A Walk With Til

02-23-05 A Walk With Til

I met a man named Til, the kind of man who could be the protagonist in a great travel writing book. He is sturdily built, from Bonn Germany, speaks English with a healthy Welsh accent from his university days in Aberystwyth, and is completely blind without a pair of thick glasses.

His laugh is more like an intense giggle which consumes his body and face and is contagious to the point where one notices similar body laughs consuming companions, rooms, trees, carpets, and mountains. Til spends his time roaming across Asia; in fact not a week after I met him, he left for his second tour of adventuring in Afghanistan.

More NGO development bum than secret service agent, what he really enjoys is a good stiff walk through alpine terrain, eating a full jar of new yoghurt, and a quiet game of chess, at which he excels.

On a monday afternoon, Til and I met in the English bookstore in Tbilisi, and started just such an adventure. I had just bought a couple of new books which seemed interesting, and complaining of the weight added to my pack already full of language and chantbooks, Til insisted on taking the whole lot uphill himself, saying in his Welsh accent, “I’m always in training for the next mission, whatever it will be.”

We walked uphill, twisting and turning into the jungle of little cobblestoned alleywalls that remind a visitor that this is infact an ancient city that existed before a Soviet redevelopment plan contorted the downtown areas into massive boulevards, be-statued traffic circles, and great concrete monuments of sub-aesthetic heroicism.

Perhaps with a background in communist mentality, the works of art that litter Tbilisi and many other Soviet cities are symbols of worker’s freedom; but to me they are as unpalatable as the official policies that moved people from their traditional homelands into identical cubicles in concrete apartments to work in ant-like factories. If an artpiece’s only value is it symbology, nothing could be more persuasive as a discredit to this genre of concrete monolith.

A great statue of a woman, painted in bright silver, holding a drinking bowl ‘tasi’ and a sword, overlooks Tbilisi. While other statues receive some criticism from Georgians, and the Lenin and Stalin statues were quickly torn down after the breakup, this great woman’s statue is still said to be the protectress of Tbilisi. She seems to have become a Saint Nino figure for the city, and though the statue is as ugly as the next, she has taken on the symbology of an ancient story; the ancient tradition of female protectress, which has in recent millenium been attributed to the role of Saint Nino and the Mother of God, but from an earlier time, a time of wine culture, sun worship, and animal sacrifice, could have been associated with the great fertility earth goddesses of ancient times. Who can know?

Til and I emerged from the old city and began climbing straight up the shaly, crumbly hills that emerge from beneith the concrete of the city in the same way that the Pasadena hills rise straight out of Los Angelos. We battered our way up over sliding rock and muddy gullies, emerging finally on top of a thirty meter precipice affording a view down to the MtaTsminda church directly below us and a magnificent panorama of the city (and her protecting monstrocity of a statue on the opposite hillside).

We climbed further, arriving at the base of a massive radio/TV tower which one learns not to see anymore after the first initial shock of seeing it upon arrival in Tbilisi. It is absolutely massive, dominating the skyline, standing on the highest hill above Tbilisi’s oldtown and stretching at least eighty meters up towards a heaven of information robots.

Nearby, the remains of a funicular cable-car station stands side by side with a series of ‘bellevieu’ restaurants, now derelict without the operationof the cablecar. As derelict attracts derelict, I slid my recently withdrawn $600 in rent and language lessons money out of my wallet and into a side pocket as Til and I started recounting every robbery situation we had ever heard of or been involved in.

Personally I have yet to feel even mildly threatened in this poor city of two million. But Til was once handily and without incident robbed of ten dollars on a bus by three men who were discerningly mild-mannered and nonchalant (read well-experienced). Much worse are stories of drunk Georgians with weapons at supras and the accidents which ensue.

Leaving this pleasant area, we tramped out across the mountaintop on a 4x4 track through mud and a light covering of snow, telling inspired travel stories. Til worked in Georgia for a year a while back, and used his time to take trips all over the place while working for the CARE NGO, hiking up and down mountains, visiting remote villages, and generally having a great time. In fact, last Saturday he took a marshutka into the mountains, disembarked on a whim, and hiked five miles up through the snow drifts of some random valley to nowhere in particular. Eventually, ‘fresh bear tracks, and a paranoia of starving wolf packs’ brought him back to the military highway and a returning marshutka, he confided.

