It all happened at the last minute, and pretty soon I was
on the midnight plane to Georgia. According to the inflight magazine, it was a
small country not much bigger than Wales. In fact, assuming the map was correct,
if you stretched out the north coast of Wales about as far as the Isle of Man,
then spun Wales 90 degrees to the right, it would be about the same shape as
Georgia. It looked like a very bad drawing of a dinosaur. A fat dinosaur. A
dinosaur that could barely lift its belly from the ground. And from what I’d
heard about the hearty food and the Georgians’ love of booze, it might have
been a fitting description.
The dinosaur’s head and neck was on the Black Sea and its
body stretched east, stopping well short of the Caspian Sea. Its front feet were
perched on the boulder of Turkey to the southwest, but to stop it sliding off, its
belly was splayed on Armenia to the south, and its rear on Azerbaijan to the southeast.
Directly north was the crushing weight of Russia.
As you can tell, I knew – and still know very little -
about what travel guides often lazily describe as this “mysterious” and “secret”
former Soviet stronghold. But in fairness, I’d been pretty much unaware of its
existence until August 2008, when Russia snatched South Ossetia and Abkhazia like
a school bully raiding a smaller kid’s lunch box. I was working for a TV news
station in London at the time, and for a week covered every twist and turn of
the war from the safety of my windowless hutch, spoon-fed by wire copy, and
with only pictures from the ground to give me any sort of indication about what
the place looked like.
I don’t remember much about the conflict now. Only
that at the time I was pretty sure it was the beginning of World War Three, so
brazen was Russia’s invasion. I’d been trying to give up smoking and make a
substantial cut to my drinking, but the thought of nuclear missiles lighting up
the sky quickly put an end to that, just as it did when Donald Trump came to power
eight years later.
A line in the sand must surely be drawn, I’d thought. How could America and its Western allies stand by and watch the annexation of a sovereign country after all the kerfuffle over Iraq? Surely a stand would have to be made? A stand that would only be decided by bombs. But then, of course, little Georgia was an insignificant country that had no oil, and as few people knew where it was on the map, nothing was done. Georgia was rarely on their mind.
Instead, the West stood by like a shame-faced commuter pretending not to see a granny being mugged at a bus stop. And as I flew into the country in early January, more than a decade after that five-day war, Russia still held the land it took without a blush – and had absolutely no intention of handing it back.
So apart from Georgia’s famed hospitality and love of the vine, that was about all I knew about the region as I sat on that crowded five-hour flight from Luton Airport to Kutaisi, the country’s third largest city, reading about Georgian food in preparation for the week ahead.
A line in the sand must surely be drawn, I’d thought. How could America and its Western allies stand by and watch the annexation of a sovereign country after all the kerfuffle over Iraq? Surely a stand would have to be made? A stand that would only be decided by bombs. But then, of course, little Georgia was an insignificant country that had no oil, and as few people knew where it was on the map, nothing was done. Georgia was rarely on their mind.
Instead, the West stood by like a shame-faced commuter pretending not to see a granny being mugged at a bus stop. And as I flew into the country in early January, more than a decade after that five-day war, Russia still held the land it took without a blush – and had absolutely no intention of handing it back.
So apart from Georgia’s famed hospitality and love of the vine, that was about all I knew about the region as I sat on that crowded five-hour flight from Luton Airport to Kutaisi, the country’s third largest city, reading about Georgian food in preparation for the week ahead.
I put some traditional Georgian music on my headphones.
It had a strange, unearthly quality to it. Folk musos in ill-fitting Fairport
Convention T-shirts might corner you at parties and tell you its beauty and
ethereal nature comes from its polyphonic roots – interweaving vocal harmonies,
often backed by a three-stringed lute called a panduri.
It sounds a little like Irish music when you first
hear it, and there are DNA studies showing Ireland’s saints and scholars were
descended from farmers and bronze metalworkers who travelled from the Middle
East and Black Sea thousands of years ago. They may have even been the origin
of the western Celtic language. All I can tell you is the music sounds old.
Very old. Like the sound of ancient Gods lamenting lost loves and fallen heroes.
As for the booze, I knew Georgia claimed to be the
home of wine, with archaeologists tracing the first known wine-making to the South
Caucasus 8,000 years ago. The early Georgians apparently discovered grape juice
could be turned into wine by burying it underground for the winter in qvevri – egg-shaped
clay pots that have now become an official symbol of the country, and as I
would discover, are found on everything from fridge magnets to tea towels. The
only thing I couldn’t understand is what took them so long.
