ლაჟვარდ ცაზე დღეა თეთრი კრავების

The Azure Skies Are Covered With White Lambs

ლაჟვარდ ცაზე დღეა თეთრი კრავების,

დასავლეთის კარი ჩატყდა ზმორებით;

უნაზესი ისმის ხმა საკრავების

ბაღებს იქით, სადღაც, გადაშორებით.

მზის გადასვლამ სივრცეები დაწმინდა.

იბინდება, იბინდება მთაწმინდა.

აჰ, ეგ თმები, ჩემს სახეს რომ ეხება,

შუქმა კარგი მოგონებით შეღება.

იყო ომი, იყო ცეცხლის დროება,

ლოდინია ახლა და მყუდროება

ციდან მთებზე ეშვებიან კრავები,

დაღალული წყდაბა ხმა საკრავების.

The azure skies are covered with white lambs,

From lazy stretching Western door collapsed,

The finest sounds of harps and pipes are heard

Away from gardens, where life’s now at rest.

The setting sun has cleared the skies and clouds,

The late twilight is on the holy mount.

Ah, hair of yours, that’s touching now my face,

From light it’s got the old remembrance paints.

There was a war, there were the fiery fights,

Now - cosiness and pending of new times.

Lambs descend from heaven to the mounts,

The weary sounds of harps and pipes die down.

Galaktion Tabidze, 1925.

And so, you resume your role as foreigner. Elsewhere this distinction may become blurred, here it endures as if inscribed, like the walls of Ananuri. Each time you come and go, new words are learnt and short cuts are found. If you wanted, you could walk from Lado Asatiani to Nutsubidze street with your eyes closed, but still you are illiterate and the map indecipherable. And so, you spend your time digging for clues, in museums and Magazins, at market stalls and Marshutka stations, on your laptop or with friends. However, your real guide is the Dry Bridge. Somewhere between permanent exhibition and skeleton key. Laid across red felt and plastic, the bazaar is a living monument to the cities ancestry, from Iberian Kingdom to Georgian SSR, offering it up to be bought or bartered, and with every purchase, a new way in.

Your first, a collection of postcards from 1976. There are the usual sights, Vakhtang surveying his kingdom from Metekhi Church, the hot springs that skinned his falcon and gave birth to the city, the funicular to Mtatsminda and the balconies, the lifeblood. Each tourist is bound to an illusion, you included. The preface, a crusade for authenticity. To explore “The City That Loves You” before it is scarred by mass tourism. These postcards offer a different angle, when mass tourism was a fantasy of the proletariat, so is this angle more authentic? Perhaps unscarred, but wounded. Rustaveli metro and The Chancellery, both represent something not quite entirely Georgian. Then there is Dynamo stadium, whose swimming pool has since become the symbol of Georgia’s cultural mutiny, as surrogate mother to the hallowed nightclub, Bassiani.

Your second, a collection of video tapes, assumedly from the early millennium. They offer comparatively little, but do open new paths to familiar places. As if rediscovering your own memory. A small offering of both 10th and 11th buildings of Tbilisi State University. Where on one particularly ambitious afternoon, amidst this mirage of monoliths. The oppressive climate washed over you like bleach, gifting sickness in a bout of sunstroke.

Then suddenly, the excavation is over. A new tomb uncovered. Three photo albums of three families, dating from what you can tell, between 1954 to 1982, some photographs presumably older, some later. The amateur anthropologist in you salivates like a voyeur, as you gladly surrender Queen Tamar to the discovery. Then for a moment you sit with your catch in 9th of April. A park which, though at times, can be as foreboding as the name it carries. Has watched you grow and wilt, seized in conversation and tamed by denial, but through these observations, become your most sentimental space.

დახურულია გული, როგორც საკანი რამე.

თითქო უმძიმეს კარებს კუპრის დაედო ლუქი,

As if a solitary cell,

A door that’s locked tight with sealing wax

ჩამოიბუროს ზეცა, მისიც აღარა მჯერა

I ceased to trust the Heavens dear, let skies go dim!”

Galaktion Tabidze, 1916.

Initially you browse each page with reverence, but to correctly examine this cadaver you must break seals, remove photographs and reorder them, pair faces and trace links. Which at first may be somewhat tenuous, a smile, a girl, two girls, two soldiers etc. Never before have you seen so many combinations of beauty in one place, each face unique but for an unmistakable divinity. The city too has many faces. Between vulnerable balconies, gaudy Moorish and latent Art-Nouveau, it’s easy to lose yourself in admiration. It’s imperfections can become like a mirror, it’s beauty claustrophobic. The anonymity afforded by large squares and monolithic buildings is somewhat scarce. Although crudely amputated from their somber past, you can take refuge on Rose Revolution Square or in Vake Park, but the distorted essence of these relics can be unsettling. Only in the dignity of dawn, like that of an ancient song, do rituals intersect with equality and you make sense of the polyphony.

