Signs of Something: Etseri, Svaneti

We are now counting down the days until the village's fields are emptied of scythed, dried, stacked hay, which their owners will sled off to their barns by oxen pairs for bovine winter feed. Once those fields are free, our cows will no longer go up the mountain and need laborious fetching down every evening, the summer's drudge. We will send them to this field or that for some weeks, and they'll actually come home themselves! A sign of coming autumn, as days shorten and cool off while the Georgian lowlands continue to swelter.

Another fall sign is the coming drop-off in tourist numbers. School in this country doesn't start until mid-September, but elsewhere it's usually earlier than this, so vacationing families with schoolchildren must wrap things up soon. The tourists without this time constraint are free, of course, to come and go, and the approaching fall season promises spectacular leaf displays on Svaneti's mountainsides.

Speaking of signs... although it's not the best time for it (that would be spring), I'm finally ready to plant a Hanmer Guest House sign of my own, and see the fruit that it will produce. It will go in down near the Etseri bus stop, on the Zugdidi-Mestia road, cemented in place, complementing the smaller version which is on the wall of the house. It's only been, what, two years since I ordered the thing in Tbilisi and fetched it up here?

I used to work in signage, along with screen printing of stickers, baseball caps, T-shirts and other things, as a late teenager in Canada. It was my first full-time job, which came and found me when I was nearing the end of grade 12 in high school, and it changed my life over four years.

Solid Rock Signs, later Sign It, was never that successful financially, though it was the livelihood of the two men who started it and their families. But it was a rich training ground for good work habits and other important adult life skills, helped me make friendships which have lasted these thirty years, and taught me the art of serigraphy by hand to boot.

George was the main graphic artist; I attended his funeral just a few months ago after an inoperable brain aneurysm dealt him its final blow. Dear fellow. He would send me up to eight layers of colors to print one after another on intricate little baseball cap crests, the layers needing to be perfectly "registered", or lined up one on another in the right place and order. When the company had a falling out with one of its main salesmen and he moved on, he couldn't find a better printer in the province of Alberta, they later told me. I wasn't the fastest, but I worked hard to be as accurate as I could be. I still have an album of my best work, part of my portfolio.

Screen printing is for large-volume orders; you would do a few prints only as art, limited edition signed and numbered pieces to go on the wall. But for one or a few items, like a single sign or two, you need vinyl, cut precisely by a computer-controlled blade, and stuck onto the sign. This is what I went with for my own guest house signs, cut in Tbilisi. The frame and post for them had to be welded by hand to my specifications from steel in Zugdidi. Then I spray-painted these parts for rust protection, slot the signs and their plexiglas covers in, and bolt an end piece on to hold it all in place. Then I'll drive it down. Dig a deep enough hole; plant the sign; make cement and fill it; guy-rope and peg the sign and wait for the cement to dry. That's all there is to it, though I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to get around to assembling the thing.

Better late than never, though, and it will point the 1 km way to us from both sides, another item in our arsenal of advertising options. It's about time!

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1300 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

Tony Hanmer