republic than Georgia. Georgians seemed able to add flair to anything, whether it was Georgian wine, Georgian charms, or Georgian history (did you know the Argonauts sailed this way?). The very image of a Georgian as a generous, hot-tempered, reckless friend became a brand. Correspondents for Dengi (Money) magazine and the NTV program Namedni (The Other Day) who visited Georgia discovered that the past ten years have done nothing to change this image.
The Road to the Sea
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| War and politics are totally out of place on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus |
For the last ten years, Russians have been going to Georgia mainly on business and with apprehension, since the history of the independent republic, which has endured civil war, mass emigration, and staggering poverty, is not conducive to a holiday mood. Georgia is not very big: people usually travel from one end to the other in fixed-route taxis, and the trip from Tbilisi to Batumi takes eight to ten hours. Beso, the owner of an aging Ford Transit, could not say how many hours it would take us to make this trip.
-- “Usually, if you have a really good car, you can get there in about three hours. It’s quite possible in five hours—it’s four hundred kilometers. It’ll most likely take eight hours. Don’t worry, everything will be OK; I make the trip nearly every day. Thetrain? I don’t know; I hear they haven’t repaired the bridge near Zugdidi yet, so the train doesn’t run every day. Or else there aren’t any trains at all. It doesn’t matter!”
It would be stretching the imagination to call Georgia’s main road connecting Kartli and Kakheti in central Georgia with Mingrelia, Guria, and Ajaria on the coast a highway. Sometimes, for three or four kilometers it is something like a modern freeway with signs. More often, it is a track that has not been repaired for five years. Still more often, it is a lunar landscape with craters that seem impossible to avoid.
-- “People driving this road for the first or second time don’t always make it,” explained Beso. “You have to get used to it. It’s best to go at night when things are quieter.”
A State Motor Vehicle Inspectorate (GAI) officer in a padded jacket and peaked cap rushed out to the Georgians from a tumbledown booth, blowing deafening blasts on his whistle. Without slowing down, Beso leaned out of the window and shouted something insulting at him in Georgian.
--“Now he’ll pick on us… No he didn’t. But he’ll go on blowing his whistle anyway. He’s not in uniform. Why should I stop for him – how do I know he’s really what I see?”
There are 7 official customs posts on the Tbilisi–Batumi route and 42 unofficial ones. And the number of militia “stooges” hiding around the corners of buildings is beyond count. Each one of them wants to know who is on the road, what they are carrying, and whether it might be contraband.
--“Nothing to declare? Nothing at all? OK. Have a good trip!”, said the next whistle owner. What can one get from journalists?
Traditional Georgian houses line this road, sturdy two-story houses, always with a mezzanine and garden around it for each family. Georgia’s outward poverty ends behind a low fence, because a Georgian cannot allow himself to be poor in his own home.
The Tangerine Republic
It is nearly impossible to explain what the Georgian economy is built on. Of course, every Georgian will explain to you that the republic is just as rich in minerals and industry as it is in talent and beauty. Nevertheless, you rarely encounter people who work for industrial enterprises in Georgia. The Kutaisi Auto Plant (Kutaissky avtozavod), which previously produced Kolkhida trucks and KAVZ buses resembling steel coffins, once tried to assemble cheap Indian Mahindra jeeps, but they have apparently given up on that. At any rate, these jeeps are as rare as reindeer in Georgia. There are big plans that everyone at Kutaisi will tell you about, but without going into details. Everything will work out!
However, Georgia does not need any of this. The country’s main wealth is its natural beauty and climate. In Batumi, for example, there was light cloud and a temperature of +13°C when we arrived (in February) and then it warmed up.
Naturally, under these conditions, the people’s main occupation is farming and gardening. If there were no orchards in the country, the number of Georgians going to Russia to find work would be about ten times greater. In winter, the gardens feed all of Abkhazia, which was completely cut off from the world after the civil war (called the patriotic war in the republic).
