Touring Khevsureti: The hills are alive…

This past Friday, I found myself in the middle of a high altitude, musical supra in the village of Barisakho, Khevsureti. Anchoring one end of the heavily laden table was a quintet of Khevsuretian women singers, dressed in smart denim and black, with a striking complement of traditional bushy white wool hats on their heads. Perched at the other end were members of the Sighnaghi, Kakheti-based ensemble Zedashe and in-between sat 20 participants of the Village Harmony music camp.

We were at the end of a week of high-altitude, high-spirited traveling through the peaks and valleys of Khevsureti – Georgia’s remote and mountainous region along the border with Chechnya.

Tour organizer Mindia Tsiklauri arranged our trip. Tsiklauri, 33, is originally from Arkhoti, Khevsureti, but now lives in Tbilisi. Between June and September, Tsiklauri organizes trips into Kazbegi, Tusheti, and Khevsureti for a number of companies, including Georgica Travel and Wild Georgia. (During the rather extended off-season, he is a lecturer on tourist agency management at Ilia Chavchavadze University in Tbilisi). This trip marks his first collaboration with Village Harmony.

Village Harmony is a Vermont, USA-based non-profit that organizes summer camps which take place each year between May and October in many countries, including Georgia. A group of un-auditioned (but tuition-paying) teenagers and adults learn music together for a week and then perform a series of concerts. Some camps tour for two weeks; others have a more modest smattering of two or three performances. All learn world music at the hands of folk musicians teaching their native repertoire.

This camp was based in Sighnaghi, where participants learned a repertoire of Georgian songs from Kakheti, Svaneti, and Mingrelia as taught by Zedashe (an ensemble of young singers based in Sighnaghi, led by Ketevan Mindorashvili). At the end of their Sighnaghi residency and performances, a few intrepid (and flexible) souls stayed on to travel together into the highlands and on a rainy day in late October, we hit the road to Khevsureti together.

Off the grid in long johns

October is late in the year to be heading into the highlands. The safe season for travel in Khevsureti lasts a scant four months: June to September is when the weather and roads are the most pleasant. Even then, at the higher altitudes, the temperature can range from +25C during the day to below 0C at night making Khevsureti long john country virtually year-round.

The reason for long johns becomes obvious as soon as we leave the Georgian Military Highway and begin gaining some serious altitude – the temperature drops, and the landscape outside the car windows turns autumnal. The mountains are both severe and pastoral – on the hills leading up to high snowy peaks there are gold and red apples in the trees, beehives in backyards, and warm fiery colors in the hills where the leaves are turning in the crisp, quiet, cold air.

Unlike its neighbor Tusheti, Khevsureti is not yet set up for the solo traveler. Of all of the towns in Khevsureti, only one – Shatili – has a formal guesthouse. Cell-phone service is non-existent, and only a few towns can receive satellite phone service (where the cost of a call – GEL 9 per minute – is somewhat prohibitive). At each overnight stop on our itinerary – Roshka, Shatili, and Barisakho – we stay with Tsiklauri’s friends and relatives. Our drivers are likewise friends who have taken the better part of a week to drive our gaggle of 20 musicians into the Khevsuretian highlands. Tsiklauri did much of the organizing for this trip in person, driving up to Khevsureti from Tbilisi to make arrangements with hosts where there was no cell service.

The ungrateful dead

A city car can do the drive from Tbilisi to Barisakho. (There is, apparently, a marshrutka from Tbilisi to Barisakho, but no further). After Barisakho, though, you’d better be in a Niva or a similarly rugged vehicle. The hearty road-line on the map is, in fact, a narrow, rock-riddled, serpentine squiggle that demands both judicious and courageous driving.

At Barisakho, we get out of the marshrutka and have a hearty lunch of khatchapuri, bread, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs and – most memorably – vodka, which we drank copiously to fend of the chill in the air. After this, while we are waiting for the Nivas, someone produces a panduri, and we sing. A young woman from Maine brings out her fiddle and calls a short contra dance.

