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Tbilisi

Posted by Jim St. George on October 23, 2018

Posted in: Asia, Georgia. 2 comments

Here I am outside the Narikala Fortress, originally built by the Persians in the 4th century

I was looking forward to Tbilisi, a historic capital wedged between the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires. It’s a place I have long wanted to visit and it definitely lived up to and even exceeded my hopes.

It’s hard to say that there is anything specifically great about Tbilisi (known typically as Tiflis until 1936) except that it just has a great feel to it. Because of its location at the crossroads between east and west it has always been something of a cosmopolitan city, something evidenced by the wide range of architecture. And the fact that the weather was just about perfect – sunny with low humidity and highs in the upper 60s – didn’t hurt. This thing about travel during the shoulder seasons can work really well.

We stayed at the Rooms Hotel Tbilisi, sister hotel to the place we stayed in Kazbegi. I think these are the only two hotels they’ve done but it’s an absolutely great model turning old buildings into lively and exciting spaces.

What is there to do in Tbilisi? You can walk around a lot. The old city is small but definitely worth a visit or two with some good restaurants packed in. The Bridge of Peace over the Kura River is a particularly beautiful walkway. You can take a cable car from right near the Bridge of Peace up to the 65-foot Mother of Georgia statue, erected in 1958 to celebrate Georgia’s 1,500th anniversary. Or you can ride a funicular up to Mtatsminda Park, home of a 200-foot high ferris wheel with great views of the city.

Mark in the ferris wheel of Mtatsminda Park

One surprise was the Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art. I wandered in one afternoon after lunch and a pleasant hour or two reading in a park, not expecting much. Instead it was one of those serendipitous moments when you learn something truly interesting. Zurab Tsereteli, you see, is Georgia’s most prominent modern artist and, since 1997, President of the Russian Academy of Arts. We’ve actually seen two of his more famous pieces in Moscow, a decidedly controversial statue of Peter the Great – occasionally voted one of the ugliest statues in the world – and the somewhat more conventional Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

The current exhibit in Tbilisi’s Museum of Modern Art is a collection of recent work, large oil paintings from the last 10 to 15 years mixed in with some large statues he’s done over the years. It’s a remarkable body of work for someone who would have been in his late 70s and early 80s when he created them. It was fun to learn about this giant in Georgian and Russian art, though I would try to forget that he’s a big friend of and apologist for Vladimir Putin.

Tsereteli’s Dima with Tonic and Gin. I can’t say exactly what that title means but I like the painting.

And then the other big event for us was an evening with Patty and Chaz, a couple from St. Louis we met and enjoyed drinking with in the Maldives. Just before we pulled into Kazbegi a few days ago I saw on Facebook that they were leaving Kazbegi. I messaged Patty to ask if we had just missed them and we discovered that we would cross paths for one night in Tbilisi, so we made plans to have dinner. It’s one thing we enjoy a lot on this adventure is meeting friends – sometimes old friends, sometimes intrepid travelers we’ve met along the way – in obscure places. I’ll call Georgia obscure enough to qualify.

A fun evening with Patty & Chaz. Officially they live in St. Louis but they seem to be on the road almost as much as we are, and just as likely to be in some pretty obscure place. Last time Maldives this time Tbilisi. I’ve suggested we do the next meeting in Zanzibar.

This is our last stop in Georgia; from here we head down to Armenia for six nights. One word, though, about Georgian wine. For years, particularly in recent years as I’ve read Russian and Soviet history, I’ve read about these great Georgian wines. Over and over you hear how surprisingly good they are and I was looking forward to trying them. Surprising, yes. Good, not so much. Perhaps they were good in comparison to what else you could get in the Soviet Union in the 1940s or 1960s, but Mark’s estimation was that they ran from tolerable to terrible. I probably wasn’t quite that negative but I would say that the gap between reputation and execution was perhaps the biggest I’ve ever experienced. Let’s just say I won’t be hunting out the Georgian Wine section in Manhattan liquor stores when we settle there in a few months.

Mark on the Bridge of Peace

And standing beneath the Mother of Georgia. She has a bowl of wine in her left hand signifying Georgian hospitality and a sword in her right hand for, well, just in case…

Part of the Tsereteli exhibit

And one more I liked, titled simply Sergei

One feature of the former Soviet Union that I’m always amused by are these underground passageways to cross major streets. I mean, you certainly wouldn’t want to interfere with vehicular traffic, after all. One you get down there there are all sorts of little shops and people selling stuff and, often, bad musicians.

A funky little restaurant in the old city where we had a frustrating meal, one of those places that after you wait and wait for food the waiter says “It will be here in five minutes” and fifteen minutes later you’re still waiting. The setting was nice though.

