We were looking for someone, Elena and I, that morning as soon as we got off in the chaotic Tbilisi train station. Suddenly Levani appeared. His surname ended in ‘-shvili’, and he was just one of many Georgians in this suffix (‘son of’). A 30-year-old bearded Georgian, massive, with very clear, bold eyes. Levani is a guide by profession, known through the intermediary of some mutual friends, and that day he would show us Tbilisi. ‘Do you want to dishonour a real Caucasian man’? he asked, when we tried to stop him from paying for everything for us, in the name of sacred Georgian hospitality. Levani is a passionate, smiling, caring, strong, outspoken Georgian, sometimes almost wild. A lover of football and women, of beautiful women (he would specify), praising us via steady uncomfy compliments. He had lived in Italy for a long time, in Calabria, often spending his summer holidays in Lignano, and therefore adored it. Almost as much as Georgia. He self-defined a patriot. The only one of his nuclear family to have remained living in his homeland, ‘we Georgians spread around the world’, he said. When war broke out in Georgia in 2008, due to the self-declared independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, provinces that are still unrecognised by the international community, Levani returned from Italy in a car with three compatriots, driving through Anatolia, crossing the Turkish-Georgian border at Sarpi, and then driving home to enlist against the Russians.
As compulsory conscription is still in force in Georgia, when war broke out in Georgia, just ten years ago, Georgians were ready to defend their land against a gigantic enemy, with crazy, reckless courage in their bodies, and a few weapons provided by the Americans. The Russian tanks stopped at Gori that time, not a shot was fired, or almost, the Americans had stopped contributing to the cause when they realised that it was not worth investing money in a conflict that would only affect a handful of Abkhazians, about 200,000. But the Georgians would fight, unreasonably, ardently. ‘I had come back to shoot one of those Russians in the legs,’ Levani said. He is like that, vigorous, unscrupulous, sometimes brutal, proud of himself, of his family, which he would tell us about at length, of his land.
We began our visit from Rustaveli Street, a sort of Petersburg Nevsky Prospect. A shaded avenue with a European feel, decorated with elegant late 18th-century buildings: the Opera, the National Library, the Opera of Sciences, the former viceroy’s palace, the National Museum, the Parliament, a few sumptuous hotels. The city had been Turkish until 1783, when it became Russian with the Treaty of Georgievsk. Rustaveli street and the Tsarist quarter of Tbilisi are still the image of typical post-Petrine and Petersburg architecture, commissioned by the Viceroys of the Caucasus who wanted to transform the Persian-style city into a European-style metropolis. The architects who built Tbilisi at that time came from Tsarist Russia; they were the same Italians of the Quarenghi school, who would enrich the Georgian boulevards with neoclassical buildings, exporting the Italian spirit here, so much so that they marked with the Italian word ‘Salve’ some of pavements in the streets.
We passed Freedom Square, the nerve centre of the city, and landed in old Ottoman Tbilisi. Colourful, dilapidated, decaying, lived-in. The old city is the emblem of centuries-old Georgian religious syncretism. Side by side are the Synagogue and the adjacent Jewish quarter, the Armenian Church of St. George, the Mosque in the Muslim quarter, and a myriad of Georgian Orthodox churches. Christianity was declared the state religion in 337 A.D., with the Georgian church proclaiming itself autocephalous, becoming autonomous from the Patriarchate of Antioch, as early as the 5th century. The effigy of St. George, the patron Saint of the town, from which the name Georgia derives, stands everywhere in the city, as does the three-armed arched cross of the autocephalous Georgian church: as the legend tells, the symbol of the Georgian church is said to be the arched cross, because in the countryside farmers used crosses to support the weight of vines.
The oldest church in the city is Anchishkati, my favourite church in Tbilisi, dating back to the 6th century AD. Next to the seat of the Georgian patriarchate, the eden of this small, mystical and silent church stands out. To enter I had to cover my head, and so did all the women. There is something extremely spiritual about Orthodoxy. In the silence of the places of worship, in the slowness of the ritual celebrations, in the veneration of icons, in the scent of incense, in the slender wax candles that drown into the sand of the candelabra. Georgian inscriptions help embellish this gem suspended in time, decorated with ancient frescoes and altarpieces.
If Sioni Cathedral did not seem as authentic to us, we than lingered on the statue of Tamada, in the downtown of the capital: the tamada is the Georgian equivalent to the Greek symposiarch, in charge of sitting at the head of the table and calling the toasts during the traditional supra, the sumptuous Georgian banquet of Ottoman origin held on feast days or funerals. The tamada must boast great rhetorical skills and display a proverbial resistance to alcohol.
As we continued into downtown, we wandered through the city’s vibrant streets, where the same quaint clubs which live indolently during the day turn into open-air discos at night. There was a very goliardic atmosphere in that city, starting with the colours of the churchkela (typical Georgian elongated candies made of nuts, grape must and flour), of the blue, pink, yellow, green buildings, aesthetically cousins of Turkish konak and tangled in ancient rundown streets. Turkey is also palpable throughout the Muslim quarter, where simple bakhlava bakeries lie, opposite the old Hamam from the Ottoman period.
A little further on we climbed the old city, reaching by funicular railway the Narikala Fortress, which from above towers over Tbilisi, reflected in the Kura river.