A few minutes into our warming activities, our host cautions us that a next-door neighbor has died recently. In Khevsureti, custom dictates that no revelry take in the village until a year has gone by. Muted, we put away our fiddles, panduris, and songs, and wait for our rides.

Our next stop is Roshka, the second highest continuously populated village in Georgia (after Ushguli, Svaneti).

The drive up to Roshka is slow, with the Nivas in low gear, winding slowly up the steep, narrow roads. It is a day of gray, heavy clouds. They hide the higher parts of the mountains, but the slopes that we can see are luminous with the red, orange and yellow of autumn.

Roshka is small, with only a handful of households. The roads are all unpaved and muddy, with an impressive top layer of cow manure. Electric lines run up the mountain to the village, but the electricity did not work while we were there. After dark, the otherwise silent night fills with the boom and roar of a generator, started up for our benefit, which powers the solitary bare light bulb over our dinner table.

We have dinner at the home of Shota Tsiklauri, whose house I, and seven others, are staying at for the night. With 20 descending for dinner, the other guests and I deem it considerate to stay out of the way, and so we sit on the second-story porch outside, where dinner will be, and experience a gradual, alarming drop in body temperature.

At dinner we are all cold. Supra a plein air in October in the mountains is a new and bracing experience for many of us. But here again, there is vodka on the table, and we partake of a few hearty toasts to make the cold recede a bit. And the food is good. A few of us go especially bonkers for cups of the thick raw local honey, which is sublime, especially with the tart mountain apples on the table.

And because this is a supra, and because we are singers, we all sing some more: big exuberant American shape-note songs, gospel and Georgian folk music. And then, through the noise we are making, there is a piercing, and, even for those of us whose Georgian is non-existent, unmistakably angry scream from the ground below our supra. The next-door neighbor’s brother has died recently. We have once more managed to break the Khevsuretian ban on singing in the wake of a funeral.

The supra fizzles out abruptly as, horrified, the participants head to their host’s houses to sleep.

Avoid the boulders and stop

before Chechnya

The next morning comes in a blaze. The sun is out, and the white peaks of the Caucasus gleam tantalizingly over the fiery patchwork of leaves in the hills. This is a glorious time to be up here. Frost tips the grass, and enormous gray boulders dot the landscape. The hills that bracket Roshka are covered in haystacks that pepper the landscape like gumdrops or rabbit droppings.

With careful planning, it is possible to do a day trip up to Roshka from Tbilisi. There are three lakes that one can hike to from Roshka – the Abudelauri lakes – which are three strikingly different colors. One, which is shallow, is a bright green color (from plants that grow at the bottom of the lake). Another is very deep, and dark blue. The third is white, “like milk,” according to Tsiklauri, from ice and fine glacial debris in the water. All are within 1.5 kilometers of one another, and can be accessed in a day-hike from Roshka.

Sadly, we do not have time for this hike. Instead, I go for a short, easy amble in the nearby hills. On my way back to the house for breakfast, I am waylaid by an old woman who leaves her herd of cows to herd me into her house and sell me a pair of scratchy wool socks. The floors of her house are covered with small red potatoes. She waves at these and grins.

After breakfast we drive to Shatili, near the border with Chechnya. The road to Shatili is somehow even more narrow and perilous than the road to Roshka. We pause periodically to clear the road of unacceptably large rocks from recent landslides. Black-blue slate slips down in slow cascades on all sides; the road here seems singularly impermanent.

We come to Shatili by way of the Datvis Jvari Pass (2677m). This is the part of the trip that shortens the tourist season. The pass, in late October, is already only intermittently passable. As we near the pass, the landscape turns abruptly from autumn to winter. Wet, heavy snow blankets the road. The snow-and-slate shoulders of the surrounding mountains are stark and stunning. We skid slowly along the road. Part sleigh-ride, part prayer tent, our Niva muscles through. After a brief heart-in-the-throat hurdle over the pass, we continue our slow way down into Shatili.

