ARTICLE: In Tbilisi, Georgia, Bold New Buildings Rise From the Ruins of Dead Empires. By Joshua Levine (tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com)

(tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com) In Tbilisi, Georgia, a shiny new architectural skyline has become a political issue as much as an aesthetic one — is it slapdash commercialism ruining the culture’s authentic history or a step toward a more progressive society?
 
SLIDE SHOW FUTURE SHOCK

Simon Roberts: A monk looks on at Tbilisi’s half-built theater and exhibition hall, designed by the Italian architects Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas. See the slide show

Rezo Gabriadze’s puppet theater stands in the heart of Tbilisi’s Old Town, which is very old indeed. Around the corner are the sulfur baths, where, according to legend, Georgian King Vakhtang I decided to build the city in the fifth century. Up the street is the great Sioni Cathedral from the seventh century.

Gabriadze himself is a Georgian national treasure. I saw his marionette version of the Battle of Stalingrad when I first came to Tbilisi 10 years ago and fell in love with the city. I was ushered into a dank, run-down basement, where I watched, enthralled, as Gabriadze’s tiny puppet tanks advanced to the rousing strains of Shostakovich. It was unforgettable.

The theater was a dump, but then, so was the rest of the city. The old buildings were missing many of the elegant narrow bricks first introduced there by the Byzantines. The covered balconies with their delicate latticework, a gift of the Ottomans, were listing and rotting. There was litter everywhere. An apartment’s garbage disposal was often its front window.

None of this made the city any less romantic or delightful. Houses still clung to the cliffs above the Kura river as they did centuries ago, looking as though they might suddenly lose their grip. A faint smell of sulfur hung over the shallow domes of the old baths, where Pushkin once ogled Georgian women bathing. From high up on the cliff, the stones of the ruined Narikala fortress gazed over the town from the fourth century, and the eighth, and the 13th, and the 17th.

History has played rough with Tbilisi for a very long time. Persians, Byzantines, Ottomans, Russians and Soviets have all had their way with her. Each has left a little of its best self there. The result is a city that Boris Pasternak called a chimera — a fanciful beast with a Western head and an Eastern body. Tbilisi has gotten even more fanciful recently. Italian architects have been busy with glass and steel, adding the sleek vernacular of modern capitalism to the city’s Babel of building styles.

The new buildings are striking, and some are beautiful. Do they belong here among the ruins of dead empires? It turns out that question is as much political as aesthetic. Georgia’s new buildings have become pawns in a power struggle over its place in the world. Does it belong in the cosmopolitan sphere of the European architects who built them? Or should it remain somewhere lost in time, “a city as if not of this world,” as Pasternak puts it?

It is impossible not to be struck by how much the city has changed since I had last seen it, maybe four years ago. Gabriadze has a renovated theater, which opened in 2010. He designed it with the same cockeyed whimsy he puts into the puppets he makes. A crooked clock tower, encrusted with Gabriadze’s handmade tiles, sprouts a pomegranate tree from its roof. A gold-winged angel strikes the hours.

The changes go well beyond the theater. The whole surrounding neighborhood, what the history books used to call Old Tiflis, looks freshly minted. The houses wear bright new paint, and their sagging balconies have somehow pulled themselves up straight. The streets are clean, or at least much cleaner, and there are scores of new cafes and restaurants.

This was the first time I’d had a chance to see the Peace Bridge over the Kura river — it opened in 2010. The Italian architect Michele De Lucchi gave the bridge a wavy glass roof lit by more than 1,200 LEDs for maximum twinkle.
Just down from Freedom Square at the city’s heart stands a boxy block of glass shaded by huge droopy white petals on tubular stems. It’s the new Tbilisi Public Service Hall by two other Italians, Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas, and if it seems overscaled, it’s meant to. Inside the cavernous hall, Georgians are getting married, buying new houses, paying their taxes and conducting all manner of official business with an absence of humiliation and indignity that is quite fresh here. The grandiose architecture is meant to amplify the virtues of Georgia’s kinder, gentler bureaucracy. “I’m done in five minutes, which is almost a shame because it’s so pleasant here I don’t want to leave,” one of my Georgian friends tells me.

Do not expect rousing applause for any of this, however. For all their charm, Georgians can be maddeningly querulous. Tbilisi’s face-lift has gotten many of them particularly riled up. The complaints come in a variety of voices, some shrill and some shriller. The preservationists accuse the government of handing out inducements to private developers, who favored slapdash commercialism over historical authenticity in restoring Old Tbilisi. The local artist Gio Sumbadze calls it “facadism.”

Sumbadze does have a point. There is indeed a Ye Olde quality to some of the jazzed-up facades. But in fairness, the government needed to make some concessions to induce private developers; it could never have afforded to restore Old Tbilisi on its own. Meanwhile, the Soviets had crammed four or five families into houses built for one, and the wear and tear was dismantling the area from the inside.

I take a walk around the historic district with Maia Mania, a professor at Tbilisi’s State Academy of Art and one of the new Old Tbilisi’s fiercest adversaries. “Look at that!” she says, pointing a withering finger at one old building. “They took out the old bricks there and used brick cladding! And they attached a balcony there — what for?” Finally we come upon a lovely open courtyard, a characteristic feature of traditional Georgian houses. Mania finds it quite harmonious, except for “those three red things. I wish they weren’t there.” They are two women in red sweaters and a red car. “I am ill with what they have done in Old Tbilisi,” she says, looking genuinely ill. “If they had done a real restoration on 10 houses, I would be silent.”

More than a few Tbilisians find the new buildings incongruous and jarring, and sometimes just plain bad. The Peace Bridge, a source of much raillery, is nicknamed the Always Ultra Bridge for its resemblance to a feminine napkin. “I think the new buildings would be marvelous, but maybe someplace far away, like in the suburbs,” says Nino Sukhishvili, who, along with her brother, runs the Georgian National Ballet founded by her grandparents.

No local animus quite matches that of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the quirky billionaire who entered public life expressly to topple former President Mikheil Saakashvili, the man behind Tbilisi’s architectural revival. Ivanishvili, now Georgia’s prime minister, has made no secret of his disdain for Tbilisi’s new buildings, sucking them into a wider Kulturkampf over Georgia’s identity. He has called them a waste and an eyesore.

