Georgia is unique in many ways. Before coming to the country, it seemed like a mysterious place that nobody could entirely explain. So, taking the lead of Georgia’s most universally revered hero, Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, I’ve tried to better understand the people who make up this amazing country through his three main ethnic markers of Georgian identity: language, fatherland (territory), and religion.
Language:
Madloba!MA-lo-BA….MA-lo-BA…
Our host, Giorgi, is exaggerating his mouth movements and repeating the phrase over and over again as we sit on his front stoop overlooking the city of Singhali. As any good tourist in a new country, the first thing I had tasked myself with was learning how to say thank you and as someone who is bilingual, traveling with my finance who is quadrilingual, it was embarrassing that it took us a full five minutes of practice to produce a passing pronunciation. Giorgi joked that the grapes draped on the house above our heads would ripen before we would succeed. After the first lesson, I did not doubt it.
The Georgian language is one of the oldest in the world with its own entirely unique alphabet. This uniqueness is a point of pride for the Georgians. With a history of invasion and occupation, the survival of their language is what distinguishes them from Russians, Europeans, or Persians. It is theirs and nobody has been able to rip it away.
Fatherland:
While unfortunately we did not have enough time to travel to every region of the country, we paired our choices with our passions: wine and hiking. Our first stop: the Kakheti region. Georgia’s foremost wine region is home to 4,250 square miles of rolling vineyards, most of which are family-owned. As such, we decided to forgo a traditional hotel and stay in a small house on a vineyard order to get acquainted with the ancient traditional winemaking ritual.
After settling in, our host got us straight to work. Handing us sharp gardening sheers and plastic buckets, he led us into the rows of his tongue-twisting indigenous grapes like rkatsiteli, mtsvane, and saperavi. We continued to fill buckets as the sun dipped below the mountain skyline and turned the sky a soft blush hue. The sheepdogs who followed us row by row grew tired of our banter and began to settle into the warm grass along the edges, only to be rudely awakened every two minutes by chickens seeking to exert some kind of dominance over the unexpecting masters of the farm.
As the soft pink above us deepened into bright oranges, our host called us back to the front porch. We waddled back with our bounty in both hands and dogs on our heels. We dumped our harvest into our host grandfather’s small wooden press and began to crank the wheel, lightly crushing the grapes, skins and seeds still included. As we cranked, our host joked that he would call this barrel his “tourist wine” once it was complete.
After the hard labor was done, we entered his family’s tradition winery as the sky’s burnt orange turned to deep purple. Inside the dimly lit stone and brick winery we saw the grape harvest from two weeks prior boiling on its own as the fermentation process heated up, starting to take on an amber color underground in a kvevri. After a prolonged wine and brandy tasting we retired to the balcony to watch the stars and moon light up the tops of the snowcapped mountains, while the dogs settled down for the night in front of the door.
After copious amounts of wine and cheese in Kakheti, we headed to the mountain town of Kazbegi to hike off the extra pounds. The white knuckle drive up through the windy mountains was only broken up by random pit stops to stretch our legs, breathe in the increasingly colder air, and take in the alluring fall colors creeping over the mountain passes. We drove into town after night had fallen and promptly tucked ourselves in, exhausted from the nail-biting driving in Georgia.
In the morning we were greeted with the most amazing view of Mount Kazbek towering above the town, interrupted only by the spectacular sight of Gergeti Trinity Church teetering on the edge of a cliff about a quarter of the way up. After gorging ourselves on an early morning breakfast we packed our bags and set out on the treacherous 12-mile hike up to the Kazbek glacier.
After climbing up 5,000 feet we were met with the most amazing view of the glacier and the vastness of the Caucasus mountains. After a small lunch of hard-boiled eggs and apples, we rested next to the faithful stray dogs that had followed on our trek. After marveling at the pure ice glacier towering above us, we packed up and tried to reassure our wobbly legs for the step hike down through the icy gravel, the barren hillsides, and into the long grass hanging onto the windswept cliff sides. While exhausting, it was one of the most stunning terrains we had ever hiked.
Religion
When Chavchavadze spoke about religion, he meant Christianity, specifically the Georgian Orthodox Church, which remains the spiritual home to 85% of Georgians. However, religion for Georgians goes well beyond a single religious institution. Georgians have preserved a long history of religious harmony within the country despite thousands of years of conflict waged with surrounding nations. Jewish communities exist throughout the country, Azerbaijani groups have practiced Islam in Georgia for centuries, and the Armenian Apostolic Church has autocephalous status.
It is also within these places of worship that the rich political and social history of the country is recorded. Dating back to the 6th century, the Jvari Monastery sits atop a hill overlooking the convergence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers and is believed to be the exact spot where St. Nino, a female evangelist, brought Christianity to the country. Moving down into the old state capital of Mtskheta, you find the masterpiece of the Early Middle Ages, the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. It was the site of both coronations and burials of multiple Georgian kings and has withstood numerous foreign invasions. The Bodbe Monastery, in the Kakheti region, is now a nunnery but during the Soviet Union was stripped of all religious purposes and used as a hospital.
Reflections
As I now sit in a cafe in the middle of Tbilisi and reflect on my two weeks in Georgia, I am struck with an uneasy feeling. I know more about the Georgian language, geography and religious institutions. It is a country that has preserved its own language despite numerous occupying forces. It is a country that is isolated by its mountain ranges and bordering seas and yet is seen as a crossroads between the East and West. It is a country that has managed to keep its diverse religious practices throughout wars and occupation.
But it is also a country of so much more, and I feel as though an easy definition of what is Georgian still escapes me.
-- Savannah F., Cohort 4