I’d also heard the beer was pretty good, and there
were an increasing number of microbreweries making craft beer. The chacha, a
sort of colourless rocket fuel like Greece’s tsipouro, could be dangerously
strong. And the Georgians liked to toast anything, even a successfully-cooked soft-boiled
egg for breakfast. The convention was to down your glass at every toast - with the drinking
vessels getting bigger each time. There could be as many as six toasts, perhaps
more, depending on the stamina and ruthlessness of the toastmaster.
I’d read a bit about Georgian food over the years, but
the only two dishes I could recall as I sat on that plane, next to two Georgians
watching kung fu films on their laptops, was a cheese-stuffed bread called khachapuri,
that they sometimes shaped like a boat and cracked an egg into, and
mushroom-shaped dumplings called khinkali.
I’d never eaten khinkali, so I switched on my tablet and
watched them being made on a YouTube video. They resembled the tortellini of
Italy or, perhaps more accurately, the momos of Tibet and Nepal. You make a
dough from flour, eggs and water, but it is far less eggy than pasta – just two
eggs to a kilo of flour, whereas pasta might take ten eggs for the same amount
of flour. You roll it out thinly in circles a few inches wide, add a spoonful
of spiced minced meat, cheese, mushroom or vegetable filling, crimp the sides,
and then twist it into a clever shape and boil for 15 minutes or so.
They are shaped like a leprechaun’s treasure sack, and topped with a nipple-like pinch of dough to hold them together. You eat them with your hands, holding them by the nipple and biting in while doing your best to avoid gravy running down your chin. The nipple you put back on your plate. It is considered cheap to eat them, the video said - they help the waiter count how many you’ve eaten while totting up the bill.
They are shaped like a leprechaun’s treasure sack, and topped with a nipple-like pinch of dough to hold them together. You eat them with your hands, holding them by the nipple and biting in while doing your best to avoid gravy running down your chin. The nipple you put back on your plate. It is considered cheap to eat them, the video said - they help the waiter count how many you’ve eaten while totting up the bill.
I also read how Georgians like to flavour their food
with cumin, blue cardamom, dried marigold leaves and pomegranates – but most of
all with walnuts. If there is anything that really sums up Georgian food, it is
the heavy use of walnuts, food writers seem to agree. They also like to eat
plenty of fresh herbs with their food – and there is often a saucer or two of fresh
sprigs on the table.
The only country I’d been to that ate herbs like that was
Vietnam, where a bowl of steaming noodle soup (pho) or delicious beef stew (bo kho) would always come with a basket of saw-edged coriander, paddy herbs and thinly
sliced banana flowers.
Georgia, like every other country, has its regional
dishes, with meatier dishes in the east and more vegetable-based dishes in the
west. They also use tandoor clay ovens to bake bread and barbecue meat, and as
a rule, do not eat a lot of fish. But it is not easy to summarise a country’s
food; there are always exceptions. I read something by an American journalist
who’d lived in the country for a number of years. He said there are two rules
in Georgia – you don’t criticise their religion (nearly 90% of the population are
Eastern Orthodox Christian) and you don’t criticise their food. I made a mental
note not to do either.
I’d been told Georgia was a cheap, fast-growing place.
I knew expats who were planning to move there from Thailand and Cambodia,
saying southeast Asia had become too expensive. The country seemed to be crying
out for foreign investment. There was a full-page advert in the inflight
magazine for “citizens of any country” to buy flats in Georgia. The developers
promised interest-free mortgages without proof of income, and a residence
permit with every purchase. For 29,555 euros you could buy an apartment in
Batumi, a casino-filled resort on the Black Sea. A few hundred euros more
bought you a flat in a snowy resort on the Goderdzi Pass in Adjara.
It would, of course, be impossible to learn any useful
idiot level of Georgian in just a week, but I promised myself I would try. If
only it was that easy. It proved to be a very difficult language to remember,
let alone pronounce. And by the end all I had gleaned – mastered would be far
too generous a term – was gamarjoba (hello), diakh (yes), ara (no), getakva
(please), me mkvia (my name is), mobrzandit (welcome) and bodishi (I am sorry).
The latter would come in useful many times.
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