This was my first trip with Traverse. I arrived Monday night and just about had time to figure out the metro before I had to use it for real to get to the pick-up spot at Rose Revolution Square on Tuesday morning for our trip to the Chronicle of Georgia. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I should have booked this one and by the time I got back, I definitely wasn’t sure. Was this what the week was going to be like? For me personally, as someone who refuses to quite take my place as a “content creator”, it was a huge “Ohh… you’re really not like the rest of them”.
The official title of the trip was “photoshoot”. What did that entail? Were we actually doing a photoshoot? A workshop on photoshoots? I take “snaps”, as they call them in the Chalet School, rather than photos, I don’t do photoshoots and I don’t appear in them. Was I even supposed to be there? Did I want to meet real content creators, Instagrammers, photographers, people who know what they’re doing and get exposed first thing as a mere hobbyist who shouldn’t even be in Georgia? Did I want to be on a tour first thing on my first day when I could have been getting my bearings in Tbilisi?
Well, we were transported by minibus to the Chronicle of Georgia and then pretty much left to do our own thing for an hour and a quarter. For me, that mostly involved trying not to get in the background of anyone’s photos and trying not to be spotted vlogging. I’m not a natural or confident vlogger and even in this crowd, where it’s a normal and accepted thing, I still felt the need to hide it. There didn’t really seem to be anyone in charge . We jumped off the bus and then went “… now what?” and when it came to leaving again, one of us decided if she wanted to be at her 1pm meeting, she was going to have to take charge and herd everyone else back onto the bus. I’ll be honest, if I’d got myself here – which would have taken much longer and been much more difficult, involving a metro, a bus and a 25-minute uphill walk through a wooded residential area – I probably wouldn’t have spent an hour and a quarter taking photos. I did use 8 minutes of that sketching the thing in charcoal. I bet in those 8 minutes, I paid more and closer attention to the Chronicle than anyone else did in an hour and a quarter.
Because oh yes, this inspired a blog post I may or may not publish called “influencers in the wild”. I watched people doing multiple takes of walking across the screen. I watched people take selfies with tracking gimbals that stood up by themselves. I watched people indeed conducting photoshoots, flicking their hair and making those bored I’m-better-than-you faces, and I realised that this was everything I’d dreaded. I was surrounded by pros doing stuff I’d never imagined actual real in-person people doing and I felt so out of place. I pictured another week of feeling like the boomer in the group who doesn’t understand what everyone else is doing and I kind of wished I hadn’t come. Spoiler, although maybe you can tell from the posts so far – it wasn’t like that any other day or on any other tour!
But what is the Chronicle of Georgia? It’s a monument to celebrate – apparently – Georgia’s 3000 years as a state and 2000 years of Christianity. Neither of those anniversaries is approaching with any urgency, by the way, as far as I can tell. Christianity came to this part of the world around 319AD, although two of the Apostles apparently preached it here in the first century. So that makes Christianity 1705 years old – nearly another 300 years before it reaches Chronicle age. Georgia itself – well, it’s hard to put a date on countries. Borders shift all the time. You might not notice but have a look at world maps from when you were born. On my birth map, there’s no South Sudan, Croatia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania or Georgia but there’s a Yugoslavia and a USSR. Go back to my parents and half of Europe is unrecognisable. According to Wikipedia – I know – the Georgian Realm was unified in 1008. We did have Colchis and Iberia from the 13th century BC. I wrote about Iberia in an earlier post but evidently it didn’t make it to publication. This Iberia is different from the Spain-and-Portugal Iberia. It’s confusing that we have two regions with the same name at opposite ends of the same continent but as far as I can tell, it’s entirely coincidence. The names come from different roots in unrelated languages but in short, if you see Iberia in the Caucasus region, it’s an old name for the area that roughly occupies modern-day Georgia and Armenia. I can see Georgian lands as a “Vassal state of the Seleucid Empire” starting in 302 BC, which makes it 2,326 years old. Nearly another 700 years until that 3000 year mark you’ve already celebrated.
On the other hand, although I can’t read a word of Georgian, I can decipher a little Cyrillic. Not usually enough to read the Russian underneath but I can see very clearly on the scroll at the foot of the Chronicle that the Georgian, Russian and English all say something very different. Perhaps they have different numbers that make more sense than the English version.
And here we are and I still haven’t told you what the Chronicle of Georgia actually is! It’s a monument and artwork, sixteen 35m-high black pillars with scenes from Georgian history and the Bible on it. Yes, it does look a little bit like a weird scifi version of Stonehenge. Alien brutalist Stonehenge. It sits on a hill overlooking the Tbilisi Sea, a reservoir and water-leisure area that according to the driver-guide began as three salt lakes that got linked up but if that thing is supplying most of Tbilisi’s drinking water, it can’t be salt anymore.
I thought you could go up on top of one of the pillars. From a certain angle, I could see a pink hat on top but not finding any entrance or any mention, I had to give up. The hat eventually seemed to be a light or a cover or some kind of plastic dome. Not a person. It’s a shame because it would have been really interesting to see the Chronicle from the top. Some people were flying drones but drone footage isn’t the same as seeing it yourself.
It’s a weird thing to walk around. These pillars are huge and black, wider on each side than my armspan and there are figures embossed on them. Is embossed the right word? The pillars are stone with wooden rails holding up vast metal plates with the pictures on. I can’t tell which are Georgian history and which are Bible. I don’t know enough about Georgian history to know any of the stories and apparently even with the Biblical ones, people can’t really tell what the thought process was behind the images that ended up on the monument. I would say don’t worry so much about the stories, even though the stories are the point of this place, and just appreciate being here, walking among these giant pillars.
It’s kind of like walking among the Temple of Karnak, only this is black metal and not yellow-white sandstone. The sun makes weird patterns between them and brings out certain shapes and figures in bright definition and everything is enormous. I keep talking about aliens but this definitely feels like the sort of place a mind-controlled human might build on the instruction of alien overlords, ready for them to launch their invasion of Earth from.
I wish we’d had more time with the guide, explaining the details of what we were seeing and less time taking selfies. It’s a great viewpoint – you’re raised up above the urban sprawl of the ugly part of Tbilisi, an entire valley full of Brutalist Soviet-era apartment buildings spreading towards the mountains to the north of the city. I just wish I could write a blog post about it that’s more than “it’s big”, “it’s kind of like Stonehenge”, “it’s kind of alien” and “there are feral cats living inside the pillars” (there are).
I do absolutely think you should make the journey out here. It’s a bit of a hassle by public transport but pretty much the entire rest of the group spent the week getting about by Bolt, which is a lot like Uber but mostly incredibly cheap and that’s probably the best way to get to the Chronicle of Georgia without hiring a car (I absolutely wouldn’t hire a car!). I think as a piece of giant art you can walk inside, it’s an amazing place and I love how weird it is, even if you have no idea what you’re experiencing, and as a viewpoint, it’s pretty good too.
