Tbilisi: The Edge of the Real

The electricity will be on in one hour, says my landlady. She tells me that it is dark out all over town (ignoring the glittering chrome bridge over the Mtkvari River, ignoring the casino that casts neon shadows on the banks at night). She calls me ‘daughter’ and evades specifics. Won’t I come upstairs for dinner at eight, or perhaps nine? (She is so busy; she works so hard; she’ll ring when dinner is ready.) The call never comes.

So I eat out, in restaurants, but often I cannot seem to leave my neighbourhood. Whenever I think I’ve found the way, I am turned back on myself again. A street is closed off for reconstruction, a nameless alleyway is rerouted, crumbling buildings are bulldozed to make new paths. In their absence I discover more: abandoned observatories, synagogues hidden in courtyards, balconies with wrought-iron mermaids, angels and griffins carved into stone. The streetlamps on Botanikuri Street are uprooted at least four times in a given month because the workers have made mistakes in the wiring, and so the road to the old fortress is closed off. I do what the locals do, and simply detour through the pastel apartment buildings which have now been colonised by builders, who leave behind plastic bottles stinking of moonshine when they leave.

Tbilisi has always been a fragmentary city, a carnival cosmopolis for Azeri merchants and Armenian carpet weavers, holidaying Russian painters, Silk Road traders and Syriac holy men. It remains — in the eyes of so many Georgians — a borderland between those two all-encompassing categories of Georgian and foreign. Tbilisi is not ‘the village’ — a vague Georgian term denoting homemade wine and virginal sixth cousins, evenings playing on the pandauri and toasting to the blood of enemies. Nor is it ‘the mountains’, those vertiginous and wildflower-drunk passes that nobody I meet in Tbilisi has ever visited, but which comprise the subject of at least half the folk songs I hear sung outside my window before dawn.