Saakashvili was swept into power by the Rose Revolution in 2003. He was young and dashing, and so were the good-looking men and women who joined his government. They enjoyed overwhelming popularity and good will. Like Russia’s Peter the Great, Saakashvili set out to usher in a golden age of Western-leaning modernity, using Italian architects to fashion the iconography.
The goal was a worthy one for a country mired in post-Soviet poverty and corruption. The problem was that Saakashvili pursued it more like a czar than an elected president. Dissent was ignored or overridden, sometimes brutally, and the Rose Revolution withered under his harsh care. By October 2012, Georgia had finally had enough, and booted out Saakashvili’s United National Movement at the polls. (His own term as president ended in October 2013.)
Ivanishvili has been the opposite of gracious in victory. He often seems driven more by an implacable hatred of Saakashvili and all his works than by any particular vision of his own. He has brought various charges against more than 100 United National Movement politicians, and even put some of them behind bars while they awaited trial. And he has effectively stamped out any architectural renaissance in Tbilisi, old and new.

On the riverbank across from the Old Town, bulldozers sit idle on the site of a controversial music theater and exhibition hall, also designed by the Fuksases. It was to be housed in a pair of massive pipes that now lie there like two Ozymandian legs of steel. Most people I spoke to never liked them anyway, and they do look ungainly and strange where they are.

But that’s not the point, or at least it wasn’t Ivanishvili’s point when the theater’s Georgian developer was detained last November on suspicion of receiving illegal funds. Shortly after, Tbilisi’s mayor, Gigi Ugulava, released a statement: “The Prime Minister sees the building of the theater as the muzzle of a cannon directed at his residence and is threatening to destroy it. There is no point arguing about tastes, but I am getting the impression that people are being detained for their taste in Georgia now.”

I meet Ugulava in his office in one of Tbilisi’s new high-rises. At 38, he is one of Saakashvili’s eager young Rose Revolutionaries. He tells me: “When Ivanishvili says he wants to destroy the theater or the Peace Bridge, it has nothing to do with architecture; it has to do with his wish to get rid of everything from Saakashvili’s era. Besides, look at Ivanishvili’s own home. It was the first big modern glass building in Tbilisi.”

You can’t miss it if you look up on the hill above Tbilisi: a $50 million futuristic thingy that looks like it’s waiting for George Jetson to land on its helipad. Ivanishvili, often described as a recluse, likes to work up there instead of in his offices in Tbilisi. The complex also houses his private zoo, not to mention artwork by Hirst and Koons down through Lucian Freud, Lichtenstein and Henry Moore (Actually, the paintings in Tbilisi are copies; Ivanishvili keeps the originals in London.) At $6 billion, Ivanishvili’s fortune, made in Russia during the rough-and-tumble days of privatization, comes to around half of Georgia’s G.D.P.

Georgians know better than most people that power comes and goes. They’ve had a lot of practice recycling imperial debris. Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s main artery, is lined with the elephant skeletons of Russian and Soviet dominion. Temur Ugulava is currently transforming one of them, a gargantuan Soviet printing house from the 1970s, into two luxury hotels. He will keep all the old printing machinery, which churned out copies of Pravda in another lifetime. “Temur prefers to buy Soviet buildings,” says Natalia Kancheli, who is working with Ugulava on the project. The two of them recently converted an old Soviet hotel near Mount Kazbegi in the Caucasus mountains. “Cost was no object to the Soviets. These buildings will withstand a 9.0 earthquake.”

Ultimately, however, there’s a lot more at stake here than architecture. Farther down Rustaveli Avenue is the old parliament building, near where I meet Giga Bokeria, another ministerial survivor from the Rose Revolution. The parliament is a Soviet classic from 1938, with a colonnade of elongated arches rising up four soul-crushing stories. It’s no longer used. Saakashvili moved parliament to a utopian complex he had constructed in Kutaisi, three hours away, by the Spanish architect Alberto Domingo. The new parliament is a big glass egg that looks intended to support human life on an inhospitable planet.

Which, in a sense, it is. “All these new buildings were part of a package. We were trying to change the mentality of the whole apparatus,” Bokeria says. “In post-Soviet times, the government had an orgasm just finding ways to insult you. That’s what we were trying to leave behind. The core of the debate was always, What kind of country should Georgia be?”

Lately, that debate has grown sharper teeth. Last May, gay rights demonstrators were badly beaten during a rally that had been condemned beforehand by the Georgian Orthodox Church. Ivanishvili denounced the violence, but the antimodern sentiment isn’t just aimed at buildings anymore. “That was the most shameful day in our history,” Bokeria says. “They’re trying to make us un-Georgian.”

“I believe there’s a tipping point for everything,” Kancheli says. “Saakashvili finally reached it, and now he’s gone. I think Ivanishvili’s government will ultimately reach a point on the other extreme, and then they’ll be gone too. Hopefully, one day Georgians will learn how to live in the middle.” Whichever way Georgia swings, a building somewhere in Tbilisi will commemorate it.

MOVIE REVIEW: ‘The Loneliest Planet,’ Directed by Julia Loktev (movies.nytimes.com)

(movies.nytimes.com) Two Hikers Who Need to Watch Their Steps

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: October 25, 2012

We never learn very much about Alex and Nica, the young couple (played by Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) at the center of “ The Loneliest Planet.” As cute as a pair of kittens and obviously in love, they are backpacking through Georgia — the former Soviet republic, not the American state — a few months before their wedding. Their interactions are playful and tender. They play with local children, conjugate Spanish verbs and have an affectionate, sexy teasing rapport with each other. Where they live, what they do for a living, the quality of their ideas or the nature of their opinions — none of this is especially relevant.

lex and Nica are thus somewhat paradoxical creatures, at once highly specific and maddeningly abstract. “The Loneliest Planet,” the second fictional feature directed by Julia Loktev, is rigorously committed to a particular kind of minimalism. Ms. Loktev is highly, even morbidly attentive to physical detail, to registering the sounds, colors and textures of the natural world and the tiniest nuances of human behavior. She also ruthlessly purges her movies of the kind of psychological expression and narrative exposition that most filmmakers depend on. Her stories take place in a vacuum that is also recognizably and palpably the real world.

Her previous film, “ Day Night Day Night” (2006), follows a young woman through Midtown Manhattan. She is even more of an abstraction than Alex and Nica: all the viewer knows about her is that she carries a backpack full of explosives and is planning a suicide bombing in Times Square. The documentary background and the camera’s unflinching attention to her every step, gesture and facial expression both create suspense and induce a kind of philosophical reverie. Who is this person? Why is she doing this? What does it all mean?

Similar questions hover around “The Loneliest Planet,” even though the dramatic stakes seem lower. The title evokes a series of guidebooks popular among adventurous travelers, and Alex and Nica, setting out for a hike in the Caucasus Mountains with a local guide named Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze), seem to fit that profile. They are daring and carefree but not especially reckless, and they tramp across a rocky, empty landscape with easygoing determination. Occasionally the guide tries to make conversation, telling a labored dirty joke or a puzzling anecdote about buying a car.

