Worm or What?

Would you believe that the title of my article for this week is the name of a town in Georgia? No? Try this: ask a Georgian what “Chia tu ra” means, the initial “Ch” being the same Georgian consonant as the first one in “Adjara”. My thanks to the TLG volunteer stationed in Chiatura who first pointed this out to me! It joins my healthy list of amusing or amazing Georgian place names.

My wife and I recently revisited Chiatura for the first time together since we stopped there on our honeymoon nearly 8 years ago. She has relatives there, and the mother of one of them, her aunt, recently died. So, leave the barn denizens with a thankfully very obliging neighbor, and off we drove into the sunrise for a five-hour trip.

Chiatura is (in)famous for manganese mining, and for the blame this gets for any kind of ill health in the vicinity. We actually stayed, this time as before, in the village of JvariEtseri (one of the many “something-Etseris” in Georgia, as opposed to ours in Upper Svaneti, the only Etseri in the country spelt with the EASY “ts” as opposed to the harder, aspirated one. Another potentially useless fact for you).

The funeral feast was the only part of our two days spent in the big town itself, and on the way, I happened to see something which no one had bothered to point out to me before, one of the ecclesiastical wonders of Georgia. Enough of a wonder, indeed, that my photo of it on Facebook prompted one of my friends to remark on the usefulness of Photoshop. Another FB friend quickly corrected him with a Wikipedia link showing that the improbable stone finger pointing up at the sky with a chapel even more improbably built right on its top is… all too real. This is the Katskhi Pillar church. See and believe. The roots of the current rebuilt church are a 9th-10th century hermitage; it was first mentioned in print in the 18th century; and it was first actually documented as being climbed only in 1944.

The morning after the night before was easy for me, as I’m not a hard drinker in any case and don’t have even a drop when I’m driving, as I was. The family put us up next door, and I was asked to be tamada (toastmaster) at breakfast, which featured only delicious leftovers from the previous evening. I seem to have pulled it off, judging by the general reaction; I have been well trained and am also much experienced in the Art of the Georgian Feast, although there is always room for further education in this hugely complex subject.

Then our host took us for a walk to a small nearby man-made lake, spring-fed, the reflections in which giving me examples of one of my favorite subjects to photograph. Another one for me is “nature reclaiming manufacture”, in other words the chaotically ordered processes of decay that rust, cracked paint and the like display to my fractally-trained corneas. I am always on the lookout for such things, and Georgian villages rarely disappoint. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

We returned to the most unwelcome sight of yet more snow, the nth time since “spring” officially began that our green hills have been whitened to the depth of eight inches or so before re-greening, causing no end of confusion for the keen to graze bovines. In our absence, prolonged by a day due to my brand new rule of “any drive of more than four hours for an overnight shall become two overnights”, another unexpected event. A neighbor of nearly 80 years’ age had inspected our pregnant cow just before we left and assured us that a calf would absolutely not be forthcoming for the next few days. Guess what. Mother and son are doing fine, thanks.

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 1350 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