Georgia by Peter Nasmyth

Author:Peter Nasmyth [NASMYTH, PETER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS003000, HIS010010, TRV009040, TRV0000
ISBN: 9781468316247
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

The water garden, Novy Afon, in the more orderly, pre-war days

I remembered his over-the-top descriptions from The Birth of a Man sitting near here, recovering from bee-stings, triumphantly dipping bread into a pot of honey. When he looked up he saw Georgia as a kingdom full of “jewels, silk and happy children,” “sowing it with kaleidoscopic treasures,” and the Caucasus mountains as a “magnificent church” built by sinners “to conceal their past from their own conscience.” Chekhov also had passed through Abkhazia declaring “the scenery is maddeningly beautiful … every little bush, every shadow in the mountains, all the delicate shades of the sea and sky offering me a thousand plots.”

Finally we arrived at the caves, only to find them locked.

“Must be a strike,” said our guide. “Part of the troubles.” We descended from the bus, milled around the closed-up reception centre, with that so near and yet so far feeling. Then I happened to glance across the valley where, to my astonishment, I saw a genuinely ‘magnificent church’ perched on the opposite hill, not once mentioned by our guide. A huge building consisting of silver tipped pastel blue domes bubbling up out of the mountain-side, its walls painted in rich yellows and red, and crowned by spires. What, we all asked her excitedly, was this?

“It’s the old Novy Afon Monastery,” she said, adding casually: “It’s not interesting.”

She seemed greatly surprised by our desire to visit it.

“It’s just been repainted,” she said. “It only looks good on the outside. There’s nothing there.”

But she convinced no one. The bus was turned round and driven to the bottom of the hill. “Well if you really want to visit it, you’ll have to walk up the hill,” she said unhelpfully. But to her surprise, everybody did just that.

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