Every step carries a premonition that something might happen, a sense of foreboding and latent violence that Ms. Loktev creates by amplifying ordinary sounds, applying small doses of portentous music and cutting abruptly between shots. Something eventually does happen. I can’t be more specific, partly because I don’t want to spoil a surprise and also because the specifics don’t necessarily matter.

What matters is the effect of the event on Alex and Nica. It either opens a fissure in their relationship or reveals one that had been there all along, though those are only two of the many possibilities. The episode — which lasts a few seconds and is never spoken of afterward — might just be a crazy story they will tell at their wedding, or something they’ll fight about later, or forget about entirely.

Such speculation is as vain as wondering about what these people were doing before they went to Georgia, though just as inevitable. Their isolation from each other, from us and from Dato is part of the point of the film, which is (speaking of paradoxes) aggressive in its subtlety. It is gripping and haunting, but also coy and elusive.

The Loneliest Planet

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Julia Loktev, based on “Expensive Trips Nowhere” from the collection “God Lives in St. Petersburg” by Tom Bissell; director of photography, Inti Briones; edited by Michael Taylor and Ms. Loktev; music by Richard Skelton; production design by Rabiah Troncelliti; produced by Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Helge Albers and Marie Therese Guirgis; released by Sundance Selects. In Manhattan at the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In English and Georgian, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Gael García Bernal (Alex), Hani Furstenberg (Nica) and Bidzina Gujabidze (Dato).

ARTICLE: Justice or Vengeance? By Denis Corboy, William Courtney and Kenneth Yalowitz (nytimes.com)

(nytimes.com) Weeks after Georgia’s free and fair parliamentary election and an acclaimed peaceful transfer of power to the opposition, democratic gains are being thrown into question by a spate of arrests of high-ranking officials of the previous government of Mikheil Saakashvili, despite the fact that he remains president.

Saakashvili’s former defense and interior minister, ranking officials of the Interior Ministry, the chief of the armed forces general staff and the vice mayor of Tbilisi are among those who have been arrested. Charges brought against them by the new government of Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire businessman, include abuse of office, illegal detention and torture.

The sweeping nature of the arrests and murky judicial procedures have stirred unease. The secretary general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has said he is “extremely concerned.” A senior U.S. State Department official cautioned Ivanishvili against pursing selective justice.

Ivanishvili claims the arrests are not political and has offered independent monitoring of judicial proceedings. At the same time, he is seeking legislative approval for a weakening of Saakashvili’s remaining executive powers.

Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition won a surprise victory in the Oct. 1 election despite changes to the electoral system apparently intended by Saakashvili’s party to strengthen its own hold. Constitutional amendments enacted under Saakashvili also shifted more power to the prime minister, a position Saakashvili evidently hoped to assume once his final presidential term ends in October 2013. Now, however, Ivanishvili and Saakashvili must cohabitate for a year.

Saakashvili had been criticized in Georgia for accumulating excessive powers, maintaining tight controls on national television and other abuses of power. On the eve of the election, a video was leaked showing prison inmates beaten and abused by guards.

These and other serious allegations must be investigated. But the trials should be conducted fairly and openly, and the result should be due process, not score settling.

Post-Soviet Georgian politics have often been marked by confrontation. Ivanishvili professes to be open to advice from the West on the rule of law, but he and some of his supporters also seem bent on retribution. A contributing factor may be anger with the West, which strongly supported Saakashvili because of his pro-Western stance, for insufficiently challenging his violations of democratic practice.

Western leaders should be consistent about the need for equitable justice, a message that the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, was to convey Monday in Tbilisi. At their meeting next month, NATO foreign ministers should also assess Georgia’s progress in meeting criteria for membership, especially in fostering democracy.

Georgia’s hopes for closer ties with the West — already strong — depend on continued progress toward democracy. Ivanishvili might bear in mind that the European Union has frozen ties with Ukraine, another former Soviet republic with Western ambitions, because of the imprisonment on questionable charges of the former prime minister and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko.

The United States and the European Union would do well to offer Georgian leaders the counsel of a group of internationally prominent jurists. They could advise on ways to ensure fair judicial proceedings.

The West should also enhance programs to strengthen the rule of law, respect for human rights and media freedoms. The election in October, which was deemed free and fair by Western observers, raised hopes that Georgia could become a beacon of democracy. A retrograde move would put this at risk.

Denis Corboy, a visiting senior research fellow at Kings College, London, served as European Commission ambassador to Armenia and Georgia.William Courtney was U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia and special assistant to the president for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. Kenneth Yalowitz served as U.S. ambassador to Belarus and Georgia.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 27, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

LENS BLOG: Coming to Terms With the Legacy of War. By Jesse Newman (lens.blogs.nytimes.com)

(lens.blogs.nytimes.com)With Pictures by the grant winner Davide Monteleone (“Red Thistle — the Northern Caucasus Journey”)

slideshow >>>

The cover of "War is Only Half the Story, Vol 5"

Spin the globe, point your finger and stop it cold. Odds are you’ve landed on a country that has, at one time or another, seen armed conflict or all-out war. Think Afghanistan, Iraq, the United States, Sudan, Israel, Colombia and Sri Lanka, to name a recent few. As each new conflict unfolds, audiences around the world feed on a steady diet of images depicting violence and suffering. They flash daily on our televisions and computer screens, and scroll across our tablets and smartphones. In the best of circumstances, cease-fires are eventually declared and peace agreements signed. The tanks roll out, soldiers depart and media attention shifts to a new story. Often, only a handful of international journalists and photographers stay behind – and join national ones – to cover what remains.

Some of those photographers have been honored with grants from The Aftermath Project, a nonprofit organization committed to the idea that war is only half the story. Each year, The Aftermath Project awards grants to photographers from around the world who are working to tell what they see as the other half: what happens after years of the bombing and bloodshed come to an end, when refugees return home, rebuild towns and villages, and set out to restore their societies. Many photographers working in postconflict settings believe these stories are every bit as newsworthy as war itself. By distributing their work to artistic, academic and political groups around the country, The Aftermath Project hopes to broaden public understanding of what it calls “the true cost of war – and the real price of peace.”

$1,300, Davide Monteleone, #2, 18x18 inches

“If it’s not breaking or yelling or dying or bleeding in front of us, we don’t know how to cover it,” said Sara Terry, founder and director of The Aftermath Project, which is in its seventh year of giving grants and on the verge of publishing its fifth book. “The news media can be very horizontal,” she said. “We want to cover stories vertically. Go deep. Explore the consequences of conflict and how people learn to live again.”

