My second Traverse tour was a tour of Tbilisi’s Old Town. There were four Old Town tours going and it took a moment to make sure we were all on the right buses. There was a Cultural Exploration which was going to various museums, exhibits and galleries – not my thing. There was a Gastronomy tour – turns out most of them were going to end as gastronomy tours, unbeknownst to us. There was a Tbilisi day tour which I would have gone on if I’d known what it involved. The schedule just said “zip line”, which didn’t give a lot away. That one went on until 7.30pm, took in pretty much everything that the other tours did, included the zipline from Narikala, a tour around the Old Town, a wine tasting, a substantial lunch and an evening boat tour. My Old Tbilisi tour, according to the itinerary, included the Abanotubani district, the waterfall, Meidan Bazaar and assorted places of worship and ran 10am to 1pm. If you’ve read any of my previous Georgia posts, you’ll have discovered that nothing finishes at the time given on the schedule.
By now, I knew roughly where we should be going so it was a bit of a surprise that we turned right out of Rose Revolution Square and headed north rather than south towards the Old Town. This was in order to give us a glimpse of the Heroes roundabout where an ugly and seemingly abstract tower honours the lost heroes of Georgia in the Red Army invasion of Georgia in 1921. We didn’t get to see it up close and with that much traffic around and across it, I’m not sure it’s even possible, but the names of over 4,000 people who died in various battles and wars against Russia from 1921 all the way up to the Abkhaz war in 1992/3.
Then we zoomed through Rose Revolution Square again and headed where I expected. Our first stop in the Old Town, two metro stops if we’d been travelling by public transport, was at Metekhi Virgin Mary Assumption Church. I’d had a little stroll around the grounds and inside the church the afternoon before because it’s a five-minute walk from my hotel and an obvious point of interest on the way down to the river to go to the sulphur baths. The area seems to take its name from the church – it’s the name of the street my hotel is on, it’s the name of the bridge below and it’s the name of the cliff that runs along the riverbank on that side. Most of it was built in the late thirteenth century, possibly following the destruction of an older church on the same sight. It’s nothing particularly special inside. I suspect Russia and/or the Soviets cleaned out anything of interest. Anyway, on this tour we were just going to look across the river from the car park below and be told the story of the founding of Tbilisi, which I’ve already covered in the sulphur baths post. In short: King Vakhtang Gorgasil was hunting when his hawk caught a pheasant. Under the weight of its prey, the birds fell and were found by the king dead in the natural hot spring water. His Majesty decided that he was going to have his capital built here and he named it Tbilisi, the warm place. There’s a statue of him on a horse overlooking the river, across to the hot river valley, although it’s now pretty well-covered.
Then we jumped back on the bus to drive across to Abanotubani. This is the point where I wondered if we were going to go into the baths, since it still seems unhinged to just not have a tour there when you’re trying to promote and sell Georgia as a tourist destination but no. I mean, the fact that we hadn’t been instructed to bring swimwear and towels gave away that we weren’t going inside. We looked at the valley, still visible between bathhouses but with a very small river – or perhaps it’s just the time of year. Lela, our guide, took us across the valley and round the back to see the waterfall but because of rockfalls, the path has been fenced off. A determined adventurer could get round the fence pretty easily but we didn’t. It’s closed off for a reason. We could just about see the waterfall which is about as small as its stream would suggest. Again, maybe it’s just that it’s winter and it might become a spectacular torrent later in the spring.
From here, we could see all the buildings built up and up above the valley, with overhanging wooden balconies. These are something of a Georgian trademark. Other countries have balconies but they’re not Georgian balconies, which are made of wood. Balconies are something of a social status symbol and it took a while to realise that when Lela talked about decorations on balconies, she wasn’t talking about pretty tables or pot plants – she means how ornate the balconies are. We crossed a small bridge and went up a spiral staircase to find ourselves in a narrow street winding its way through the Old Town, overhung with more balconies. Stopping a tour group here to talk about the area isn’t ideal. We saw Tbilisi mosque – not the beautiful blue-tiled thing you’ll see if you google it. That’s Chreli Abano bathhouse. I gather that this is now the only mosque in Tbilisi and that it’s unusual in that Sunni and Shia both worship together here.
