Batumi

Batumi

My phone had been off while riding around in Kakheti in my dress shoes. Unprepared to be biking at all, I only had two pairs of clothes with me and no phone charger for the whole week I was away.

When I returned to Tbilisi after Bush had made his hip-shaking fly-by, Luarsab excitedly called and said that we had to leave for Batumi the next morning. There was another sacred music conference and not only would I be reading my Sharadze paper again, but we would set up a photo exhibit, I would drive the car because we were bringing the whole family, and the most famous choirs in Georgia would be performing: Anchiskhati, Basiani, and Mzetamze!

The conference was amazing. Everyone loved our exhibit, Luarsab talked about the last Georgian monks on Mount Athos in Greece, I talked about the preservation movement, we went to amazing concerts, and I even sang one song on stage at the insistence of the Conservatory director who thought I was some kind of visitng international scholar or something hotshot like that.

The big oil boats chugged in and out of the harbor, the pebble beaches sang as small waves lapped up and back, smoothing their egglike shapes into fine acoustical rollers of symphonic underwater chinking. Last week I was sitting by a river in Kakheti and I heard such chonking and galumphing, I kept looking around for the origin of such strange sounds; finally I realized it the sound of boulders being bumped together under the snow-melt torrent of the mountain stream.

Palm trees and quiet balconied streets. A feel of summer lethargy and decadence. Batumi the pearl of the Black Sea port cities; I haven’t found a Georgian yet who doesn’t love this place.

On the way home along the Black Sea coast ‘highway’ (which peruses every small village and crosses several rivers), we were excited to point out the new bridge which replaced the one blown up by ousted local warlord Aslan Abashidze in 2004, just before being exiled to Russia by the new Saakashvili Rose Revolution government. He blew up all the bridges to Georgia as a final protest action against the encroachment to his private money laundering empire.

We wound our way up into the foothills with our singing-nun friend Mother Martha, and arrived at Jikheti Monastery to the sound of bells tolling in rapid rhythm as if we were a visiting bishop! False alarm. When we disembarked from the car under sprawling beach trees, their great arms extending over the gray stone church, the nuns looked embarrassed and apologetic. In fact, they were expecting a bishop, none other than Alaverdi cathedral’s Meope Davit, and he arrived within the next two minutes.

We sang chants for the bishop, toured a small chant and religious museum at the monastery, and dined to a quiet supra where I was pressured by one middle aged monk to choose one of the two righteous paths: become a monk, or start a family!
What a spectacular view, the same place I saw the raptor migration from last September, a sight I will never forget as hundreds of large birds wheeled on the thermals, making their way south to Africa and Middle East.