Military Highway to Qazbegi

Military Highway to Qazbegi
05-25-05

Village Harmony has a program going on right now: twenty Americans are here for two weeks studying folk music with the Zedashe Ensemble members. They were all in Sighnaghi for a week, but this week they are staying in a small village up one of the long valleys in the High Caucasus, a place called Karkucha, winter population twelve. I decided to join them there for two nights.

The May photo album will show the voyage into the mountains by minibus better than I can describe, but in brief I can say that we traveled up from the 80 degree heat of Tbilisi to such a height that we drove between banks of snow still twelve feet high. The Great Caucasus Range stretches like a wall between the Black Sea and the Caspian, some of it’s peaks 18,000 feet high. The road through the mountains is well maintained because it is the linking artery with Russia, the great Military Highway project built by hand and shovel more than a century ago.

First we climbed through foothills, past the great reservoir serenely commanded by the multi towered Ananuri Fortress, and across newly rebuilt bridges that cross and recross the flood plain of the potentially raging Aragvi River. The mountains slowly closed around the valley, the peaks looming larger, the cliffs steeper, until finally, the road began it’s abrupt ascent, climbing switchbacks straight up cliffs one thousand feet and out into the highlands.

Old Soviet tunnels and bridges took us over frightening crevasses and under snowdrifts, rockslide-threatening slopes of shale and mud hovering above. We climbed through snow embankments over the pass, satellite dishes at a small weather station pointed at reflectors on the hilltops nearby, and down into the surreal landscape of the inner Caucasus. I say inner because no longer is one just climbing or descending into or out of the mountains, now the mountains surround us in every direction.

I had made friends with everyone on the marshutka minibus already because the women sitting next to me at the beginning of the trip was also a chanter, and after humming one Easter chant together, she announced to the whole minibus that I was a chanter. Old ladies in the front of the bus gave me bread, repeatedly forcing more on me as we went along, and eventually procuring a little plastic container of cream cheese. The rough looking guy across the aisle offered me some of his coke, and the young looking mother of four on the back seat plied me with the questions of the Caucasus: family, homeland, marriage, and faith.

It was dusk as we approached my turn off. I didn’t have much of a plan, so the driver helped me find a local husband and wife to taxi me to the village where John and all the Americans were staying. We drove through puddles hopping with frogs, crossed gravel-bed streams, and navigated small hamlets of slate-walled houses, the narrow lanes twisting and turning narrowly through the buildings.

I arrived finally, in the dark, wearing my newly acquired Qazbegi region hat, a huge ball of sheeps wool protruding in all directions, looking as I had a full sheep still on my head. They couldn’t believe I had made it, and one after another I received big hugs of welcome from my Zedashe friends, Keto, Nika, Shmagi, Tamila, Shergil, and John, followed by catchup toasts from each of them.