I confided that I have had a steadily decreasing threshhold of adventurism since age twelve when I used to walk across the top of old railroad bridges high over shallow rivers, ‘just for kicks.’ Since then, I seem to be doing less and less things just to get myself in trouble, but Til seems to be getting worse. I don’t know what is involved in trans-Iranian travel, but yesterday he left for Yerevan, Armenia with the plan to take either a bus or a train across Iran and into Afghanistan. Okay...? Not exactly what I would be doing on a weekend.

Eventually we emerged on top of a snowy ridge, and looked far down at the sprawling ugliness of Tbilisi’s Sabertalo suberb of concrete blocks. I tried to pick out my building but couldn’t decide which one of ten identical buildings it might be. We followed some old tracks down a snowy bank, then traversed a steep arroyo and climbed up and out the other side to the next ridge. Below was Turtle lake and the replica Svanetian tower which directly overlooks the Vake and Sabertalo districts. Ice covered the lake, and we admired the ice circles and thaw cracks that we could see with a perfect bird’s eye view. Not a bird to be seen however, we were the only ones.

In summer snakes and bandits prowl the hills, but I think winter sends both into holes to hide.

We talked about myths of Georgian history, me spouting the traditional supra line that the Russians brought only a dissolution of traditional Georgian values... but Til presented an opposite perspective, saying, ‘the Soviet Union brought healthcare, security, organization, industrial growth, jobs... to a country that knew only strife. The reason Georgia was one of the most corrupt Soviet States was because the Georgians were already corrupt, and now they are just returning to their former, pre-Soviet ways and that is why nothing here works.’

This is kind of depressing, and though I didn’t necessarily disagree, we eventually conceded to the idea that Georgia’s ineffectiveness is the result of just another case of two conflicting ways of life struggling to emerge from a colonialist era. On the one hand, I conjecture that pre-Russian Georgian society was somewhat tribal, having local nobles, family networks, strong traditions, and ties to history and family name. This system was supplanted by Russian Tsarist bureaucracy in the early 19th century, and at least for the Georgian church, which is actually the only subject I know anything about, was severely disruptive to its structure and organization.

For example, the Georgian church system was something akin to the medieval European system, with monasteries owning land and supporting not only themselves but also being the hubs of local economic, social, educational, and charitable work. Bishoprics were relatively small in geographical area, but had close contacts with neighbors. I’m studying this because each bishopric developed their own subtle variations on the canonical church chant melodies based on their local folk singing culture. Today we have twenty variants for any single chant text, all equally beautiful and interesting.

The Russian system centralized all income, dissolved local bishoprics, and instated a salary system for the new Russian bishops, priests trained in new Russian-language seminaries, and new Russian church choirs. Georgian chanting families, who had been supported by the church for generations, were suddenly out of livelihood and needed to find work. This forced the oral tradition of training new master chanters into swift decline.

Even monks began to receive a salary, unheard of in the Georgian system where monks were without possession and depended entirely on the community to which they served.

Later, the Soviet government overthrew this imposed hundred year system and introduced another system which tried to eliminate Georgian’s ties to their past, their families, and their traditions. The Soviet system successfully wiped out the remaining Georgian monastic and church culture, the traditional heritage centers for Georgian literary, philosophical, and musical learning.

So Georgians have tried to adapt, and not too successfully, to a series of new systems of thought and organization, while strong clanal and family relations from the old Georgian system still hold fast. Without strong cultural systems in place, what holds a culture together? Old Georgian values are almost myth, and live mostly in the hands of young revivalists, people who study the old ways from books, imagine what life was like, and try to recreate it. Old people in the villages still get by as subsistance farmers, the way they always have, and yet even the oldest cannot remember a time that was not the Soviet Union.

A mere half hour of skidding down through the mud, and we were walking the streets again.

Back at homebase, Til and I each ate a whole jar of yoghurt over three games of chess, and then headed to a farewell supra, where I was forced to be Tamada for a crowd of twenty. Thankfully Luarsab was there to help coach me, and the bass from our Sameba Cathedral trio, Ladi, showed up and we sang through our complete repertoire of folk songs throughout the four hour meal.

Of course many of my toasts had to do with Til and his travels, his family, his good health, his past and future, what little I had learned about him. But before the fifth toast even arrived, he hissed a warning, ‘one more toast to me and you won’t live through the night!’ Georgian tradition won out over this death threat, but Til’s kingliness as the guest of honor took a hit in oratory extrapolation, and he returned to the status of being a crazy guy with a dispensation towards mountains, yoghurt, and chess.

Goodbye Til and hope to see you again!