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lupestripeFriday was another travelling day albeit one interspersed with sights along the way. Again, we got lucky, aided by the tremendous hospitality of the Georgian people and specifically Tamari who made our last morning with us particularly memorable. I awoke about ten minutes earlier than planned and upon leaving the room, it was clear there was nobody else around in the guesthouse. I went back to the room for a short while and waited for Wolfie to awake before I wandered around the house and courtyard looking for signs of life. Alas nothing was stirring and upon retiring to the room again, I heard the front door open. I greeted Tamari and her husband and said hello to her niece, who was in tow and probably about nine years old. They had just been to the hospital to see the birth of their second grandchild, so they were understandably delighted. They told us everything over a breakfast of eggy bread, butter and jam made from the persimmon fruit, which was naturally very sweet and tasted like honey. We paid for all the hospitality and wrote in their visitors book before packing our bags and thinking of a strategy of how to get to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
Tamari kindly volunteered her husband to drive us to the railway station so the five of us soon headed down there to see what time the next train was. We hoped to go to the town of Mtskheta on the way, the old Georgian capital and seat of spirituality of the country, which was on the way to Tbilisi. Alas there was no train going there and the immediate train, which was due to depart any minute, was also expensive, something that Tamari was not having anything of. Consequently, she again volunteered her husband to drive us the 45 minutes to Mtskheta at a price cheaper than the train, which we accepted gladly. We had to drop her niece and herself off at the guesthouse en route but after a quick petrol stop - LPG is incredibly popular here as it's so cheap - we were soon headed east towards Tbilisi. The road was a typical motorway, long and dull, but we did get to see the disputed region of South Ossetia which comes within 400m of the main road. The drive was quite silent, again due to my lack of Russian skills, but soon enough we arrived in Mtskheta, where our driver seemed quite upset to leave us. He dropped us off in the car park immediately in front of the quaint Samtavro Church, which was built in the 1130s. There is a smaller church in the grounds dating from the fourth century, Tsminda Nino, but we only stuck our heads inside as it was so small and a number of elderly people were praying quite devotedly. These two churches are in a monastery complex and the larger church has a number of striking frescos and robes which were idolized by the large number of worshippers in the building. Indeed the Georgians are a devoutly religious people and at times I felt we were intruding on their worship as we walked around looking at the delightful churches. At the back of the church there is a small museum containing triptychs and icons from the region, but without English labels this was just a miscellany of objects, although the museum curator, along with an elderly crone, were very interested in who we were and why we were in Georgia.
Our next stop was a short walk away, the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, which pretty much dominates the town. Dating from the early eleventh century, this is quite an enormous structure and certainly architecturally interesting both outside and in. Initially we walked around the cathedral admiring the wonderfully intricate stone carvings in the wall, including the semi-eroded Georgian cross and peacock towards the apex of the roof of the basilica. As we were walking, we spied the Jvari Church high on its hillside promontory overlooking the Cathedral and wondered how we would get there, spending a good hour or so debating amongst ourselves as to the best way to see the holiest site in the whole of Georgia, where King Mirian erected a huge wooden cross after his conversion by St Nino in the fourth century. Between these periods of contemplation we actually went inside the Cathedral, and inside two minutes we were accosted by a shrew-like elderly woman dressed in black offering a guided tour. I immediately took a liking to her and we assented, giving us whistle-stop yet fascinating glimpse at the whole Cathedral. She kept repeating the same thing twice, assumedly because people had struggled with her accent and she was sick of being asked to repeat herself, and I found this particularly amusing as she dragged us around. The key sight in the cathedral was that of Christ's robe, which was worn during the crucifixion and is believed to lie underneath the central nave, marked by faded seventeenth century frescos of the conversion of Kartli. Indeed many of the frescos in the cathedral are faded, particularly as many of them had to be whitewashed in the Soviet days and indeed only one fragment of an eleventh century fresco remains, which was pointed out to us. Svetitskhoveli literally means life giving column and comes about from a fable about a Mtskheta Jew coming back from Jerusalem with the robe after Jesus's crucifixion. His sister Sidona tried to take it from him and died in a fit of passion, with the robe being buried with her. The initial site was forgotten but when King Miriam built the first church in Mtskheta, the wooden column designed to stand at its centre could not be raised from the ground. After an all-night vigil from St Nino, the column moved on its own accord to the burial site, which is where the Cathedral is today. In addition to this, a number of Georgian monarchs are buried here, including the last king of Georgia who died in 1800 and King Erekle II. The lady's tour was quite informative, taking in every angle of the Cathedral and after we had paid her 20 lari, she scuttled off to try and find more people to guide (not that she wasn't doing this during our tour as she approached a number of people asking whether they wanted English language tours as we went around).