Here the huge statue of Kartlis Deda (20 metres high) holds a sword and a goblet of wine, one to defend against enemies, the other to welcome friends of Georgia. From this vantage point, we admired the hubbub of this ancient city, trying to understand what kind of country Georgia was, a Caucasian land nestled between Turkey, Russia and the Middle East, a child of all and none, Turkish in its customs and buildings in the old centre (cafes and shisha), Christian in its worship, European in its appearance and mentality, Soviet in some ravine of the suburbs, in the vodka, in the kvass (a fermented drink of Russian-Ukrainian origin), in the timeless use of the Russian language, which everyone knows and few practise, in the ghost of Stalin, born in Gori, and today exorcised in the Made in China magnets scattered around the city. Of Tbilisi, I had immediately felt the warmth of home, the smiles of its inhabitants, the freedom of a carefree day lazing around with a glass of wine and a delicious table laid in the shade of a tree; after a month in Azerbaijan, in half a day in Georgia I felt as if I were getting closer to my homeland.
But what is Georgia in 2018?
The country struggles for its identity, after centuries of domination and influences that have enriched and marked it, but never engulfed it. It was only in 1918 that it became independent along with Armenia and Azerbaijan, before the Soviet arrival. It is geographically the sister country of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Armenia, but incredibly different, mild, solitary, untamed, a lover of life, in the pleasure of the table and the tasting of good wine, born here, in Georgia, between 10,000 and 9,000 BC. Today, this country is trying to carve out a space for itself in the world, driven by the Georgian Dream party, founded by the tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili, the same man who called former Milan footballer Kakhaber Kaladze, the current mayor of Tbilisi, to be deputy prime minister. Georgia benefits from NATO funds, from the European Eastern Partnership Policy, waits to join the European Union, hates its Russian neighbour, while still being intrinsically linked to it. It appeals to the modernism of the capital and the fashionable seaside resort of Batumi to get closer to the West, while in the streets, markets and neighbourhoods ‘beyond the Kura’ lives the spartan and decadent, Caucasian, melancholic and simple Tbilisi, reeling from eighty years of communism and a gigantic past.
Levani told us about this reality. He told us about the values of his people: hospitality, family, honour. He told us of his memories of his family, of the sacredness attached to family ties. About the relationship with women, and the respect given to the integrity of the female figure in conversations between men. The woman is ‘sacred’, and therefore must be protected, helped, preserved. A Georgian man would never go with a friend’s sister. All this sounded strange to Elena and me, two young millennials steeped in Western values, illusions of empowerment, gender equality and whatnot.
Women here marry and have children around the age of twenty-five, then continue working, or perhaps stop. The new generations keep up with a progress that slowly filters through the Caucasian involucre, they travel the world exporting Georgian joy, they normally speak three languages (Georgian, Russian, English) and often a fourth or fifth. And yet they maintain their traditions. This is what Levani, Elena and I were talking about, until, in the early evening, we arrived at an inn on the upper city, facing the river, with a rather odd host. We had ended up in a typical Georgian wine shop, where the host served wines from his own production and other local vendors. He was a friend of Levani’s. We sat on the terrace by the river waiting to watch the sunset set over the Tbilisi fortress. We had been assigned a spartan table, covered by an adorable red and white checked tablecloth vaguely reminding Trastevere.
That evening there was also live music, and a group of young buddies played the traditional panduri. It was an evening I remember with nostalgia. The rough and friendly host served us a steady stream of shashlik, tomatoes and cucumbers with the ever-present walnut sauce and plates of khachapuri. Shashlik is spit-roasted meat, beef, chicken or mutton. Khachapuri is, together with dumplings, khinkali, the national dish of Georgia. It is a heavenly buttery flatbread filled with cheese (kachapuri imeruli) or cheese pluseggs (kachapuri adjaruli). Its leguminous variant is lobiani, a flatbread stuffed with mashed beans.
The host had explained to us the different types of ‘chacha’ (Georgian brandy): ‘women’s’ and ‘men’s’. As Chance decided, that evening, after four glasses of white wine and an exaggerated dinner, we all ended up drinking a series of small glasses of ‘men’s chacha’. Toasting with us were some tipsy Muscovites. We certainly didn’t show an alcoholic resistance equal to a respectable tamada, but in the glycaemic delirium of a tasty dinner, that evening I thought for the first time after a month away from my land, that one can be at peace anywhere, at home as under a pergola on a river I had never contemplated, if lulled by the tranquillity of a centuries-old city, in the company of just witnesses, equally intent on living with the same intensity, a usual, soft, placid, free, spring evening. I had never experienced this feeling in Caucasus so far. I never thought I would experience it instead in a place practically equidistant from Trebizond, Yerevan, Baku, Grozny.
My first month in the Caucasus had been difficult and full of contingencies. Now it finally seemed to take a turn. Until we realised it was time to return to Baku, that night, on the 1am flight. I was about to leave, unconsciously pocketing a Georgian cookbook under the effect of ‘men’s chacha’. It was our turn now: it was Elena and I, eyes crossed, heading towards the airport, accompanied by a Georgian who was now unstoppable and determined to play all his cards… But that’s another story.