We wound our way back downhill to the entrance to Abanotubani where Lela pointed out the Forty Martyrs of Sebastia Monastery. I missed a chunk of this but there was something next to it which I think used to be underground, and I think there was wine or a bathhouse. The thing I can be more precise about is our next stop, a restaurant called Shemomechama. If I haven’t mentioned the Georgian language before, it’s… peculiar. It doesn’t use pronouns or articles or gender – jury’s still out on whether Georgian society has a concept of gender, because Lela made it sound like it didn’t but I’m seeing plenty of evidence that it does (separate public bathing rooms, the number of times King Tamar, Georgia’s female king, was pointed out, etc) – but it does have verbs that can do incredible things. This particular word, Shemomechama, means something along the lines of “I didn’t intend to eat it but I did but it doesn’t count because I didn’t mean to”. Naturally, the group wanted to know the equivalent of “I didn’t mean to drink it but I did”. I didn’t see that one written down so I’ve attempted to transcribe the sounds that Lela made and I think it’s something like “shemomeshwa”.
Where next? Next we went into Meidan Bazaar. This was on my to-do list and I wish I’d had time to go back. It’s a sunken passage and as you go through, the wares change from wine to chocolate to art to musical instruments to to enormous daggers. I suppose if we’d been quick and decisive, there would have been time to shop but we didn’t have time to dither as we made our way through. I know I couldn’t actually buy a dagger – can’t take a two-foot knife in your hand luggage and I haven’t got the faintest idea how to get it packed up to send home in the post but I would have liked to buy some postcards and maybe some Georgian chocolate and maybe a picture for my gallery. But we were out the other end already. This is the craftspeople end of Old Tbilisi, with streets like Silversmith Street and Weavers Road etc – maybe not those exact names, and certainly not in English, but people with particular crafts or particular wares tended to gather together and you’d end up with an entire street selling the same thing. We made our way through a very narrow road lined with cafes and restaurants and paused at the other end, next to a statue of a slightly alien-looking gentleman holding a horn of wine.
This is an important figure, one we’d hear a lot about. This is the tamada, the toast-master. At every supra, a Georgian feast, someone would be chosen as toast-master. It would often go to one of the older, wiser and more respected attendants, often one of the hosts but status was less important than skill. The toast-master had to be able to do all the toasts in the right order while maintaining the atmosphere of the event, be witty and engaging but also in control and he had to be able to do this with quite a lot of wine in him, for there would be several toasts and at each one, you were expected to drain your horn of wine – you can’t put the horn down because of course, it won’t stand up. The toasts – and I thought I wrote this down, so sorry if it’s wrong – are to God, to peace and Georgia, to the dead and then to anyone else the toast-master wants to toast.
We popped into an enamel shop that surely didn’t want a horde of tourists parading in and out again without even being given time to buy anything and then just round the corner was the northern end of the Peace Bridge, built in 2010, with a criss-cross canopy and illuminated by 1208 LEDs which come on overnight, flash Morse code messages and sometimes respond to movement on the bridge. It looks a bit like a giant sail flapping in the wind. It has staircases at each end to connect it to the pavements on each side of the river but the bridge itself stretches right into the Old Town and right into Rike Park on the other side. We had a few minutes for photos, then we went back into the Old Town.
Next was a succession of churches. The one where Stalin got married (“You know he was Georgian? We are not proud.”) to his first wife (Lela speculated on how different history might have been if she hadn’t died young), the residence of the Georgian Patriarch (head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, apparently seen as some kind of friendly uncle/godfather figure), a church built in the 6th century behind an arch built in the 16th, a “charmingly disheveled” leaning clock tower built by a beloved playwright and puppeteer and up to the Catholic Church. We were joined by one of the street dogs at this point. It gently strolled up to Lela and touched its nose to her knee and she scritched its ears and head as she talked and it then followed us up the street, moving from person to person for attention. If you didn’t read my First impressions of Tbilisi post, Georgia has a problem with stray dogs but they’re all vaccinated against rabies, deflead, dewormed and pretty much communally fed. They’re very good-natured, love a bit of attention and although they’re a bit grubby, none of them look thin or mangy. At one point, they were all neutered but either they’ve stopped doing that or there’s a magic portal producing dogs because the population doesn’t appear to be decreasing.
Now, this was the point where I was starting to wonder some things. The tour was 10-1 and Lela had mentioned lunch and returning to the Caravanserai, a kind of hotel/marketplace for travellers on the Silk Road which we’d paused outside. By now it was 12.30 and we were wondering how we were going to fit in the Caravanserai, a lunch and returning to Rose Revolution Square all in thirty minutes. Off we went to the Caravanserai where we were apparently going to have a wine tasting. We were all looking at each other by now. This wasn’t in the itinerary. Neither was a brief tour of the wine museum, hidden in the cool brick-lined basement of the caravanserai. Wine is important in Georgia and important to the tourist board running the various trips this week. As a person who doesn’t drink wine, I’d avoided all the many wine tours and walks but it appears I was going to learn about it whether I wanted to or not.