The original Grapevine Cross, carried by St. Nino into Georgia in the 4th century after she was given it by Mary herself, now in Tbilisi’s small but elegant Sioni Cathedral

Christ sitting in the dome of the new Holy Trinity Cathedral, consecrated in 2004. The main cathedral of the Georgian Orthodox Church, this is pretty much the only finished space; the vast majority of the interior remains to be painted. I guess we’ll come back in 10 years or so to see how they’re doing.

And finally a view of a little bit of Tbilisi and the Kura River across to the Holy Trinity Cathedral from up near the Narikala Fortress. Fall really is beautiful here.

Sheki

Posted by Jim St. George on October 14, 2018

Posted in: Asia, Azerbaijan. Leave a Comment

We stopped en route to Sheki to ride cable cars up into the mountains

We loved Baku but we were eager to go to Sheki, described in Lonely Planet as “Azerbaijan’s loveliest town.” I mean, how bad can that be, right? Well, OK, it had its charms but we weren’t exactly enamored of it.

Sheki, with a population of 64,000, lies about four-and-a-half hours northwest of Baku. Leaving Baku we found ourselves in a big, rolling desert for quite a while before we got any sense of the Caucasus but eventually we started to get into green foothills. We had made plans to stop en route at a little town for lunch and then again at a ski area where you can ride cable cars up and down the mountains. Both stops made the drive a lot more pleasant than just motoring on though the home-made wine at lunch was not exactly up to par. OK, it was awful, but the rest of lunch was good.

How’s that for a bucolic lunch setting?

Once we got to Sheki we discovered there really wasn’t much there. The main draw is an old “palace” – really an administrative building – from when Sheki was the capital of a small Khanate. Flanked by plane trees planted in 1530 (yes, nearly 500 years old), the building is modest from the exterior but inside it is pretty impressive, largely because of the stained glass. Each window consists of hundreds of hand-carved wooden pieces slotted together without metal fastenings. For whatever reason you weren’t allowed to take pictures from inside the building, so this photo is lifted from Wikipedia.

Not much to see from the outside but once you get inside the windows are beautiful

Beautiful indeed, but it’s a small building; it only takes at most 15 minutes to walk through. There were two other small museums in the old walled town but they were utterly forgettable. After that, what do you do in Sheki? Not much it turns out. There’s a big old caravansary (an old inn with a big courtyard to host caravan travelers) that takes another 15 minutes to walk around. And that’s about it, even though we had three nights scheduled here. For years as we’ve been traveling I’ve felt sorry for people on package tours who pull into a town like this, stop overnight, and then leave the next day. This time I was a little jealous.

For about $1.20 each we bought tickets to a local art museum. Really not much to see but the ladies who work there were lovely and so happy to show us around.

The old town – palace, caravansary, and so on – along with our hotel were all up the hill a bit from the modern town and Mark went down there to explore while I hung out to read. He came back pretty discouraged; nothing at all that resembled what one would call a “restaurant.” We ended up each of the three nights in Sheki at a restaurant just a few minutes from our hotel that was little more than tables set out under some trees with a pretty limited menu. The good news was that the food was actually really good and the people were really friendly. It’s a little strange eating outside at night when the temperature is barely 50 degrees but with enough sweaters it ended up being charming. And cheap: good food for both of us along with a bit of vodka and wine for under $25.

One of the joys of eating outdoors is the opportunity to make new friends

In the end I did find Sheki charming, though three days was a bit much. I spent one day a little under the weather from something I ate for lunch (and, choices being as limited as they were we still went back there for lunch the next day…) but when I got down to the modern town it really was pretty. I sat in a park to read but that didn’t work so well; within a minute a couple kids coming home from school stopped and sat right with me to carry on a conversation. In Azeri, which didn’t work so well so instead he pulled out his little guitar-like instrument and started playing for me. Then an old guy took it and played something before the kid got it back to play some more. Friendly people here, even after they decided I was serious that I wasn’t going to give them any money.

More new friends

That wraps up our somewhat brief journey through Azerbaijan. Now it’s off to Georgia.

How can you not be charmed by a town like this?

We managed to find a cute café where they made authentic espresso

Of course you’re often reminded that you are in the former Soviet Union

Sometimes it feels like nothing much has changed in many, many years

A second-story hallway in the old caravansary

One of the two nearly 500-year-old plane trees outside the palace

An old church that houses the other utterly unforgettable museum in the old town

Exterior of the Sheki Palace; the beauty is apparent only when you go inside

There are big foothills behind the town and I’d hoped to maybe do some hiking. Sadly there didn’t seem to be any trails so that didn’t work so well.