Knight’s wear a Panther’s Skin, Georgians are illusionists, and Tbilisi is, of course, a stage where logic is suspended and moulded, not unlike Churchkhela. Expectation inevitably bends to the rhythm of the city. A rhythm that is complex, delicate, but somehow unwavering. Where morning has the elegance of Mass, afternoon becomes a Supra. The chaos somewhat poetic, as the cacophony of day unfolds at the feet of Shota Rustaveli. Else where you find time to notice banality, here it is not so easy, the simplest thing over complicates, the smallest detail magnifies. The amalgamation of unruly Marshutka drivers and merchants on every corner, teenage couples and widowed revolutionaries, the destitute and the fashionable. All coexist with a distinct volatility that is uniquely Georgian, both brash and utterly charming, from kissing to fighting to screaming to laughing, and back again.

Khachapuri, Kakhetian wine, Kinkhali and Chacha are their own cliches, but the prevailing intoxication is illuminating. Shadows sink deeper until Pirosmani reads like a guidebook. At times, even your friends must remind you, and exclaim with pride, “there is no logic here”. Perhaps belief in the intangible is as much an authentically Georgian trait as any, and you are charmed by the small, abundant tokens of this precarious adhesive. From the steel beams that hold Akhospireli street together, to the giggling children of Varketili, who followed you for twenty minutes, too shy to speak. And, what to make of the benches? If there are nine million bicycles in Beijing, between Dedaena, Vera and Mziuri alone, there are nine million benches in Tbilisi, rarely occupied, and between those benches, the question of Europe. Some say yes, some no, it was, or it will be.

Even in a country fuelled by Orthodoxy, religion is not what it seems. Blind tradition makes a habit of adopting and reshaping, Pagan and Totalitarian customs. Lasting up to six days, the funeral ceremonies in Svaneti and Samegrelo include a variety of rituals, subverting those of Christianity. In Svaneti, men become nocturnal, aiding ascension in a trembling chorus. However the mourning Megrelian women, simply surround the coffin to howl. Stressing vowels as if reciting poetry, clawing their faces to raw flesh. The pain of grief supposedly alleviated through this primal act of martyrdom. Upon reading this, your mind wanders. You picture the Megrelian women on a certain, cool spring afternoon, in 1953. A certain, cool spring afternoon, that seems to follow you everywhere. With Moscow treated for it’s tumour, and impoverished Ukrainian's fed. De-Stalinization may have begun the next day, but more than half a century later, the curse of “the great son of the Georgian nation”, still lingers with a peculiar poignancy.

In both your collection of tapes and photographs, you pair a fountain in Tskaltubo. Initially planned in 1931, reimagined in 1950. Tskaltubo was designated a spa resort and balneotherapy centre. Composed of nineteen sanatoriums circling a Central Park. In hindsight the passive expressions of your archive, framed in this placid setting, illustrates some kind of dubious innocence. At one time the symbol of Western Georgia, accommodating 125,000 visitors a year. Now it is a somber reminder, of a past life’s careless extravagance. As most buildings have come to house refugees displaced in the Abkhazian conflict. And behind the central fountain, above the door of Bathhouse #6. A frieze of Stalin looms with a foreboding irony.

You wonder how the heart keeps beating, but the answer is in the catacombs of Tbilisi. Running alongside the Mtkvari river, between moments of near whimsical harmony, there sleeps a cold brutality. It doesn’t lurk or intimidate, but does offer some kind of explanation. The ruthless determination of a city in transition. You see it everyday, eventually distinguishable by affliction alone. The brace that binds the rotting foot and puss soaked cast of Rustaveli Square, the bulbous disfigured belly of the Airways offices, and the hunchback of Liberty Square, so contorted you are yet to see his face.

They sit obediently and tragically unaware. Under the watchful, Stalinesq eye of Kakha Kaladze, as if simply waiting for the Georgian Dream that has left them behind. Then there is the synthesizer player on Marjanishvili, the sleeping baker at Good Mood Food, and the hands of the coy film critic, where some lives are tragic, others so simple, but all indispensable to the logic of the city. Perhaps out of sympathy, or a misguided attempt at philanthropy, helplessly you put these icons of your Tbilisi, alongside photographs of old. To further elevate and preserve them from obscurity and decay, to thank them for offering some familiarity amidst the constant shape shifting.

But, Tbilisi doesn’t need your help, and likewise, you are reminded daily. Simply leaving your apartment on Galaktion Tabidze Street, you step into a micro-cosmic metropolis, who’s French Patisserie and Craft Beer House would be at home in any Western European capital. Every day you walk this corridor of gentrification, as if it were death row. Obsessed with the contrast in expression, from vacant tourist to gypsy child, selling roses and ignored. The Lari in your pocket sings with the hopelessness of shrapnel, as inevitably, you do nothing. Upon putting a history to the name, Galaktion Tabidze, the tragic poetry that lines his street seems fitting.