After the tour, we decided to enjoy the mid-afternoon sun by walking around the centre of Mtskheta. Being only twenty minutes from Tbilisi, it was somewhat on the tourist route so there were a number of stalls selling food, drink and souvenirs at inflated prices. We did pick up some churchkhela, a string of walnuts coated in a caramel made of grape juice, which is a popular snack here. Apparently it was given to soldiers at times of war due to the high but slow burning calorific content and indeed it did become a little too saccharine and plasticky as we devoured the tube. Indeed these were the dildo/butt plug type things I mentioned in my Kutaisi report and I am glad we tried them. One feature of walking around Mtskheta was the constant pressure from taxi drivers wanting to take us up to the Jvari Church (they kept saying Monastery but it was pretty clear what they meant). This made me fear that many of them were on the make, so after our short amble around this minimalist town, we decided to go to the tourist information booth to enquire about the situation there. A sign in their window advertised taxis booked from there at 12 noon, 3pm and 5pm, which is why we embarked on our amble around the town in the first place but after about twenty minutes we had seen all there was to see and with the time being 2:10pm, we thought we would chance it. In the end, they sorted a taxi for us, a "very honest" English speaking driver who may have been Polish as he had a Byszczocz pendant hanging from his wing mirror. We chatted quite extensively on the 11km circuitous route, which deposited us in front of a charming little church which had a number of particularly German tour buses parked outside it. Upon disembarking, we immediately made a friend in the form of a golden dog, who walked with us to the church. The church itself is quite plain, with an interior of plain stone dominated by a central alter with a huge wooden crucifix, but the architectural design of a cross-shaped plain with four equal axes with a low dome upon a squat octagonal drum made for a pretty building. This was nowhere near as pretty as the views from atop this cliff face though, with the confluence of two rivers highlighting a different coloration of water with the background of Mtskheta town with its awesome Cathedral in the background. The only scar was the main motorway running right through the vista, along with the chemical plant in the far east, but aside from this the views were spectacular. We saw some scaffolding erected, highlighting the attention that Georgia is making to preserving its cultural heritage while one of the church's outbuildings resembled a smily face which was pretty neat. The church was constructed between 585 and 604 on the site of the aforementioned cross, making it one of the oldest surviving buildings in Georgia.
Our taxi driver patiently waited for us, allowing us to take all the time we needed. Fortunately this wasn't too long, perhaps twenty minute or so, and he also agreed to drive us back to the bus station, which turned out just to be a bus stop in the centre of town, very near where Tamari's husband had dropped us off. Still, with all the major sites done, we were happy to pay the one lari to take the minibus the twenty minutes to Tbilisi, with our taxi driver even highlighting that we needed to take a white Mercedes bus. An orange one passed but the Georgian script in the front window did not advertise a Tbilisi destination, and we only needed to wait a further five minutes until the appropriate minibus arrived. There was a number of us boarding, particularly backpackers, and during the journey we had the delight of enduring a large conversation from a number of overly loud Spanish travellers. We had to sit with our luggage on our knees but fortunately the journey wasn't overly long as we were dropped off at the far north of the city next to the Didube Metro station, right in the middle of a fruit and veg market. The atmosphere was electric and it was a great way to be baptised into a new city as we picked our way through the traffic, stalls and street merchants towards the Metro. There we had to navigate their card system, very much like an Oyster card, before boarding our train towards the city centre and our hotel, from where I'll pick up the story later.
Tamari kindly volunteered her husband to drive us to the railway station so the five of us soon headed down there to see what time the next train was. We hoped to go to the town of Mtskheta on the way, the old Georgian capital and seat of spirituality of the country, which was on the way to Tbilisi. Alas there was no train going there and the immediate train, which was due to depart any minute, was also expensive, something that Tamari was not having anything of. Consequently, she again volunteered her husband to drive us the 45 minutes to Mtskheta at a price cheaper than the train, which we accepted gladly. We had to drop her niece and herself off at the guesthouse en route but after a quick petrol stop - LPG is incredibly popular here as it's so cheap - we were soon headed east towards Tbilisi. The road was a typical motorway, long and dull, but we did get to see the disputed region of South Ossetia which comes within 400m of the main road. The drive was quite silent, again due to my lack of Russian skills, but soon enough we arrived in Mtskheta, where our driver seemed quite upset to leave us. He dropped us off in the car park immediately in front of the quaint Samtavro Church, which was built in the 1130s. There is a smaller church in the grounds dating from the fourth century, Tsminda Nino, but we only stuck our heads inside as it was so small and a number of elderly people were praying quite devotedly. These two churches are in a monastery complex and the larger church has a number of striking frescos and robes which were idolized by the large number of worshippers in the building. Indeed the Georgians are a devoutly religious people and at times I felt we were intruding on their worship as we walked around looking at the delightful churches. At the back of the church there is a small museum containing triptychs and icons from the region, but without English labels this was just a miscellany of objects, although the museum curator, along with an elderly crone, were very interested in who we were and why we were in Georgia.