Mark at our lunch stop on the way to Sheki. The greenery behind him? Plastic.

And me at the same lunch wearing a warm sweater that I (wisely) picked up in Baku before heading into the mountains

Our cable cars

These Azeri guys offered to take our picture up on the mountain but then wanted to capture themselves too

The food was good and really cheap. Here you see pickled cabbage, a yoghurt dish, and fresh greens that were spectacularly good

And keeping with the theme of new friends, this was the guy who made us dinner every night. By the third night we were buddies.

While we had mixed feelings about staying in Sheki for three nights Boston Bear was a big fan. For $90 we had a two-room corner suite where he had his own bed. Score!

Baku

Posted by Jim St. George on October 11, 2018

Posted in: Asia, Azerbaijan, UNESCO World Heritage Site. 4 comments

I really did (heart) Baku. That stunning building behind me is one of the architectural wonders of the city.

To my surprise I fell in love with Baku. I’d actually been here a couple times in the early aughts when I worked for an international NGO; my memory was that Baku was OK, but nothing special. Traveling for work is a lot different from being a tourist though and during our four days here we discovered great food, great parks, and great architecture all at a fraction of the price we would pay in other big cities.

A few things to know about Baku. It’s the capital of Azerbaijan and, with a population of 2.2 million people, the largest city on the Caspian Sea and in the Caucasus region overall. It’s a boom town dependent on oil and its fortunes over the years have ebbed and flowed with the demand for oil; these days, it’s booming. And here’s some trivia you might find useful some day: because the Caspian Sea lies in a big basin Baku actually sits some 93 feet below sea level. Thus it is both the largest city in the world below sea level and the lowest capital city. File that away for when you need it.

Here we are in front of the Maiden Tower, emblem of Baku

Because the Azeri people are primarily Turkish – the two languages are closely related and mutually intelligible – they are largely Muslim. Notwithstanding their affinity with the Turks, though, who are largely Shiite Muslims, the Azeris are primarily Shia like their neighbors in Iran to the south. But – and this is the huge difference, perhaps related to the effects of being an oil boom town, perhaps in part a reflection of the long Soviet domination here – the Azeri people are pretty much non-secular. So while Iranians just a few miles away live in a theocracy, I didn’t see a single woman in a burka nor did I hear the call to prayer once. How’s this for an unexpected experience in a Shia Muslim city: in 2009 Lonely Planet declared Baku one of the top ten cities in the world to party the night away. Strange that such a difference would exist in such close proximity.

During our stay here we experienced, to some degree at least, three separate parts of Baku. The Inner City is the old, historic town declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. The Maiden Tower – a 12th century tower of ambiguous purpose – is the emblem of not just Baku but Azerbaijan itself. We climbed the tower (kind of boring actually) and poked around the Inner City. And while the ancient walls were attractive, to me at least it felt as though the Inner City had been cleaned up a great deal since I was here maybe 13 years ago, and not entirely in a good way.

One of the gates to the Inner City. The walls were beautiful and there were some good restaurants just inside but otherwise I found the old town to be a little antiseptic.

The newer part of the city dates from Baku’s original oil boom in the late 19th and early 20th century. There are some really beautiful streets with grand turn-of-the-century buildings that clearly remind you of walking in Paris or Vienna. And in those great buildings are some really high-end stores that seemed awfully empty since although there is a lot of oil money floating around by most accounts not a lot of that flows to the vast bulk of Azeris.

Just a small sample of the attractive early 20th century buildings in Baku’s newer section

And then there’s the really new part of Baku reflecting the oil boom of the 21st century. Stunning architecture, an enormous parkway stretching some four miles along the Caspian that’s extremely well maintained, an attempt at building the world’s largest flag pole, an entirely new cultural region at one end of the park.

While there is a lot of new and ongoing construction in the city, two developments really stood out. The first was the Flame Towers that dominate the city’s new skyline. They are three glass skyscrapers, each shaped like flames. (Baku’s ancient history is based on the town being founded near the spontaneous flames that would erupt from the oil near the surface of the earth. As flames are central to the ancient Zoroastrian religion, the region was considered holy.) In the daytime they’re beautiful but at night they really come alive with some 10,000 lights creating a light show that displays variously such sights as the Azeri flag, water flowing, and massive flames burning. Now if I were designing a skyscraper I might not want to evoke in people’s minds huge cataclysmic fires, but it is truly striking.

The Flame Towers looming over Baku. The light show at night truly defines the skyline.

