Earlier in this series: The Southern Caucasus, Part One: From the Eventual Book & The Southern Caucasus Part Two: Yerevan to Tbilisi & The Southern Caucasus Part Three: Tbilisi and the Georgia Military Highway
The sides at either end of Kazbegi square comprised nothing much, with a road wandering off in each direction, one the direction from which we’d come, from Tbilisi, the other to Vladikavkaz in Russian Ingushetia. On the fourth side of the square, opposite the hotel, a half dozen desultory kiosks all sold the same things, the petty little consumer goods necessary for life. All had tissues and matches and drinks, but not cold – there wasn’t refrigeration anywhere in the whole lot.
The wares on offer jammed all the window space, inside and out, so that the salespeople sat back invisible behind a little open window in the middle. You wouldn’t call the collective attitude among these six tiny kiosk capitalists sullen. Crestfallen might be the better word.
Kazbegi itself rose on a low hill behind the kiosks. A morning walk among the houses revealed bright flowers on windowsills and suspicious, smoking men in caps seated on low benches with a wary eye and a nod of the head to a stranger. No vehicle traffic. Massive amounts of trash just cast onto the ground in the street, and pigs snuffling through it.
A dump truck sized Kamaz truck lumbered by, an unlikely family vehicle which disgorged a scarf-clad old woman and a basket down at the bottom of the hill.
At any particular time, six or eight or ten old Russian-made cars congregated at the center of the makeshift square, their drivers in little knots smoking and waiting for the odd passenger to here or there. Zaza hired a red Lada Niva, strong with a high undercarriage. Just the right vehicle to haul us up to the Holy Trinity church, way up at 2200 meters. We’d drive up and walk down.
The very existence of the road bed was remarkable in itself. Often it was no bigger than the red Lada, and little streams ran right down its middle.
The view down on Kazbegi town made it look pleasant, and cleaner than it was. You couldn’t see the trash in the river Terek. They reckoned that it was all being swept away to Russia, so what did it matter?
Way at the back of town rose a huge block building. They always used to call those places “sanatoriums” in Soviet days. Zaza said that back in the day, 300 tourists came here from all over the Soviet Union every day.
That’s all gone now. By my count we represented a tourism trickle of exactly five people staying in the Stepansminda hotel’s forty-odd rooms, Mirja and me, Zaza and an American and his driver, who didn’t stay here.
Zaza said he’d been reading what the Russians say about Georgians in internet chat rooms, and that it was “Not fantastic, more than fantastic. They are saying we will eat them if they come.”
The mountains behind Kazbegi town rose jagged and spectacular, holding their winter snow into June. Mt. Blanc, the highest place in the Alps, is 4807 meters. In the direction opposite these smaller peaks stood Kazbeg itself, taller than all the Alps at 5033 meters, making its own weather, its perinnally snow-clad summit spinning off clouds, from here its glacier visible, massive, powerful.
The Church up here is called the Gergeti Holy Trinity Church because when it was built, it was surrounded by a village, since disappeared, called Gergeti, whose inhabitants held the mandatory role of serfs to and caretakers of the church and its surrounds.
On the church’s second floor there is “a space imperceptible for outside people’s look which indicated that the church had guard functions (places for rifle muzzles).” Sacred icons of the larger Georgian church were brought here for safe keeping in trying times, including the cross of St. Nino.
The founding legend has it that three contending kings argued about in whose jurisdiction the church should be. A village elder way back in Mtskeda proposed to slaughter a dry cow (not a valuable milk-giving one) and cast one of its bones out to the edge of the village. A raven would take the bone, and where it stopped, build the church. They followed the raven to Ananuri, where they erected a cross, then to Bidari mountain, where another cross was built, and then here to Gergeti.
Oxen delivered the building stones from villages fifteen kilometers away, and water for the masons came by sheep. Today that spring is called “Kalata,” or mason.
There was a service in progress as we arrived, but no evidence of a congregation. Someone called His Grace Stephantsminda and Khevi Bishop Peter “rather often” performed liturgies at the Holy Trinity Church, and even farther up at the highest place among all Orthodox churches, 4200 meters, at an icy little outpost they call Glacier Holy Trinity Church.
We didn’t disturb the service but we did disturb a young man with bright red tennis shoes, who was offended by the beers Zaza hauled up here for us, with which we stood in the courtyard. So we retreated a little way down and outside the church grounds and enjoyed warm sunshine and a stiff wind, gazing out on the scenery with beer and potato snacks.
The walk back down to Kazbegi town wound through low canopied birch forest. Birch trees are my favorite. They’re exotic in the southern U.S. Tall and majestic or young and strong, in stands or solo, birches always look clean and prim, not straggly and hang-down like some of their tropical cousins.