The Aftermath Project is itself an aftermath of sorts. Ms. Terry, an award-winning correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a freelance magazine writer, became a photographer in the late 1990s and spent five years documenting life in postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina. For her, the most important photograph she took during that time showed a forensic anthropologist in white gloves, carefully handling the skeleton of a teenage boy found inside a mass grave of victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica.

“These graves had tried to obliterate evidence of a massacre of 8,000 men and boys,” Ms. Terry said. “But the anthropologists were determined to give them back life by identifying them one at a time, by naming them. I realized I want to be part of the story that says hatred and evil and inhumanity isn’t the final word on who we are.”

Photographers awarded Aftermath Project grants work on stories that focus on how individuals and communities come to terms with the legacy of war: how they remember their dead, search for justice, rebuild civil and political institutions, cope with trauma and find joy. The coming book, “War Is Only Half the Story, Vol. 5,” features the work of the grant winner Davide Monteleone (“Red Thistle — the Northern Caucasus Journey”), and the finalists Elizabeth D. Herman (“Women Warriors: Bangladesh”); Lara Ciarabellini and Massimo Mastrorillo (“Bosnia and Herzegovina — If Chaos Awakens the Madness”); Carlos Javier Ortiz (“Too Young to Die”); and Miquel Dewever-Plana (“Guatemala: The Other War”).

Mr. Monteleone’s photographs explore what daily life looks like in places like Abkhazia and Chechnya; they document the weddings, funerals and sporting events taking place amid an unsteady peace in the Caucasus. Two other photographers, Ms. Ciarabellini and Mr. Mastrorillo, have expanded on Ms. Terry’s work in Bosnia, chronicling the continuing struggle for harmony between previously embattled communities in the former Yugoslavia.

As in past years, the book featuring these stories will be distributed to members of Congress; professors and students in journalism, peace-building and postconflict studies; human rights organizations; and museum curators. A continuing Kickstarter campaign seeks to support the book’s publication (13 days remain), and applications for the next round of grants are due on Nov. 5.

Ultimately, Ms. Terry said, it is a matter of what you choose to shine a light on. Her words echo those of the journalist and media critic Walter Lippmann, who said of the press, “It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” For The Aftermath Project, both the fighting season and everything that comes afterward deserve to be brought to light.

“Conflict is the story of our inhumanity to each other,” Ms. Terry said. “If those are the stories we keep telling ourselves, what have we become?”

The Aftermath Project’s campaign to raise money to finance its book is here.

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OPINION: Georgia Speaks Its Mind. (nytimes.com)

(nytimes.com) The stunning victory by a reclusive billionaire over the forces of the West-leaning president in Georgia raises a host of questions. But before they can be answered, the election itself is worth celebrating. It was a significant achievement that Monday’s election in the small former Soviet state was deemed essentially free and fair by international observers, despite President Mikheil Saakashvili’s increasingly imperious ways, and that both sides accepted its results nine years after the Rose Revolution. 

Still, the next steps are rife with dangers. Under a transitional political arrangement, victor and loser will have to rule jointly for most of the next year, and Georgia still has to find its place between the West and Russia, with which it fought a short, nasty war in 2008. 

Mr. Saakashvili will remain president for almost a year as Bidzina Ivanishvili’s victorious Georgian Dream coalition takes over the Parliament, with Mr. Ivanishvili most likely becoming the prime minister. Next October, a new constitution will come into force, devolving many powers of the president to the prime minister. 

Until then, both men will have to somehow overcome the scars of a vicious campaign in a culture not given to compromise. Even in his gracious concession of defeat, Mr. Saakashvili noted that “we believe that their views are extremely wrong.” And Mr. Ivanishvili called on Mr. Saakashvili to resign, but later withdrew his demand. 

Another challenge for the new government will be to lower tensions with Russia without abandoning its Western ambitions. Mr. Saakashvili, who took an unabashedly pro-Western stance, was completely spurned by Moscow, especially after the brief Russian-Georgian war. Russian boycotts of Georgian wine and other products have hurt the Georgians, while Russia’s recognition of the independence claims of two Georgian regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, remains a deep wound. 

Mr. Ivanishvili, who made a huge fortune in Russia, was little known even to Georgians before he plunged into politics a year ago, and remains something of an enigma. He promises to improve relations with Russia, and also says he will continue to pursue membership in NATO. 

During the campaign, Washington wisely avoided taking sides. The United States and the European Union must continue giving the Georgians every incentive to build their democracy and to take their place in Western institutions. But overt interference can only create unnecessary tensions and suspicions. 

Russia expressed hope that the election would help restore “constructive and respectful relations.” For Russia, that would mean lifting economic pressures and acknowledging that Georgia has its own hopes and dreams.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on October 4, 2012, on page A34 of the New York edition with the headline: Georgia Speaks Its Mind.

ELECTION: Democracy in the Former Soviet Republics (nytimes.com)

(nytimes.com) No leader of the former Soviet republics has been more pro-Western than President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. He moves easily in Washington and dreams of bringing his country into full NATO membership. But his government’s handling of prisons and its approach to parliamentary elections set for Monday are raising doubts about his commitment to democracy and reform. 

Critics both inside Georgia and internationally have increasingly faulted Mr. Saakashvili for persecuting opponents, pressuring the courts and stifling the news media. In June, the National Democratic Institute reported on a growing political polarization and a rise in hate speech in the country. 

Since then, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has expressed concern that the judiciary is not independent enough to guarantee fair elections. Amnesty International and Transparency International Georgia have cited numerous cases in which opposition activists were beaten, intimidated or detained for supporting Mr. Saakashvili’s political rival, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, and his “Georgian Dream” coalition. The government slapped Mr. Ivanishvili with what many considered excessive fines for campaign spending violations.

Then a week and a half ago, protests erupted after two pro-opposition television channels — including one owned by Mr. Ivanishvili — showed film of inmates in the capital’s main prison being tortured and raped. Two ministers resigned and 10 prison officials, including the chief, were arrested. The government said the film was recorded by guards who were bribed, but the violence was reprehensible and appeared to violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture. 

Only a full, transparent investigation will make good on Mr. Saakashvili’s promise to punish those responsible and reform the system. 

Georgia is less than nine years past its Rose Revolution. This election is another critical building block in a fragile democratic order. On Monday, the country will elect a new Parliament; because of legislative changes, the prime minister’s job will become more powerful than the presidency once Mr. Saakashvili’s term ends next year. There is speculation that he will try to stay in power beyond that by seeking the prime minister’s office. 