Though dubbed “The King of Poets”, a moniker even Stalin couldn’t bring himself to undermine, perhaps his coronation was a consolation prize, as Galaktion ultimately symbolises the sardonicism of Georgian tragedy. An Order of Lenin could not prevent the death of his first wife. Olga Okujava, with eye’s that stayed open as she died, in Oryol, 1941.

Surviving, as those around him perished. The Georgian Union of Writers depleted, as if plucked like pomegranates. The curse of terror became a tumour, life became sorrow, the purge restaged. On the 17th March 1959, whilst hospitalised on Chavchavadze Avenue, Galaktoni jumped from his internment window. Between this barbarism and beauty, a glade of tranquility breaks the puzzle. Like Hamlet Gonashvili fell from an apple tree, and the black rash of Kato Svanidze oxidised a heart of stone into 20 million dead. As if by a Khanjali, the precision in which tragedy slides into banality provokes an end to questioning. What bleeds, you educe to be Georgia. Then suddenly, the photographs come to an end, the albums wilt to anthologies, the lives detained, once intended to be forgotten, have become trapped in you.

Then, in a moment of clarity, you find yourself in the Tokyo Dome, the 24th of April 1989. Shota Chochishvili, the wry smiled Judoka of Kvareli, who found Gold in Munich and Bronze in Montreal, smothers the “Moeru Tokon” (Burning Fighting Spirit) of Antonio Inoki, repeatedly dropping him on his back until declared unconscious. Oddly enough, upon reliving this moment 29 years later in 240p, came a sudden realisation. That you too must admit defeat. The inclination to build a monument, to a culture that deeply inspired and disordered you. Arrested you at Parajanov’s first screening, may not be the testament you had envisioned, but to wade further, you risk losing sight of the ideal.

However, you fought and now the inscriptions are deeper and with delight, you can at least recite a simple phrase. Like a proud parent, you treasure the first words, “Marshutka Sadguri”. Clumsily plucked in haste whilst stranded in Chiatura, and like a mournful child you savour the last, “Bebo”. Timidly spoken in a modest apartment, which redefined your memory of Varketili. Now instead of the district kids, you think of the elation and tenderness in a Grandmothers smile, as she watched her two Madonna’s play carelessly hand in hand.

And despite the monument’s decommission, your epitaph can remain. Just as in the Antarctic, in the Hut Point Peninsula, somewhere south-west of Mount Erebus, there is a frostbitten cross standing over Observation Hill. It serves as an understated symbol to Robert Falcon Scott, and his failed expedition to the South Pole, in 1912. Beyond underestimating destinations, little comparison can be drawn between your efforts. However, through this testament to failure, Scott has become one with the antarctic, and so, perhaps you can take solace in consideration of this film, as your Observation Hill. From Gori, birthplace of Stalin, resting place of Chochisvili, to Truso Valley and the Black Sea promenade of Sukhumi, the deeper you got the more inscrutable it became. You lost perspective and better judgement against such alluring illusions. You sought birds milk, and found the water of Chiluri. And so, naturally, you disappear without a trace, to resume your role as foreigner.

სტიროდა სული ცისფერ ღვინოებს 

The Soul Wept Out With Light Blue Wines

სტიროდა სული ცისფერ ღვინოებს,

ღვინო ეძებდა სულ სხვას პირიქით

და შემდეგ უცნობ პიანინოებს

ატრიალებდა ტანჯვის ლირიკით.

როგორც მრავალი ვარდების მფენი,

მას სული ჰქონდა უხვად ციური,

მასში მრავალი იყო შოპენი

და პაგანინი ფანტასტიური.

მას საქართველომ გადაუზნიქა

ვერხვები შორი ალაზანისა

და აი, ეხლა მისი მუსიკა

ჩვენი ისლების რხევამ დანისლა.

მშვენიერია ეფექტი მისი

იქ, სადაც სიტყვა თავდება ძველი,

ოდეს თავისი და არასხვისი

ცრემლებით თვალი უბრწყინავს სველი.

The soul wept out with light blue wines,

But wine then searched for someone else,

And whirled the piano keys meanwhile,

With lyric of tormenting tense.

As if all spreading fair roses,

The soul was full of Heaven’s spell,

Contained much of Chopin’s music,

And Paganini’s fancy realm.

Tall aspen tree’s of Alazani,

Bent low in Georgia on his way,

And music then, all of a sudden,

Got misty through our Carex waves,.

Effect is fine, overwhelming,

Where end those words, all worn and old,

The eyes in tears, gently melting,

Are sparkling wet but never cold.

Galaktion Tabidze, 1919.

(Translation by Innes Merabishvili, 2017)