Our next stop was a short walk away, the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, which pretty much dominates the town. Dating from the early eleventh century, this is quite an enormous structure and certainly architecturally interesting both outside and in. Initially we walked around the cathedral admiring the wonderfully intricate stone carvings in the wall, including the semi-eroded Georgian cross and peacock towards the apex of the roof of the basilica. As we were walking, we spied the Jvari Church high on its hillside promontory overlooking the Cathedral and wondered how we would get there, spending a good hour or so debating amongst ourselves as to the best way to see the holiest site in the whole of Georgia, where King Mirian erected a huge wooden cross after his conversion by St Nino in the fourth century. Between these periods of contemplation we actually went inside the Cathedral, and inside two minutes we were accosted by a shrew-like elderly woman dressed in black offering a guided tour. I immediately took a liking to her and we assented, giving us whistle-stop yet fascinating glimpse at the whole Cathedral. She kept repeating the same thing twice, assumedly because people had struggled with her accent and she was sick of being asked to repeat herself, and I found this particularly amusing as she dragged us around. The key sight in the cathedral was that of Christ's robe, which was worn during the crucifixion and is believed to lie underneath the central nave, marked by faded seventeenth century frescos of the conversion of Kartli. Indeed many of the frescos in the cathedral are faded, particularly as many of them had to be whitewashed in the Soviet days and indeed only one fragment of an eleventh century fresco remains, which was pointed out to us. Svetitskhoveli literally means life giving column and comes about from a fable about a Mtskheta Jew coming back from Jerusalem with the robe after Jesus's crucifixion. His sister Sidona tried to take it from him and died in a fit of passion, with the robe being buried with her. The initial site was forgotten but when King Miriam built the first church in Mtskheta, the wooden column designed to stand at its centre could not be raised from the ground. After an all-night vigil from St Nino, the column moved on its own accord to the burial site, which is where the Cathedral is today. In addition to this, a number of Georgian monarchs are buried here, including the last king of Georgia who died in 1800 and King Erekle II. The lady's tour was quite informative, taking in every angle of the Cathedral and after we had paid her 20 lari, she scuttled off to try and find more people to guide (not that she wasn't doing this during our tour as she approached a number of people asking whether they wanted English language tours as we went around).
After the tour, we decided to enjoy the mid-afternoon sun by walking around the centre of Mtskheta. Being only twenty minutes from Tbilisi, it was somewhat on the tourist route so there were a number of stalls selling food, drink and souvenirs at inflated prices. We did pick up some churchkhela, a string of walnuts coated in a caramel made of grape juice, which is a popular snack here. Apparently it was given to soldiers at times of war due to the high but slow burning calorific content and indeed it did become a little too saccharine and plasticky as we devoured the tube. Indeed these were the dildo/butt plug type things I mentioned in my Kutaisi report and I am glad we tried them. One feature of walking around Mtskheta was the constant pressure from taxi drivers wanting to take us up to the Jvari Church (they kept saying Monastery but it was pretty clear what they meant). This made me fear that many of them were on the make, so after our short amble around this minimalist town, we decided to go to the tourist information booth to enquire about the situation there. A sign in their window advertised taxis booked from there at 12 noon, 3pm and 5pm, which is why we embarked on our amble around the town in the first place but after about twenty minutes we had seen all there was to see and with the time being 2:10pm, we thought we would chance it. In the end, they sorted a taxi for us, a "very honest" English speaking driver who may have been Polish as he had a Byszczocz pendant hanging from his wing mirror. We chatted quite extensively on the 11km circuitous route, which deposited us in front of a charming little church which had a number of particularly German tour buses parked outside it. Upon disembarking, we immediately made a friend in the form of a golden dog, who walked with us to the church. The church itself is quite plain, with an interior of plain stone dominated by a central alter with a huge wooden crucifix, but the architectural design of a cross-shaped plain with four equal axes with a low dome upon a squat octagonal drum made for a pretty building. This was nowhere near as pretty as the views from atop this cliff face though, with the confluence of two rivers highlighting a different coloration of water with the background of Mtskheta town with its awesome Cathedral in the background. The only scar was the main motorway running right through the vista, along with the chemical plant in the far east, but aside from this the views were spectacular. We saw some scaffolding erected, highlighting the attention that Georgia is making to preserving its cultural heritage while one of the church's outbuildings resembled a smily face which was pretty neat. The church was constructed between 585 and 604 on the site of the aforementioned cross, making it one of the oldest surviving buildings in Georgia.
Our taxi driver patiently waited for us, allowing us to take all the time we needed. Fortunately this wasn't too long, perhaps twenty minute or so, and he also agreed to drive us back to the bus station, which turned out just to be a bus stop in the centre of town, very near where Tamari's husband had dropped us off. Still, with all the major sites done, we were happy to pay the one lari to take the minibus the twenty minutes to Tbilisi, with our taxi driver even highlighting that we needed to take a white Mercedes bus. An orange one passed but the Georgian script in the front window did not advertise a Tbilisi destination, and we only needed to wait a further five minutes until the appropriate minibus arrived. There was a number of us boarding, particularly backpackers, and during the journey we had the delight of enduring a large conversation from a number of overly loud Spanish travellers. We had to sit with our luggage on our knees but fortunately the journey wasn't overly long as we were dropped off at the far north of the city next to the Didube Metro station, right in the middle of a fruit and veg market. The atmosphere was electric and it was a great way to be baptised into a new city as we picked our way through the traffic, stalls and street merchants towards the Metro. There we had to navigate their card system, very much like an Oyster card, before boarding our train towards the city centre and our hotel, from where I'll pick up the story later.