Mr. Saakashvili and his supporters suspect that Mr. Ivanishvili is a stalking horse for Russia, where the billionaire made his fortune and against whom Georgia fought a brief, disastrous war in 2008. Whatever the case, Mr. Saakashvili jeopardizes his legacy and his ability to lead Georgia into NATO if he fails to keep the country moving forward toward democracy and human rights. 

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Related News Better Off Than They Were in Years Past, Georgian Voters Ask: At What Cost? (September 30, 2012)

BLOG: Azerbaijan “Investigates” The New York Times for Karabakh Story. By Giorgi Lomsadze (eurasianet.org)

(eurasianet.org) Azerbaijan recently became a no-fly zone for moon-walking American astronaut Charles Duke and Swiss astronaut Claude Nicollier after they had the indiscretion to set foot in separatist Nagorno Karabakh without permission from Baku. 

Last week, The New York Times' travel section offered a tip to other explorers about how to visit Karabakh and still be able to hop over to Azerbaijani-controlled territory later -- namely, just  “ask for the visa to be put on a separate piece of paper that can be removed from your passport.”

The trick is hardly a secret. And one that prudent visitors quickly learn, with or without a how-to in the American "newspaper of record." 

But the Azerbaijani government, its temper taut from jousting with Karabakh's protector, Armenia, over President Ilham Aliyev's pardon of axe-murderer Ramil Safarov, charged that sharing this advice was illegal and has tasked its US embassy to investigate the case. 

It is unclear what means are at Baku’s disposal to punish The New York Times should the government decide that its "investigation" so warrants it.

This time, the well-tested domestic method of arresting troublesome journalists will not work.

ARTICLE: Off the Map in the Black Garden. By Russ Juskalian (travel.nytimes.com)

(travel.nytimes.com) STANDING on a limestone ridge in the foothills of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains, I surveyed the landscape that lay before me. To the west, illuminated by a late-day sun and with ever more craggy peaks as a backdrop, was Vankasar Mountain, capped by a solitary, ancient church. To the east, yellow grassland and scrub stretched to the horizon. And then there was the ghost city of Agdam, its thousands of ruined buildings representing the last exchanges of a late 20th-century conflict that many people have never heard of.

The road from Kalbajar to Armenia over the Sotk Pass. Russ Juskalian for The New York Times

I had come to the breakaway Southern Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabakh expecting a land of extremes. Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave whose name means “mountainous black garden,” appears on few maps. Its tumultuous recent history would affect any traveler, no doubt, but for me, the experience of visiting this place had a personal dimension. My grandmother had fled Anatolia as a girl, escaping an Armenian genocide at the hands of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. To come to Nagorno-Karabakh, a place where Armenians have asserted their right to live freely — but at the cost of having forcibly removed their Azeri neighbors — generated mixed emotions, to say the least.

Once part of an ancient Armenian kingdom, Nagorno-Karabakh was made a special autonomous oblast, or administrative zone, under the authority of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, by Stalin in the 1920s. This designation temporarily calmed fighting between the predominately Muslim Azeris and mostly Christian Armenians who lived in the region. But as the Soviet Union disintegrated in the late 1980s, old ethnic feuds turned bloody, and both ethnicities were subjected to pogroms and persecution at the hands of the other. Armenians, representing around 75 percent of the Nagorno-Karabakh population at the time, sought independence from Azerbaijan. Skirmishes led to full-on war by the early 1990s, resulting in upward of 30,000 casualties and hundreds of thousands of displaced people on both sides.

In 1994, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh effectively won that war and claimed independence with the signing of a cease-fire order. In the process, nearly the entire Azeri population was forced to flee. Today, the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (N.K.R.) is not recognized by any other country in the world. With no official borders, Armenian and Azeri soldiers are still dug into trenches on the front lines.

Though I had become interested in the region because of my ethnic heritage, once I started digging into the history of Nagorno-Karabakh, I wanted to experience what was said to be a breathtaking landscape filled with ancient monasteries, mountainous tableaus and hard-working people trying to rebuild.

So last spring I went there, accompanied by my girlfriend. I didn’t expect luxury hotels, haute cuisine or air-conditioned buses, and I didn’t find them. Instead, we stayed at local homes where running water might not be guaranteed, ate simple meals with our hosts and traveled in Soviet-era knockoffs of Fiats and antiquated minibuses with bald tires. In exchange for the lack of amenities, I was hoping not just to understand more about this little-known area, but also to understand more about my own background.

EARLY on a humid May morning, we headed to a dusty square in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where we boarded a crowded minibus, called a marshrutka, bound for Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital, Stepanakert — a trip that would take eight hours. Aside from two Asian tourists, the bus was filled with local women carrying toddlers, and old men, a few of whom played cards on an upturned cardboard box. The final part of the route twisted almost 10 miles through the Lachin Corridor, a mountain pass that had previously been (or still is, depending on whom you ask) a part of Azerbaijan.

By the time we got to Stepanakert, it was raining. We headed to the Foreign Ministry to pick up our travel papers, checked into a simple hotel and fell asleep. Early the next morning, the sun still burning off the night’s fog, we explored the covered market in central Stepanakert. The air was filled with the scent of ripe cherries and local herbs. In one corner, two women with faded aprons and orange-tinted hair worked over a griddle. The first rolled balls of dough into discs. To each disc, the second added a small mountain of chopped herbs and then folded the dough over the filling. The grilled stuffed bread, called jingalov hats, tasted of pungent mustard greens and watercress.

A 20-minute drive away, in the town of Shoushi, we met Saro Saryan, who, with his wife, runs a homestay, which would become our base. Dressed in a blue Ministry of Civil Defense uniform and cap, Mr. Saryan greeted us in his booming voice. “Russ? Come,” he said.

Mr. Saryan walked with us around town, first showing us the old fortress walls, and then the Tolkienesque Ghazanchetsots Cathedral, built of white limestone. As we approached a massive stone building that stood gutted, Mr. Saryan said, “This used to be a university. My hope is that one day you can come back and see students here.” Past bombings had transformed the broad hallways. In one room, the ceiling had been replaced by sky, the floor was covered in kudzu-like shrubs, and tufts of wildflowers clung to empty niches.

Shoushi clearly has seen hardship upon hardship. One of the only Azeri-majority strongholds in the 1980s, then called Shusha, it was the staging site for rocket attacks on Stepanakert, which was mainly populated by Armenians. Much of the town, including the university, was damaged first by Armenian bombardment, and then by the Azeris after the Armenians took control in 1992. The capture of the town by the Armenians was a turning point in the war.

