The village of Etseri, in Upper Svaneti, has been reeling for a couple of days from two more deaths. Mere weeks after Naira’s three teenagers’ car plunged into a raging melt-choked river, a pair of brothers, one in his late 30s, the other early 40s, met a similar fate. They are survived by parents and another brother. All of Svaneti is screaming, “Why, God?”
The parents of the earlier three teenagers had to go through the impossible tangle of parental grief mixed with relief, if that’s what you would call it, that dragging the river eventually granted them bodies to bury instead of empty coffins. The brothers’ bodies were more quickly recovered. My wife and I are returning from Tbilisi now, just in time for these twin funerals.
These brothers grew up and lived in Etseri’s Ladreri hamlet, which was ground zero for my introduction to the village in 2000. My surgeon friend and eventual blood brother, Nodar Aprasidze, took me to his own home there many times and introduced me to the whole village before Lali and I moved there ourselves some 12 years ago. I have many fond memories of Nodar’s big old house, where his father, brother and sister lived; now only the brother is left. I have participated in too many funeral feasts in this hamlet, too, as well as everywhere else I’ve been in Svaneti. But all the rest of the funerals there were for elderly people, entirely expected.
This time the grief will be deadly sharp, the turnout massive from the whole province. I can hardly bear to think what it will be like. I think that at the wake, before the open coffins, I will be unable to restrain myself, and will weep and wail along with the rest of the mourners. Enough British stiff upper lip.
There have been too many preventable deaths in Svaneti in the last few years. I won’t go into detail here about what caused them. But we are all exhausted and wrung out. Too many young people dying, some murdered, others in other wrong ways. We need change; that’s what I’m praying for. It’s not enough to cry out that “He or she was such a good person”!
I don’t know what else to say. My heart is broken. I know this piece is shorter than usual, but it’s all for now.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer
