This year has already seen me visit Adishi in Svaneti for the first time ever. Now I can add Ieli to that list of new places for me in this province.
As I recall, the very first mention I heard of this village is that it had been, maybe was still, an important gold-mining location. The Chinese had visited with an interest, and been rebuffed most firmly and unequivocally. That was more than a decade ago. It was off the beaten path for me (as Adishi had been), and awaited someone’s request for me to take them there.
One of our recent guests was a journalist, traveling here and there and freelancing stories in various exotic places. What did I know about Ieli? Only what I’ve written above, and roughly where it was, I told him. But for the going rate, I’d happily drive him there and also interpret for his initial visit. Agreed.
Svaneti is in the midst of its most colorful season, as the deciduous trees all go red, orange and gold for fall, while the conifers remain green and the sky blazes blue. We hit good weather on the trip, which takes you above Mestia in the Hatsvali direction and then branches off onto a slightly worse road, no more asphalt or even cement, but still quite navigable though narrow. We reached Ieli proper and then asked for the hamlet which interested us, called Atsi, much further down towards the Enguri River. Here, we met members of the only three families who currently populate Atsi.
All of them used to live in Abkhazia, and left it when the war there was raging in the 1990s, going to Tbilisi to start again as refugees. But this abandoned hamlet was their family’s real point of origin, and eventually they worked themselves into a good enough position to consider returning here and rebuilding the winter-ravaged houses, a single cold season of which can be enough to collapse roofs if no one is there to shovel them off.
There are even two complete towers, and a couple of partially ruined ones, way out here. Not only have the former been re-roofed, but their whole topmost sections have had to be remade first, no small undertaking of stone, cement, height and nerves. One of these towers also offered a rare view for me: nice laden grapevines on a trellis in front of it, not usual to find in a village at the end of the road in this province. Bees are hard at work too, in many hives.
But the locals were (unsurprisingly perhaps) shy to talk about the gold, except to say that the Soviets had dug mines for it somewhere nearby in the mountains. Now the main procurement method was panning from the Enguri, and possibly the ancient time-honored method of throwing a stone-weighted sheep hide into the river, onto which the heavier gold dust would settle while the lighter silt would wash past. Jason, Argonauts and Golden Fleece, I’m looking at you.
Anyway, now was not the gold season, they told us, so we didn’t press it, understanding their reticence, saving this topic for some future visit, once our friendship might develop further.
Mid-winter, Atsi gets 2-3 hours of precious sunlight a day, as it’s rather hemmed in with mountains. So it takes some guts, and preparation, to winter here; although apparently the gravel road in is sloughed and there are even rumors that the whole thing, some 8 km of it, could be cemented in the future. This would be transformational.
We were let into the small 16th century hamlet church, recently lovingly stuccoed and re-roofed, and served by an itinerant priest. A painted cloth banner in one corner shows the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist, and it is supposed to be as old as the building. As for secular education, the only two children of school-going age go to a place in Ieli itself, to join a handful of others.
Ieli is just clinging on to life, but better this than becoming a ghost town. I take my hat off to its residents for their gumption in staying, or returning, and doing their best to keep it alive.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
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