That evening, for 5,000 dram each (around $12), we slept in a room around the corner from the Saryans’ kitchen. On most days we sat down with the Saryan family to a dinner of lavash bread, fresh cheese, honey and grilled meat or stuffed grape leaves.

Over the next few days we hired a taxi, so we could see more of the region’s Armenian ruins. There was the white-stone Amaras monastery, swathed in knee-high grasses and the occasional wild poppy plant; the 13th-century Gandzasar monastery, whose walls and floor, some believe, contain the head of John the Baptist, the jaw of Gregory the Illuminator and the right hand of St. Zachariah; and Dadivank, where immense Armenian steles known as khachkars, some over 1,000 years old, stood in repose.

At one point, while traveling on the Stepanakert-Martakert Highway in a battered taxi, I saw the ruins of stone buildings. “Agdam?” I asked the driver.

“Agdam,” he answered, quietly. “No photo.” Agdam had been an Azeri village that the Armenians had razed during the war. Some 40,000 people fled, and many were killed. As hundreds of abandoned homes, many reduced to foundations, came into view, the driver stepped hard on the gas.

While the Nagorno-Karabakh war was one of independence — fought within the context of a century-old genocide against the Armenians by the Turks, the fall of the Soviet Union and anti-Armenian pogroms — it was difficult for me, with my background, not to feel dismay that the same persecution the Armenians had suffered was perpetrated upon their Azeri neighbors. What about the former Azeri girls and boys, now refugees about my age, whose memory of home is fading like a photograph left too long in the sun? Most, I learned, have settled in other parts of Azerbaijan. And while I may never be able to see Azerbaijan because of my ethnicity, they may never get to see the place where they were born.

When I mentioned this to Mr. Saryan — an Armenian who fled Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, around the time of the anti-Armenian Sumgait pogrom in 1988 — he said he still had nostalgia for Baku, where he had spent most of his life. “I was part of a group of refugees who met our Azeri counterparts in Vienna,” he said. “I was just in touch with one of them on Facebook yesterday.”

WE had only two days to travel via the northern road from Kalbajar province back to Armenia — amid snow-capped peaks and over the infamous Sotk Pass and its open-pit gold mine. Joined by an Austrian named Barbara who had also been staying at Mr. Saryan’s, we charted the route with a stop at a thermal spring. As we approached the Zuar spring, Barbara gasped. The natural pool was belching soap bubbles from the soap someone had dumped in. Dozens of middle-aged men splashed about. Immediately the center of attention, we had no choice but to join them. After a quick splash, we were invited for a warm beer and a shot of throat-scorching mulberry vodka.

We continued to the town of Kalbajar, ascending a 6,500-foot plateau via a series of steep switchbacks. Like Agdam, this place was mainly non-Armenian before the war; it is now controlled by the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.

Kalbajar, too, looked like a ghost town — except that some of the homes were occupied by ethnic Armenians, many from the Armenian diaspora, coming from Georgia, Russia and elsewhere. With almost no tourism infrastructure, a doctor arranged a place for us in a hospital outbuilding where we slept on two wobbly metal beds.

In the morning, we headed back toward Armenia with two young men we had hired to drive us in a 72-horsepower Soviet-built Lada Niva. We traveled for hours, over mountains, into valleys and back up again. Finally we came to the Sotk Pass atop a rocky hill of debris dumped over the edge of the mountain by huge mining trucks. The road went from dirt to fist-size stones. Crossing this geo-industrial outpost was like passing through a portal. The earth itself seemed to be in upheaval, with whorls of dust spinning into the air by heavily laden trucks.

And then it was over. We headed back down the other side, back into Armenia without so much as a sign to mark the border.

But my mind was still running in circles around Nagorno-Karabakh. I was thinking mainly about the war, and about Mr. Saryan’s son, who, the day after graduating from high school, had led us to a gorge near Shoushi. I asked him if he could imagine having an Azeri friend. And, as if the question itself had puzzled him, he said, “Why not?”

IF YOU GO

Visiting Nagorno-Karabakh is not for the faint of heart. Every year soldiers on both sides of the front lines are killed by sniper fire. Outside Stepanakert, accommodation is mainly limited to homestays.

Visas can be arranged in advance in Yerevan, Armenia, or upon arrival in Stepanakert at the foreign ministry. If you plan to visit Azerbaijan in the future, ask for the visa to be put on a separate piece of paper that can be removed from your passport. Azerbaijan will not allow entry to anyone with a Nagorno-Karabakh Republic visa in their passport.

HOW TO GET THERE

Hyur Service (contact@hyurservice.com; 374-10-54-60-40; www.hyurservice.com/eng). With a few locations in Yerevan, Hyur can arrange rental cars, private transportation or all-inclusive trips to Nagorno-Karabakh. Prices vary. The staff speaks English.

Public minibuses leave various bus stations around Yerevan, heading to Stepanakert every morning for around 4,500 Armenian dram, or $11.30 at 400 drams to the dollar. Travel takes eight hours.

WHERE TO STAY

Saro Saryan Homestay (saro.saryan@gmail.com), in Shoushi. Mr. Saryan and his wife are regular features on the independent travel scene in Nagorno-Karabakh, and speak very good English. For 5,000 dram per person per night, you can stay at their home. Mr. Saryan has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Shoushi, and if he has time he may offer a walking tour of the town and its ruins. He can also help arrange onward travel and accommodation throughout Nagorno-Karabakh.

Hotel Armenia (www.armeniahotel.am; (374 47) 94-94-00; info@armeniahotel.am, Renaissance Square), in Stepanakert, has 55 rooms furnished to international standards, and prices include Wi-Fi, breakfast and use of a gym. Double rooms range from 30,000 to 41,000 drams per night.

PHOTOESSAY: A Dip Into the Black Sea. Photos by Petrut Calinescu & Text by by Kerri MacDonald (lens.blogs.nytimes.com)

Nina and her daughter (background) fish from a jetty for Frog fish. The catch suppliments their meagre diet which is limited by her monthly pension of about 50 Euros. Ochamcira, Abkhazia; Copyright by Petrut Calinescu

Slideshow & Full Text: lens.blogs.nytimes.com
Kerri MacDonald www.kerrimacdonaldonline.com
Petrut Calinescu www.petrut-calinescu.com


(lens.blogs.nytimes.com) As a boy growing up in Constanta, a Romanian city on the western coast of the Black Sea, Petrut Calinescu made the seaside his playground. He spent his afternoons with friends, searching for German bunkers and plotting adventures. He recalls being drawn to the mystique of the open water.