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| This isn’t Eteri Gagua’s richest citrus harvest: she once received the Order of Lenin for them |
The road from Sochi to Sukhumi starts at the so-called Cossack Market, the main transfer center for Abkhazian tangerines going to Russia and the only sales market. The road looks like a half-kilometer-long corridor enclosed in a steel net. An endless stream of tangerines flows through it from Psou on the Abkhazian side on people’s backs and handcarts and in sacks and boxes. They cost from 7 to 10 rubles a kilogram at the Cossack Market. In Abkhazia, they cost nothing, but there are plenty of them.
--“Yes, I carry them. My daughter is disabled, so someone has to earn money,” confided 80-year-old Anna Petrovna, who was hauling a cart loaded with about 100 kg of fruit to Russia. “Why just tangerines? I don’t have just tangerines. I have oranges, lemons, and other citrus fruit. I have bay leaves…
A train recently started running between Adler and Sukhumi to facilitate deliveries of tangerines, and this has strained diplomatic relations between official Tbilisi and Moscow. The cause of the strain, which we photographed at the Sukhumi station, was not very impressive: six standard railway cars. It transports 40–60 people a day, and owing to the dreadful condition of the tracks, the 120-km trip takes six or seven hours. However, this symbol of friendship between Abkhazia and Russia is highly valued. While attempting to photograph it, we were hauled off by the Abkhazian transport police on suspicion of spying.
Tangerines are a private business in Georgia, and former collective farm gardens are rented to local residents. The harvest ends in November, and the fact that we found a tree still sagging under the weight of its orange fruit in the former citrus-growing center of Tsikhidziri seemed like a miracle.
--“These are citrons, not tangerines. Do you remember the drink called ‘sitro’? No, you don’t remember… Come here,” said the owner of the garden. After an hour of conversation, we learned that her name was Eteri Gagua and that in 1975 Pravda had written about her as a leading citrus grower and how she had been awarded the Order of Lenin for her many record harvests. Now Eteri rents a half-hectare garden from a former state citrus farm and grows 8–15 tons of tangerines per year, supporting the whole family.
Not just the family, however. Georgia is famous for its devotion to relatives and hospitality. If you think that hospitality is the reserve of Russians, Armenians, and Tajiks, then you probably cannot imagine what Georgian hospitality is like.
Resort Life
--“Look,” said Nugzar Zhordania, head of the Abkhazian government’s Department of Information Policy, who was showing us around his native city of Kobuleti. “This is just an ordinary street where ordinary people live. But there’s a little restaurant on the ground floor of every other house. If you come to Kobuleti in summer, it’s fabulous, like St-Tropez! Half of Georgia is here, and everyone has friends, relatives, and acquaintances visiting from around the world. Englishmen used to work here in the oil industry and they still come here for their summer holidays. And if you want to buy a house, it’s cheap.”
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| Although tankers call at the port of Batumi, the sea here is considered to be a model of purity |
Kobuleti was not so lucky in Soviet times. Because it is so close to Turkey, the military allowed only limited construction of tourist facilities, at most, a few guesthouses for the fourth and ninth departments of the Ministry of Health and the Academy of Sciences and an 18-story Intourist Hotel. Meanwhile, Kobuleti has 16 km of wide pebbly beaches, not counting the city’s long seafront. There is nothing like it in Sochi, Bulgaria, or Turkey.
We arrived at Kobuleti’s beach in a very unusual way. A tall man in pointed boots, impeccable dark suit, and flashy coat met us at the Batumi airport. He seemed about to do something like start speaking in Swahili or throwing off his coat and dancing on the runway.
Zhordania introduced us to the dandy. “Mimino Kobaladze. He’s our chief helicopter pilot. That’s right, Mimino. His son is called Mimino too. Just like in the movie, eh?
Mimino Kobaladze has been flying helicopters since 1982. He graduated from the Syzransk military flying school. He had never seen a Tu-144 at the Tbilisi airport; he said this was all invented in Moscow. We never found out what post Kobaladze held, because in Georgia, a person’s real position is valued more than his official job. It turned out that he was one of the movers behind a fantastic project to assemble light airplanes and helicopters in Batumi.