So, this is believed to be where the first wine in history was made. The region that Georgia now occupies, that is, not this specific museum. It’s the cradle of wine. It’s made in a hollowed-out tree trunks and everything from the grapes goes in there – stalk, stems, seeds, skins and all. It’s crushed by foot and then they open up a trap door at the end and it all pours into a clay vessel set into the group, which may be three metres tall. This thing is called a qvevri and so is the wine it produces. It’s left to do its thing without any additions. I don’t know a lot about winemaking but I believe elsewhere yeast or sugar is added to help the grapes ferment? Not here, it’s pure grape. Anyway, when it’s finished, there’s a thick layer of sediment at the bottom – the aforementioned stems, stalks, skins and seeds. Get rid of that. Then the wine on top is divided into three layers. The bottom layer is really strong but also kind of gooey and icky because it’s been sitting right on top of all the sediment. The top layer has been too close to the open air and oxidised. One of these layers tastes a bit like vinegar and that’s exactly what they use it for. I think it’s the top layer. The middle layer is the one they use for actual wine. Because of all the sediment sitting in there, Georgian wine tends to be a richer colour than wine made elsewhere – the white wines at our tasting were definitely more a golden orange. In Georgia, this is amber wine – but it has to be made in a clay qvevri. If it’s made in anything else, it’s orange wine.
We had to wait for the previous group to move out and then we all – 25 of us, or thereabouts – sat ourselves around a large table in a fairly dark underground room. There were nibbles laid out on the table and wine glasses and a winemaster told us in great detail about each one and then came round and poured them out for tasting. I was glad to find Erin, who had been sitting next to me on the bus, was also not drinking the wine, and two seats down, neither was Dylan. The winemaster was a little confused why three people were at a wine tasting and refusing to drink wine but it wasn’t on the itinerary and we hadn’t known we were doing it! It was well after 1pm by now. We had no idea what was going on but it very clearly wasn’t finishing by the time we’d been told. Over the next couple of days, we’d come to learn that this is normal.
What I still don’t know is whether that’s normal for Georgia or normal for the Georgian Tourist Board trying to impress their group of creators in the hope they’ll turn Georgia into a major tourist destination. People were trying to rearrange plans for the afternoon, plans to meet friends for lunch, plans to go to sulphur baths, all hindered by the fact that we were quite deep under the ground here with no phone signal.
I wish I could tell you the wine was amazing. I’ve seen a lot of praise for Georgian wine from various people who were at Traverse but for me, even if I’d tasted it, the best I’d be able to say is that it tasted winey. I’d probably say it tasted like petrol. It looked good. I wish I’d taken lots more photos of the amber one. The reds looked more ordinary, if perhaps a little darker. I’ve also seen green wines from people on other tours but we didn’t get any of those.
We emerged from the wine museum and the Caravanserai just before 2.30pm. Now we were going to get back on the bus and go to lunch on the way back to Rose Revolution Square and here was where I made my mistake. I have ARFID. I’m a bad candidate for lunches. All I wanted was to scurry across the river, up the hill and to my hotel room where I had a loaf of bread and some packets of plastic cheese slices. I know, I should eat real Georgian food – and I did, the very next day – but food is difficult and by now, I was both starving and frustrated with the way my plans for the day had spiralled out of my control. I begged Lela to be allowed to escape and off I went. I heard later that as the afternoon advanced, more and more people dropped out after lunch and of those that made it back to Rose Revolution Square, no one was quite sure what time it actually finished but thought it was somewhere between 4.30 and 5.
It was a good introduction to the city but if I – a person who still barely knows Tbilisi! – had set the itinerary, I’d have given us more time in Meidan Bazaar, more time in the intriguing back streets and had an hour in a sulphur bath instead of the unexpected wine tasting and lunch. I’d also expected to go up the cable car to Narikala – the day before, I’d gone up there and walked down on my way to the sulphur bath, thinking that I’d get to explore the place properly on the Old Tbilisi tour. I did do another trip on the cable car, equally quick, but at the moment I think I’m going to give that its own post.
What should come next is the panorama/timelapse photoshoot event at Mtatsminda which I did that evening but I think I’m going to jump to Uplistsikhe, my big tour. So pop back on Monday and I’ll tell you all about the ancient cave town.