Now that we are resettling back into Tbilisi life for the next six months (we think), a number of comparisons come to mind between the nation’s capital and one of its farthest-flung provinces.
Svaneti offers endless beauty- any season, any weather. You’re IN nature, with towering mountain walls all around you, wildflowers, rocky cliffs, a mix of severity and loveliness. Tbilisi: well, a city of 1.5 million or so. Noise, pollution, speed, crowding, but also huge displays of culture in the creative world: music, visual arts, theater, cinema, international food, bookshops and more. And public transport, of course, of which Svaneti has much less (though not zero).
Tbilisi: regular electricity and water and gas; or if they’re going off, you’ll be warned by SMS, and will know the start and stop times. Svaneti: the only gas is what you bottle. Electricity and water are free, but less reliable, and never a warning of their departure for any reason. You can call the village mayor about the water, or its power guy if he knows what’s with the juice not flowing, but you may not get a sure answer about resumption of these basics.
Tbilisi: unless you happen to own your own land, you can grow nothing but what fits in flower pots or window boxes. Svaneti, of course, allows farming on as big a scale as the land you own, which will always be some (unless you’re one of the few there who lives in an apartment in Mestia). You’d better know what you’re doing, or have a family member who does; I have my wife for this. Otherwise you can get things comically to badly wrong.
Svaneti doesn’t mind if you do home renovation, or even building construction, on any scale (for personal or small business use), with no signage or fences to put up, no print of the proposed finished project with contact numbers and due date. Tbilisi: the reverse of all these things is required. More control, more bureaucracy, but also more following of building codes to try to ensure that you get it safe, and right.
Tbilisi: gone are the days when my parents, on their first visit to Georgia in 2004, said that after growing up in Zimbabwe and also living in Indonesia for the middle of the 1990s, they were experiencing the worst roads of their lives in the capital. Both traffic and road improvement have grown apace these last two decades.
Svaneti: also great steps forward since those years when it would take you six hours to drive in 1st and 2nd gear the 120 km from Jvari to Mestia, on mostly dirt and gravel roads. Now these are almost everywhere cement and asphalt. BUT there are many sections on this stretch where half the road width has fallen away, and needs repairing from a single lane (bi-directional). They tried to do the restoration as fast as possible before the elections we’ve just had, to say, “Look how good we are,” and much of the newer asphalt is from this summer as well, with many people saying it was done too fast and not well enough at all. Plus there’s frost heave from some years ago now, left untouched and hazardous. So, very mixed results.
In Svaneti, heat your home with free electricity and a huge wood-burning Svan stove, for which you’d better have wood seasoned for 6-12 months or longer. In the big city, pay for central heating from piped gas warming the water in your radiators and faucets.
Tbilisi remains politically very diverse, as one would expect a decent-sized city, and the capital at that, to be. Svaneti is almost all GD, as far as I have heard from many horses’ mouths. This despite Saakashvili’s very energetic pacification of the place from the Aprasidze mafia-run years and restarting of its hospitality/tourism and infrastructure spheres. Rule of law was restored, violently but decisively, and the place made safe for single women trekkers, even. Now, there, most people won’t dare to notice or talk of the re-flowering of corruption post-Misha; but a few will dare.
Pluses and minuses in both locations, for sure. We lasted 10 winters in Svaneti before deciding that, with no guests for the white season, we both desperately needed and could afford to winter away in relative comfort, seeing everyone in Tbilisi and elsewhere for whom we’d had little enough time that decade. And, sure enough, the electricity on our snowy last two days in Svaneti was more off than on. They say that if the village asks for a comprehensive overhaul of the power system to prevent such outages, the money for such an undertaking will be recouped by making power non-free from then onwards. So, we’ve gritted our collective teeth and borne it. I’ll always miss Svaneti’s winter beauty, and anyway plan to return for Lamproba, the late-winter festival of torches, in February. Until then, Tbilisi wins out.
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
