I arrived in Tbilisi in the last week of October with no plan beyond a hotel booking and an intention to walk. The driver from the airport had his window down. October averages a high of around twenty degreesCelsius here, which after a wet European autumn felt like an administrative error in my favor. By mid-November the temperature had slid to thirteen and I had bought a jumper from a man who assured me it was Italian. It was not Italian.
What I remember first is the woodwork. The old town under the fortress ridge is a collection of houses that seem to be holding one another up out of politeness, nearly all of them with wooden balconies bolted to the front — carved, fretworked, painted in colours softening since the nineteenth century, sagging at angles no surveyor would sign. Laundry hangs off them. Cats sleep on them. I photographed balconies for an afternoon and kept none of it. The appeal is not visual. It is that people still live behind them.
Forty Degrees, Underground
Abanotubani, the bath quarter, does not look like a quarter. It looks like a lawn with a rash. The bathhouses were built directly over the sulphur springs that feed them, so the bathing rooms sit below ground and all you see from the street is a run of low brick domes pushing out of the paving, each with a skylight at the crown. You can walk across the roof of a working bathhouse without registering it. Off to one side stands Chreli Abano, whose blue-tiled Persian facade looks as if it wandered in from another city and stayed.
The story goes that the fifth-century king Vakhtang Gorgasali was hunting here when his falcon went down after a pheasant and both birds ended up in a hot spring — dead, and in the better tellings, cooked. He built a city on the spot. Tbili means warm; the capital is named after its water.
That water runs between forty and fifty degrees and smells exactly as everyone warns. Ten minutes in, you stop noticing. I took a private room and, out of a misplaced sense that I should do the thing properly, booked the scrub. This is where I stopped being a relaxed person on holiday. A man in shorts appeared, indicated a marble slab, and went at me with a coarse mitt like someone descaling a kettle he has been asked about twice. I have never felt so handled by a stranger, nor so unsure of the etiquette. He was untroubled by all of it, emptied a bucket over my head and left. I was pink for a day and my skin was better than it had been in years.
The Table Is a Structure
Supra means tablecloth, which undersells things badly. I ended up at one through a couple I met queueing for the cable car at Rike Park, the short lift over the river to Narikala, a fortress that has held that ridge since the fourth century and looks every bit of it. They asked what I was doing on Thursday. I said nothing.
The food arrives stacked, plates on plates, and nothing is cleared, so the evening builds a geology of itself. Presiding over it is the tamada, not a host but a toastmaster, chosen for eloquence, judgment and a capacity for wine that would finish most people early. He runs the table on a sequence — peace, Georgia, the hosts, the guests, the dead, parents, children, women, love — and each toast is a speech of a minute or five. Nobody drinks until it lands.
Then he did the thing I had been dreading without knowing it had a name: he passed the toast to me. This is an alaverdi, it is an honour, and it turns every face at the table towards you at once. I said something about being grateful for the food — the weakest sentence spoken there all night, and the woman beside me patted my arm in a way that confirmed it. A family supra can run four hours or ten. Ours went past midnight, which I was told afterwards was a quiet one.
The wine came out of qvevri: egg-shaped clay vessels sealed with beeswax and buried to the neck in the earth floor of a cellar, where the soil holds them at fourteen to sixteen degrees. White grapes ferment on their skins, in Kakheti sometimes for six months, which is why the white wine in the glass is amber and tastes like it has opinions — tannic, dried apricot, bitter at the close. Residue in clay vessels from Kvemo Kartli has been dated to 6000 BCE, and UNESCO listed qvevri winemaking as intangible heritage in 2013. None of which comes up at the table; what comes up is that your glass is full again.
Tbilisi is cheap by European standards, which made me uncomfortable rather than delighted: the gap that flatters my budget is somebody else’s wage. I have no tidy way to hold it.
On a grey morning I took a taxi north to the Chronicle of Georgia, above the Tbilisi Sea: sixteen black pillars, thirty to thirty-five metres of them, carved with kings and queens along the top and scenes from the life of Christ below. Zurab Tsereteli began it in 1985 and never finished it, which is somehow the best thing about it. No ticket office, no queue, nobody there at all. I stood there in a shirt in the wind, with a stray dog for company, looking at fresh snow away north on the Greater Caucasus.
That is the fact that rearranges the city in your head. Winter arrives on the high ground while Tbilisi is still eating outside. The Georgian Military Road runs north out of town and reaches Ananuri in about an hour — seventy kilometres, a sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century fortress with two churches above the turquoise Zhinvali reservoir. Keep going and the road climbs to Gudauri, a hundred and twenty kilometers out on a plateau at 2,200 meters, and it helps to know that the two hours between Tbilisi and the snow is a drive plenty of people do and come back from in a day. In late October the resort has not opened and the mountain is empty: switchbacks, cloud in the valleys, paragliders off the ridge because there is nothing else to do up there yet.
If You Only Have Three Days
Give the first day to walking, without a route. The old town is small and the balconies are the point. Take the cable car up in the late afternoon, when the light goes copper on the ridge, and walk back down.
Bathe on the second morning, when the rooms are empty, and book the scrub even though you will not enjoy all of it. Then eat at a long table and stay later than you meant to. If you are invited to a supra, cancel everything else.
Keep the third day for the road north. Look that way before you leave in any case: the mountains are close enough that the city forgets to make a fuss about them, and I only understood how close on the afternoon I stopped being in it.
One Last Thing
Tbilisi is the kind of city that does not reveal itself all at once. You arrive for the old streets, the baths, the wine, perhaps the mountains, and leave remembering smaller things: a balcony still holding a family above the street, the smell of sulphur on your clothes, a toast you were not prepared to give, bread passed across a crowded table.
What stayed with me was the sense of everything being close together. The old city and the modern one, the warm springs and the cold mountains, the long dinners and the sudden road north. You can spend a morning underground in forty-degree water and, before the day is over, be looking towards snow.
I came to Tbilisi intending mostly to walk. In the end, the city gave me many more reasons to stop.