“Once you look at the sea, you always want to know what is across the sea,” Mr. Calinescu said recently from his home in Bucharest, a few hours by car from Constanta.


But for most of his 36 years, he never made it to the other side. So “The Black Sea,” a project he pursued jointly with the writers Stefan Candea and Ioana Hodoiu, was born out of nostalgia for an unknown place.


Except Mr. Calinescu had never traveled there before. He didn’t think it was exotic enough. Romanians have typically been more interested in traveling to European cities, he said. He had always assumed that the Black Sea had nothing to offer — that nothing there has changed, or will change.


But with a grant from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Mr. Calinescu and his colleagues began to explore what he calls “a black hole” in the Romanian mind-set. They traveled more than 9,000 miles in 80 days, documenting their journey on a blog. Some of his most surprising pictures were taken underwater near a seaside resort using a blog-friendly digital camera (Slide 6). “It was a funny lottery,” he said. “I was doing pictures, but never knew what was going to be recorded.”


They started in Romania and from there went to Bulgaria and Turkey, to Armenia and Azerbaijan (neither of which borders the Black Sea, though both are included in the Black Sea Economic Cooperation). They visited Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, and traveled to separatist republics: Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria and Abkhazia.


Overwhelmingly, the region’s “Communist” aesthetic felt familiar. But Mr. Calinescu was struck by the beauty — and the peculiarities — of Abkhazia, a breakaway region in the former Soviet republic of Georgia that was, at one time, a hub for tourism.


“It was the dream of every Soviet citizen to have one time in his life a holiday there,” he said.


Today, postcards for Abkhazia could feature scenes reminiscent of the cold war era, and buildings speckled with bullet holes. Yet Mr. Calinescu’s pictures capture something rather jubilant, like a pair of Russian women dancing a samba in the early evening light (Slide 16).


Mr. Calinescu, who is represented by Panos Pictures, went to school for journalism, studying to be a writer. He started taking photographs, mostly for fun, in high school. Now, he concentrates on projects, including one that explores the effects of labor migration on traditional populations in Romania.


But he isn’t finished with the Black Sea. He sees it as a metaphor for life in the region. Some spend much of their lives dreaming of the beach, he said, and working to make it there. But, “once they get to the seaside, they see that it’s very expensive, crowded and ugly.”


Nonetheless, Mr. Calinescu and Mr. Candea are applying for grants to continue their travels. In July, they received a second grant from the German Marshall Fund, which will allow them to return to their Black Sea travels beginning this fall to publish in-depth reports online.


“It was like a dip into the sea on an August day,” Mr. Calinescu wrote on their blog, using another Black Sea metaphor.


“After five minutes out of the water, you want to go back in.”


Follow @kerrimac and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook. 

STORY: Superlatives Visiting Dignitaries by Timothy Farrington (newyorker.com)

(newyorker.com) The other day, the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, came to town to see an old friend: Donald Trump. In the atrium of Trump Tower, beneath a banner reading “TRUMP INVESTS IN GEORGIA,” the two men announced a plan in which Trump will lend his name and expertise in superlatives to two new buildings—one in Tbilisi, the capital, and another in Batumi, a resort on the Black Sea—that will be the tallest in the country.

 

That evening, the Georgian delegation, a group of young people who looked as if they had just come from an open call at a modelling agency, joined a dozen Trump employees and friends at the Four Seasons to celebrate. Trump himself was a late scratch (family emergency), but the afterglow of mutual regard from the press conference (“one of the greatest personalities in the world”; “one of the great leaders of the world”) barely wavered. During the cocktail hour, in the Grill Room, Saakashvili, who is six feet three, with close-set eyes and floppy black hair, explained that he had been a Trump fan since the mid-nineties. After getting a master’s in law from Columbia, he worked at a New York firm that was a Trump tenant. “I met him in an elevator,” the President recalled. “He asked me whether we liked the building. I said to him, ‘You better fix the showers on our floor,’ and it was done within, like, twelve hours.”

The Trump touch left an impression. “I always stay in New York in Trump hotels,” Saakashvili said; this time it was the International Hotel and Tower, at Columbus Circle. Georgia, too, is known for hospitality. When asked about arranging a chat with Saakashvili, Raphaël Glucksmann, a thirty-one-year-old aide, had been obliging: “We’ll kidnap you! It’s an old Caucasian tradition.” How he would know about the region’s customs wasn’t fully clear; he is French, born far from the Caucasus, and has lived in Georgia only since 2008. (Saakashvili is evidently more forgiving of where politicians were born than Trump, who has taken up the birther cause as part of his threatened run for President.)

Glucksmann turned to Vera Kobalia, the twenty-nine-year-old Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development (portfolio: “everything growing and green”). Grinning, he asked her, “Can you say something nice about our culture?”

“I lived in Canada for fifteen years. I was happy, but I still moved back to Georgia,” she said. She was appointed last July, seven months after returning from Vancouver. Saakashvili’s tenure—he took office in 2004, after leading the Rose Revolution the year before—has been a sort of “olly olly oxen free” for bright members of the diaspora. Some have more enthusiasm than experience; Kobalia notes in her official bio that she graduated from high school (King George’s, ’99) and that from 2004 to 2006 she worked as a producer for “Destination Funny Entertainment.”

At dinner, in the Pool Room, Glucksmann sat next to Camilla Olsson, a Swedish fashion marketer. “I introduced the fabulous Trumps to the Georgians,” she said. Standing in for his dad was Donald Trump, Jr., just off a plane from Scotland, where he had checked on a Trump golf course. Donald, Jr., who was wearing a white shirt with red stripes and a red-and-white tie, explained that he and his family would make sure that the Georgian projects were up to “Trump standards.”

To Olsson’s right, Temuri Yakobashvili, the brand-new, forty-three-year-old Georgian Ambassador to the U.S., listened as Carol Alt, the eighties supermodel, touted her raw-food diet, leaving the grilled Dover sole in front of her untouched. Like Trump, Alt was eager to ease the pangs of a country starved for luxury. She mentioned that she was about to begin Georgian distribution of her natural skin-care line, Raw Essentials.

“You guys can buy it in Duane Reade, but it’ll be very exclusive in Georgia,” she said. There seems to be a market: earlier in the week, a member of a Georgian delegation had been picked up for shoplifting at Century 21, though his diplomatic immunity nullified the arrest. Alt has never been to Georgia herself, but she had heard good things: “My girlfriend says the earth smells sweet.”