They hold their leaves, which are too small for the trunk, tightly to their sides. They’re so little, the collective sound of birch leaves rattling in wind isn’t a loping, lazy wave, but more of a busy flutter that collectively comes ‘round to the sound you make when you slide into a bed of freshly washed linens.
After an hour or more, the upper reaches of settlements, poor stone houses close together, not many people on the streets at midday, and the thick, stifling smell of pigs. Once again a little stream sometimes appeared in the middle of the road.
A shipping container stood along the road, locked, and curtains half pulled shut. “Kebabi,” read a sign on the front.
A woman in boots walked slowly up the hill. A man, maybe crazy, laughed and danced and pulled water from a stream into a big bucket. Two boys, one with a long switch, walked toward a herd of cows in the fields. The sound of rushing water from the River Terek walked with you everywhere.
*****
The Hotel Stepansminda is owned by the brewers of Kazbegi beer, one of the two top Georgian brands (along with Argo, as in Jason and the Argonauts). Its common rooms are forever dark and empty, its front door locked at night with the key left in the lock. There is no one behind the reception desk. There are no lifts, and four floors with ten rooms each.
Room 21 had two low double beds, a Fujeta brand TV showing channels Rustav 1 & 2. On Rustav 1: A crime show, a sitcom, a show with singing and pianos, and a soap opera starring, best I could tell, King Hussein of Jordan (or his twin). Rustavi 2 wasn’t on the air most of the time. The hot water worked, a fine asset in raw mountain air.
The dining room, downstairs, opened onto a terrace with aluminum tables and chairs over the Terek River. Occasional showers raked the terrace. It was almost always cold. But sun would return and dry everything quickly, and with a sweatshirt it was bracing to sit outside and enjoy the stiff wind down the river valley.
You could see far back up the flood plain in the direction we’d come, back toward settlements that, with the bad road, we’d passed an hour before reaching Kazbegi.
Menus were fixed. Breakfast of hot bread, fish and boiled eggs, coffee and tea with lemons started at nine. Before nine, one morning there was a coffee pot with mugs that read “Maldun Seramik,” and another morning there was nothing.
No lunch. Breakfast and dinner were served on little wooden tables with red tablecloths and hard backed wooden chairs.
Grainy black and white photos from the early twentieth century hung all along the walls. One, called “Karnaval at Kazbegi,” from 1926, showed several dozen people frozen transfixed by the camera, the way they stood back in those days, all wearing their various ethnic headgear, all doubtless clean as a whistle under all that garb, a man holding a cross dressed all in white, men with rifles and swords, kids in tunics, military men, two women in elaborate headdresses and one unfortunate dullard frozen in rigid salute, facing the wrong way.
Besides us, the Stepansminda apparently had no overnight guests except Chris Adam, a man from Raleigh, North Carolina. Chris was dark and slight, well conditioned, and wore the look of a man who had been here too long. He had a personal driver and a personal translator at work. He was here to build the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-engineered border post with Russia, a few miles up the road along the river.
We drove up to see him. Inside his office, a metal shed, we saw fantastic blueprints, which foresaw a fanciful, modern outpost of civilization right here on this spot, unlike anything vaguely in actual evidence here. Chris’s driver sat inside, a hairy Georgian who was always on his cell phone. He sat over a laptop and I asked, astonished, if they had the internet out here and he smiled, no, it was movies.
One month later the border, the only proper border between Russia and Georgia, was closed. After a week of back and forth provocations in Russian-occupied South Ossetia, the Russians closed it with two hours notice on the pretext that their side needed “repair work.”
In confirming that, Chris gamely e-mailed that “now I do not need to worry about vehicle and pedestrian traffic.” Not that that was the whole point of the project, or anything.
Next: On to Baku, Azerbaijan
Photos: Top to bottom: 1.The Gergeti Holy Trinity Church and Mount Kasbeg from Kazbegi town 2. The Family Truck 3. Kazbegi from Above 4. The Gergeti Glacier on Mt. Kazbeg 5. Door at Gergeti Holy Trinity Church 6. The Hike Down from the Church to Kazbegi Town 7. Kebab Vendor 8. Bridge over the Terek River 9. The Border Post between Georgia and Russian Ingushetia. Click each photo to see a bigger version, and see many more photos of the South Caucasus in the Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.
This is the latest in a series of excerpts from the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey. Previous entries: Madagascar, Greenland, Patagonia, Sri Lanka, Tasmania, Paraguay, Climbing Mt. Kinabalu, Tibet Cambodia and Malawi.
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