--“We have a lot of mountainous areas,” explained Aslan Abashidze, head of the Ajar Autonomous Republic. “The heads of administrations can’t always get to each village in winter. We decided to set up production of two-seater light helicopters for them. We’re training the pilots now. Airplanes? There’s a lot of potential. Air service is a solution for a lot of problems in the region in general.”
They like to tell tall tales in Georgia, you say? However, personal helicopters for heads of districts have already been assembled. People generally do not lie in Georgia; they exaggerate. First they invent a beautiful world where Georgians will live and then gradually transform it into reality. So what if it takes a very long time – what’s the hurry? Georgia’s history goes back more than 4000 years.
--“ Come on, I’ll fly to Kobuleti with you,” said Mimino, who just happened to be at the airport then. “I’ll show you where everything is too.”
Kobaladze dismissed the pilot and sat down in the pilot’s seat of the Mi-8. We took off.
--“Beautiful, eh?” asked Mimino, pointing out an upland area with houses sunk in the snow. “That’s our mountain resort. You can’t get there at all in winter, but in summer, people spend all their holidays there. Yeah, you can’t see much.”
Kobaladze made a dizzying turn over the slope...
We finally landed right on the beach in Kobuleti, three meters from the surf. Kobaladze stomped out of the cockpit and roughly chased some boys away from the helicopter. Then 15 minutes later, this respectable-looking gentleman caught sight of some acquaintances in one of the courtyards and rushed over to them just like a boy.
Almost any place in Georgia can be considered a resort, from mountainous Svanetia to humid Mingrelia. Georgians hate politics, and nearly all political discussions end abruptly with an angry wave of the hand in the second minute. However, they cannot help talking about politics in Georgia: politics interferes too much with tourism, which Georgians regard as one of the foundations of the country’s future prosperity. The main political problem is the visa requirement for Russians.
--“Who needs these visas? I’ll get one if I have to, but people in Russia are afraid to get visas; they’re not used to it. Who needs to go to Georgia for a holiday if you need a visa to go there?”
Similar conversations start up in Georgia all the time. In Batumi, they clean the seafront every day, even in February. In half-dead Sukhumi, where an apartment costs 5000 rubles, all the health spas that were not destroyed in the war are ready to receive guests at any time. But visas, borders, and armed men everywhere scare tourists away.
--“Never mind,” they said in Poti, Zugdidi, and Kavkasioni. “Come in summer. You’ll see, they’ll abolish visas. There’s no place else with nature like ours and never will be. Even tea grows here!”
A Georgian Tea Party
Georgian tea is another national brand that Georgians consider unjustly forgotten. The history of Georgian tea began in 1897 when Lao Cheng Zhao came from China to the imperial estate in the village of Chakvi. Lao, whose house still stands on the seashore, brought high-quality tea seeds to the country; and the first tea was harvested in 1902. The product is now so bad that local tea growers call poor-quality tea “Lao-class”. However, in 1903, Chakvi tea began to win prizes at international exhibitions.
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| After resting from the planned economy, Georgian tea awaits capital investments |
Georgian tea was the best of all teas produced in the USSR and competed successfully with Ceylon and Indian teas. However, as a production engineer at one of the four tea plants now operating in Chakvi said, Georgian tea was ruined in Khrushchev’s time, when the tea plantations started being worked mercilessly in order to reach the planned production figures. Special combines were used to pick the tea. As a result, the tea could not even compete with the infamous Krasnodar tea. Still, machine-assisted harvesting did its job: Georgian tea was mainly delivered to the army.
--“Overall, it’s not a bad thing that the tea plantations had a rest,” said Tomaz Bakuridze, general director of Ajaria’s TV station. “Now the tea will be of much better quality than before, and then it’ll be a big business. Of course, the tea harvest has decreased, but on the other hand, the tea will be good.”
Bakuridze heads a TV station that in a few years has been transformed from a provincial local channel into a mass medium broadcast by satellite throughout Europe, North Africa, and the United States, as well as in his native region. If anyone had said seven years ago that Ajaria television would become the world’s most authoritative Georgian mass medium, it probably would have been met with derision.