Few of the guests had visited the country, and efforts by those who had been there to describe its charms produced some striking mashups. On Batumi: “Monte Carlo meets Las Vegas.” On Georgia: “The best of Italy combined with the best of France.” On Georgian cuisine: “It resembles some kind of Indian food, but, in a sense, it’s Mediterranean.”

Around 10 P.M., the President posed for a photograph with Alt, then swept out. Trump’s absence appeared to leave no hard feelings. Earlier, Saakashvili had suggested that Trump could always emigrate: “If he decides to run for President in Georgia, he might win.” ♦ 

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Trump Signs Deal to Develop Two Towers in Georgia, the Former Soviet State By CHARLES V. BAGLI and ANDREW E. KRAMER (nytimes.com)

VIDEO: On the Farm, After the Fall - May 2011. By Julie Dressner (video.nytimes.com)

(video.nytimes.com) A trip to the post-Soviet republic of Georgia where agritourism draws visitors eager to help out with the farm chores and reap the bounty at the dinner table.

Journeys: In Former Soviet Georgia, Two Families and the Art of Hospitality

Justyna Mielnikiewicz for The New York Times

Shorena at the Nikolaishvili house. More Photos » 

Vazha and his vines. More Photos »

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY Published: May 27, 2011

FIRST the roasted eggplant arrived, topped with walnut paste and pomegranate seeds, followed by seared red peppers glistening with oil, and a salad of cucumbers and tomatoes, scattered with herbs. Then bread from a nearby kiln, a soul mate for the homemade cheese, which was akin to mozzarella with a sour kick. The two women of the house soon shuttled in with carafes of red and white wine, squeezed from grapes tended on the surrounding land and coaxed to life in cisterns out back. It was a fine finale — or so we thought — for our first lunch at a small farmstead in Georgia, the fertile backyard of the former Soviet Union.

We smiled and thanked the women. They chuckled, as if to say: silly guests, that does not make for a Georgian meal. And as a fire crackled in the hearth, they kept crowding the broad wooden table with platters — chicken grilled under a brick, chubby spiced meat dumplings, stuffed cabbage and numerous accompaniments.

“Almost everything that we eat here, we grow on our own,” our host, Vazha Nikolaishvili, later told us.

We marveled at the repast, as well as the location: Kakheti, a lush region of Eastern Georgia known for its winemaking, where blooming agritourism ventures offer a chance to see how private farming has revived since the end of the dismal collective agriculture of Communism.

Last fall, joined by my wife and three children, I journeyed two hours by car from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to Kakheti, but decided against a hotel in favor of a three-day stay with the Nikolaishvili family in the village of Tsinandali. On our arrival, we were greeted by Vazha, the patriarch of the family, a charming and chatty man who looked like Pablo Picasso.

During a tour of the property in the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains, he explained in a raspy voice how he produces wine from grapes that he tends around his house and on 15 acres nearby. He also has persimmon, and other fruit trees, and raises vegetables as well.

“When we harvest grapes and other crops, my friends, my son’s friends, come to help us, 50 or 60 men come to help us,” he said. “My wealth is my friends.”

The Nikolaishvili family has even branched into organic crops, and has helped to champion an association of Georgian organic producers called Elkana, a nongovernmental association that is trying to nurture organic farming across the country.

In recent years, local growers like the Nikolaishvilis have begun to throw open their doors to tourists, showing off Georgia’s robust traditions of hospitality, which endured even during the Soviet era. Back then, Georgia was a popular vacation spot for the Communist elite, with its soaring mountains and Black Sea coast. Even now, Georgian cuisine has a cherished niche throughout the former Soviet Union — a jazzy cousin to more staid Slavic food.

The accommodations at the Nikolaishvili’s were not fancy: the five of us slept in a couple of rustic bedrooms in the main house; the bathroom was in a separate building a short walk away. In the spring and fall, nighttime temperatures can dip close to freezing. A wood stove in the kitchen provided heat, though it did not always reach our bedrooms. (Guests are welcome year-round, though the nonwinter months are preferable. Call 995-99-260-215 or e-mail nik.nikolaishvili@gmail.com for reservations.)

Still, we were treated warmly by Mr. Nikolaishvili and his family, who delighted in describing rural customs and teaching us to cook Georgian specialties. The price was more than reasonable — $35 a night per person, including copious quantities of that delicious food and house wine. (Fresh-squeezed grape juice for the children, too.)

Mr. Nikolaishvili, 62, and his wife, Tina, 58, did not speak English, so we communicated with them in Russian, which they learned during Soviet times. Their English-speaking son, Niko, 35, and daughter-in-law, Shorena, 26, were at the ready to translate for foreigners.

Of course, it was not all eating and chatting — there was work to be done.

From the first milking of their cow at dawn to the baking of bread at night, we took part in the farm’s chores. Vazha demonstrated how the grapes were picked, pressed and fermented, especially the classic Georgian varietals, rkatsiteli (white) and saperavi (red). Though he has his own label, he said that most of his yield — he produces as many as 70,000 bottles a year — he sells wholesale. He also distills chacha, a punch-to-the-gut brew made from grape skins and other remains of the fermentation process.

The alluring property was covered with grapevines on trellises, and the children played tag around the vegetable plots in the waning autumn sunlight.

They also loved loitering in the kitchen with Tina and Shorena, learning how to cook dishes like the spiced meat dumplings called khinkali. “That’s not quite right,” Shorena gently chided, holding up a lumpy dumpling that looked as if it had been mangled by a toddler. Everyone laughed, and started over again.

The highlight of our time in the kitchen was making walnut bars called churchkhela, a cherished harvest event in Georgia. The women boiled a pot of fresh grape juice, vigorously stirring it and thickening it with flour. The children took strings of walnuts and dipped them into the mixture, forming a gooey coating. The strings were hung to dry around the house, the treats later gnawed upon for the rest of the trip.

Vazha liked nothing more than to pour a glass of rkatsiteli — or several — and sit in front of the fire in the dining room and talk. He recalled that he learned the virtues of hospitality from his grandfather, who planted the ancestors of some of the grape vines still on the property. When someone stopped by, whether for business or pleasure, his grandfather first ushered them to the table.

“Whatever there was in the house, it could be anything, it could be something simple — salt and bread, cheese and greens — he would pour wine and only after that would he ask, ‘What is the purpose of your visit, what do you need, how can I help you?’ “Mr. Nikolaishvili said.

“Why are we alive?” he added, rhetorically. “Isn’t it to meet people, to offer them a good meal, to share a meal with them? Georgians love having guests, and we want the entire world to know that.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 29, 2011, on page TR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Home Cooking in Georgia (Not That One). 

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On the Farm, After the Fall

 

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Home Cooking in Georgia (Not That One)