The other almost insanely beautiful building is the Heydar Aliev Cultural Center, designed by world-famous starchitect Zaha Hadid. We knew it was supposed to be beautiful but we were genuinely blown away by it. The building was closed on Monday, the only day we had to go there, so we didn’t go inside but the exterior is simply stunning, big flowing curves and striking movement. And as a bonus as we explored the exterior the grounds are decorated with large blow-ups of National Geographic photos shot by Azeri photographers.

The Heydar Aliev Cultural Center

(How is this for a coincidence? The very morning we were planning on walking out to see the building I was reading the morning Axios political update email. And there, item #9, seemingly randomly was a picture of the building simply calling it one of the most beautiful buildings on earth. Coincidence or proof that we’re being followed?)

One downside to the building can’t be attributed to Dame Hadid. It is named for Azerbaijan’s third president, a guy who created what can only be described as today’s authoritarian, dictatorial regime. Aliev had been a bigwig in the Soviet Union and after that government collapsed he began a quick rise to the top in his native Azerbaijan. He ruled for 10 years until just before his death in 2003 when he was succeeded by his son. And just in case it’s not clear that this is a family operation, the current vice president is the current President Aliev’s wife. With this much oil money at stake you wouldn’t want to risk letting it out of your control.

Mark & this stunning building

The only other downside to the Cultural Center – and this is shared by locations all over Baku – is that it is nearly impossible to get to on foot. This is a city meant for cars and the challenges of getting around as a pedestrian are significant. I won’t blame Ms. Hadid for that, either; she deserved all the awards she won with buildings like this.

For walking, though, you can’t beat Baku Boulevard, the huge park running along the Caspian Sea. Mark & I walked pretty much the whole distance to get to the new Yarat Contemporary Art Center with its current show of Azerbaijani artists from the post-Stalin era. The whole route was beautiful but oddly we saw almost no one out. Sure, the weather was a little misty, but it wasn’t that bad and it was a Sunday morning. For us, though, it was so nice that although we hadn’t intended to initially, we ended up walking all the way back too. And for whatever it’s worth, the next day, Monday, the weather turned nice and there were lots of people out enjoying the park then.

Just a small section of the seaside park, ideal for strolling. Along both sides were old photos, some dating back to the 1920s, showing how the city has evolved.

And so yes, there was a lot to love about Baku. The food was excellent and almost insanely cheap; our hotel was beautiful and a fraction of what you would pay for that quality in any other large city; and we loved the parks and buildings. We had debated scheduling a five-day stop and decided not to but now I kind of regret that decision. Instead we’re moving north up into the Caucasus mountains themselves, eventually into Georgia and Armenia.

The ticket booth outside Maiden Tower had these ridiculously cute kittens just hanging out. It was a little difficult to get Mark into the tower.

The Eye of Baku on a wet, moody day

There’s quite a story associate with this site, National Flag Square. At 531 feet the flagpole was briefly the tallest in the world but after just a couple months with the record it was overtaken by the 541-foot flagpole in Dushanbe, Tajikistan which itself was quickly surpassed by a 561-foot flagpole in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Worse yet, not long after it went up at a cost of $24 million or so the flag pole started to lean and had to be quickly taken down. So now they have this big monument to … nothing.

New friends Mehemmed and … I didn’t get the other guy’s name … in front of Baku Crystal Hall, built in 2012 in time to host the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest. These guys were just walking along the parkway as I was headed back and wanted to chat and practice their English. They were interesting and fun, curious about why I was in Azerbaijan. When I told them we were traveling through the Caucasus, including a week in Armenia, their mood quickly changed. Azerbaijan and Armenia, you see, are mortal enemies and have been for eons. Armenians, you see, are Christians while Azeris are Muslims. And even if they’re all secular they are still regional enemies. As far as Mehemmed and his friend are concerned, Armenians eat their children and rape their daughters. Maybe not that bad but he honestly couldn’t understand why someone who seemed civilized (me) could want to go to Armenia. Strange how hate can permeate a culture.

Out beyond both the Flag Square and the Crystal Hall was the Yarat Contemporary Art Center. We went out there to see an exhibit of post-Stalinist Azeri “masters” which was a pleasant little trip. That’s me down there while Mark was up on the second floor. It was the kind of art museum I like: reasonably small, good descriptions, and free!

“Marine Monuments of the Caspian Sea” by Nadir Qasimov, one of Mark’s favorites

“In the Flowering Garden” by Farhad Khaliov, my favorite

On his way back from the Contemporary Art exhibit Mark stopped at the national rug museum. It was in a very cool building but he describes touring it as 20 minutes of his life he’ll never get back.