All along the watchtower: the birth of a tourist industry

At the heart of old Shatili there is a village of recently restored square stone towers, built upon an outcrop of stone in the mountain valley. The towers are connected to each other by a warren of walls, roofs, stairs and ladders, and climbing though the old stone village is like climbing through an MC Escher print. Many of the restored towers offer access to wide wooden balconies that look out over the valley. Each step through the nexus of towers offers a strikingly different view of the whole complex, and the valley below.

Shatili is slowly warming to tourism. Across from an old plot of slate square tomb, there is a landing-pad for helicopters. And one of the old towers is now a bed-and-breakfast, with a kitchen and bathroom (with plumbing) on the ground floor, beds on the floors above.

For our night in Shatili, half of our party stays at the bed-and-breakfast tower, where there are 10 beds in a single large room. The other half – including myself – stays at a guesthouse belonging to Mzia Chincharauli, where several women are working hard to lay out a supra spread. Dinner that night includes some fabulous khinkhali (both potato and meat varieties), wild mushrooms that some of our party harvested from the slate side of the mountain, badrijani (eggplant), fresh cheese, potatoes, and copious amounts of wine.

The next morning, we walk from Shatili to Mutso – a tower town perched high on a mountain southeast of Shatili.

On the way to Mutso, we walk through a valley whose walls are thick with fantastic icing-like drippy formations, as well as through gentle wooded areas which, when the upper peaks of the Caucasus are hidden by clouds, look like landscapes in northern New England. Occasional outposts of border guards peering down at us through binoculars remind us that we are near the border with Chechnya. We are careful to avoid it.

Mutso, 300 years old, is severe and imposing. It is apparently slated for renovation, but for now its decaying profile still stares darkly across the valley from its perch high on a mountainside. The climb up to the old tower town is sheer and narrow. Many of the buildings have collapsed and look like nothing more than the wild slate landslides that we have driven across to get here. Where there are no roofs, the tops of the standing walls, when viewed from above, look like cuneiform letters. A few tight structures still stand. Mutso, we hear, was inhabited until the 1950s, when Stalin forcibly relocated its inhabitants.

That will bring us back to Do …

The final day of our trip is spent back in Barisakho, where we are treated to one very full day of hiking, a horse race, a concert, a spontaneous football match (Khevsureti vs. Kakheti/USA, which happily ended in a 1-to-1 tie), and a supra.

Many people will attest that it is a pleasure to be a guest in Georgia. One hears stories of hikers being chased by persistent, would-be hosts bearing cha cha – and to be a guest at a good, earnest supra can produce an epiphany of new friendships. The Village Harmony campers have the additional advantage of being able to burst into song at the table – an act that is almost invariably greeted with delight… and more toasts.

In Khevsureti, the region’s traditions and customs are still strictly observed. We experience this in the lavishness of the hospitality that we receive, the enthusiasm with which our concert singing (and the Khevsuretian and Zedashe’s performances) is applauded - but also in the anger with which our inopportune singing is condemned. In this context, traveling as musicians present singular opportunities for communication and cultural exchange - and this cuts two ways.

At our final supra however, the singing ban is temporarily lifted.

Sitting at a table almost invisible under the burden of delicious dishes, singing mravaljamier at the top of one’s lungs, cheeks red and hot with wine, and belly full of fresh khinkhali, chicken stew, and fried fish, is an unbeatable way to spend a Friday night. And as a singer, there’s a feeling that you get as you plunge your voice into the stream of song and it blends with those of the other supra participants that you are somehow, at least for a moment, less of a tourist and more of a participant.

Visiting Khevsureti: Silver white winters that melt into springs

The season for traveling into Khevsureti is effectively over for the year. As winter settles in, and the prospect of more trouble with Russia looms, I fervently hope that by June 2007, the meteorological and political climate will make further trips into Khevsureti possible for all intrepid explorers – but especially for those with a song in their heart.

USEFUL NAMES AND NUMBERS

Tour Organizer
Mindia Tsiklauri (Tbilisi), 893 14 46 44
Languages: Georgian, Russian and English

Published in Georgia Today, 3 Nov 06