Georgy, the general director of the Chakvi brick tea plant, is incredibly proud that he was able to start at least some production. Brick tea is the lowest quality product of all: it consists of tea leaves of any grade that are simply steamed and pressed into bricks. A two-kilogram brick costs about $0.60. This unusual product is almost entirely exported to Mongolia, although Dagestan and Buryatia buy a small amount. The tea is customarily brewed with milk and drunk with salt and butter.
--“You think this is totally unprofitable,?” asked the director, whom everyone calls Gogi. “This tea is the main brand in Mongolia. They call it ‘Stalin tea’ there. Do you see the hammer and sickle stamped on the molds? This is the main identification mark for Mongolians. They know it’s a symbol of a high-quality, all-natural product. Our Chinese competitors started counterfeiting this mark, so we had to change the design of the brick. They add chemicals too, but what have chemicals got to do with it?
--“Did you remove the hammer and sickle?,” I wanted to know.
--“Go on!,” Gogi recoiled in surprise. “Removeit? Noway! We made it clearer so it would be visible right away. I’ll never give up the hammer and sickle! Anything but that.”
As a matter of principle, there could not be any chemicals in the plant, which started operating in 1932 (and has changed little since then): the factory is a museum piece. It took only some small investments from Russia to start it up. We met the investor, an unassuming Dagestani named Shamil, during the inevitable feast.
Vinous Recollections
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| Tea-growing in Georgia has to be rebuilt from these small bricks |
Georgian feasts are the stuff of the most impressive legends. There is no need to explain that Georgia is a land of wine. We will simply give a short and incomplete list of the wines we tried during the week: Gurdzhaani, Tsinandali, Ereti, Odzhaleshi, Psou, Tvishi, Akhasheni, Tsinandali, Saperavi, and Khvanchkara.
--“Well,” said Tomaz Bakuridze, “generally speaking, these are only the names of regions and villages and bottle labels. There isn’t much good wine in Georgia.”
This theory was apparently demolished in the following four hours. The white wine set out on the table in Shamil’s honor had no name. After the first three three-liter jugs for ten people, we decided that the wine was not bad. After the next five, we were convinced that it was a worthy wine. After five more, we went into raptures. I lost count after the twentieth. I thought it was a simply magnificent wine. And the people – such wonderful people!
--“I’ve been searching for a real wine nearly all my life,” said Aslan Abashidze.
Abashidze told us that the amount of Georgian wine spread around the world is nowhere near what Georgian vineyards could produce.
--“The so-called Georgian wine you’re used to drinking probably isn’t Georgian. Until 1970, trademark rights were owned by the collective farms growing grapes of the corresponding variety. Today, companies in the Kuban and Moldova use these trademarks. It’s all done honestly, but it’s not Khvanchkara or Odzhaleshi. The genuine wines under these names are produced where the grape variety grows. What’s more, grapes tend to vary. I have a lot of experience with wine, and high-quality grapes are a real rarity. High-quality wine is made mainly for friends and family. You can’t buy it.”
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| Aslan Abashidze, head of the Ajar Autonomous Republic, believes that a person can search all his life for a real wine |
Abashidze treated us to Saperavi from his personal cellars. After tasting it, I was certain that I had actually never drunk Saperavi wine before.
But is this really important? The whole point of a Georgian feast—and Abashidze agreed with this—is not to have elite wines or elegant dishes on the table (Georgian cooking for these occasions in Georgia is not all that varied, although it is very tasty). The main thing is the conversation at the table and the people carrying on these conversations. If there are Georgians at the table, you get your main satisfaction from their joie de vivre.
At the port in Sochi, a Georgian named Tengiz returning home by boat from the Arctic city of Ukhta showed us the Georgian knack for living well. He merrily told us how he had nearly gone broke delivering tomatoes to Komi and was now returning home. He had borrowed $200 for his ticket from his partner, and that was all the money he had left.
--“I don’t have any baggage, just one box,“ said Tengiz. “I bought a little iron grill, and I just had to bring it home. Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to roast shashlik and fish. Oh, by the way! Drop by tomorrow! Can I give you my address?
Dmitry Butrin
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 10, 2003
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