Tsunda Church Opening

The Opening of Tsunda Church
January 17th, 2006

For three hundred years, services haven’t been served in Tsunda church, which dates from the 12th century. The church is made of the yellow stone favored for church buildings, and sits high in the air on an uncharacteristic stone foundation of black igneous rock. The reason for the extra space under the church, I learned later, was an internment area for deceased monks.

Inside the church, the walls were darkened with soot and only two slits for windows let in light. A new floor allowed us to be at the correct level to serve the liturgy, and a simple iconostasis had been built across the east wall.

The Vardzia monks were all up and mobilized by 8am, and we trooped through the arches, along the cliff edge trails past numerous caves, and down the switchback trail to a waiting jeep. Together we were seven men, and we arrived at the church early enough to make everything ready for the arrival of the bishop of Meskheti, who would serve the first liturgy. It was bitterly cold out, and by the time we arrived, I was starting to numb. I couldn’t stand to wait in the small church, so crunched through the snow taking pictures of the frozen trees and creeks, trying through the numbness in my head to feign an interest in the tracks of small animals.

The sun began to peak over the mountain about 9am, the light warming the top of a nearby ridge. The sunlight illuminated a frozen landscape of rock strewn hillsides, a few stonewalls, a couple frozen trees along ice-covered creeks, snow everywhere. I decided to tramp up there through the fields, hoping the sunlight would shine straight down to my frozen toes. My toes are always frozen, I must have bad circulation down there. I’m constantly hopping around, trying to beat the blood into them. Even in church services I have a whole discrete routine of ankle twists, knee bends, and body weight shifting to try to bring my feet back into the land of the living.

At the top of the ridge I was rewarded with sunshine, the light not so warming in terms of heat as in a certain energetic nourishment. Ah, how I loved the sun on the ridge top. I stood on a stone, closed my eyes, and felt the light on my eyelids. I huddled deeper in my sweaters, coat, and hat. Even though still cold, I felt better just to know that the sun was there. Standing like this, some villagers walking down the track nearby stopped to stare at me. I could hear them coming but I didn’t care. When it was silent for a while, I opened my eyes, and struck up a conversation, assuring them I was where I wanted to be.

Now I could see groups of bundled people walking from three directions towards the church. When I returned to the church, it was packed with kids and young adults, all holding candles and burning each other’s fingers with wax. Outside, huddled groups of leather-clad men idled in typical configurations of six or seven. Looking like a thug is in vogue at all manner of events and festive occasions in Georgia.

I wished the monk chanter were here so I could look forward to chanting the service. But he was having a Georgian week apparently, and was stuck somewhere either without a driver or without a car, someone having changed their plans at the last minute. I like the Orthodox service by itself, but I love the Orthodox service with chanting. Three nuns sounded like they were getting ready to chant the service, and when I heard them, they were actually quite good. I learned that they were used to singing services nearly everyday in the convent in Upper Vardzia.

The bishop arrived and Grigol and I were employed as bouncers, ‘sticherion,’ to hold the crowds back long enough to make a narrow human corridor for the hierarch to walk through. The interior of the church was only about 15 feet by 15 feet, and there must have been at least eighty people in there with another twenty shoving at the door.

I left at some point, wandered back up the slope to the sunlight, wrote in my journal, and promptly fell asleep on a patch up grass. I woke up to tittering and shouts as a group of teenage girls and a boy were laughing at me. I sat up enough to motion that I was alive, and hoped they would think I was just some drunk on the hill and leave me alone, and I guess they did, because with more laughing they continued on the their way. I fell asleep again until some men on the same road shouted at me to wake up or I would catch cold, and then I was embarrassed. I returned to the church, which was impossible to enter, but I stood near the door anyway.

In my journal entry from the hill I wrote, “I’m sitting only a hundred feet from a road that people are walking on, but no one notices me, here in plain sight. The sun is finally up, I am basking in the golden heat, what a blissful attention. Surrounded by snow, the whole valley and ridges around are covered in white. Dog barking in the village, smoke rising… I hear birds, and the distant cascade of a brook or river. It’s not quite a roar, but a dull gurgle, deep in the throat, a familiar sound that lives here, in this place…”

Later we went to a supra with the bishop, the monks, and a local group of men who had been rehearsing folk songs. I wouldn’t call them a choir, but they sang a bunch of songs. When the bishop learned I was a chanter, he made Grigol and I sing some songs as well, and it was painful to have to sing in only two voices. We needed a third but no one knew the parts. Both Grigol and I have low voices, so I sang the top tenor lines that Luarsab usually sings when we hang out together.

Our Toastmaster, or Tamada, was our friend Fr. Matthew from Vardzia, but the really interesting man at the VIP table was the local ‘headman’ or ‘gamgebeli.’ He has the biggest cranium I’ve ever seen on a human being. He actually looked like the depictions of Neanderthals that I’ve seen in Anthropology textbooks, and I’m not trying to slur him. This was a huge head, the eyes as far apart as most people’s ears. The bishop next to him is a man who stands six feet four inches, but his head looked pitifully undersized next to this man’s. I tried not to stare, but you know when something is really peculiar, you want to fix it into your mind somehow?

His face was fairly flat, the cheeks stretching back towards his ears forever. He wasn’t very fat, but his hands mirrored his head, and the glass of wine in his hand looked like a thimble in comparison to an equal sized glass in my hand. My head is about eight inches wide I guess, as I sit here and try to measure it. This man’s head would have been at least eleven inches wide and proportionately round. He must have been elected headman because of the size of his head I guessed.

Thankfully, this train of thought was interrupted by the arrival of the shishkebab. I was offered a skewer with ten pieces of meat on it. Like an amateur, I tried to use my fork to pull of one piece, but at a disgusted grunt from the chef, I grabbed the top of the skewer near his hand, and half rising out of my chair, I grabbed four or five large pieces with my other fist and yanked them down onto my plate. Grunting myself, I sat down and began to eat, as the chef moved on to the next guy at the table.

Funny thing about Georgia, it’s full of paradoxes. I had been watching this man making the shishkebab on an open fire in our dining room, and wondering why none of the heat from this fire was heating me up at all. I could see the flames easily, the fireplace being only about fifteen feet away, but I couldn’t feel a damn thing. The reason of course, in this land of paradoxes, was that the outer door was open for our entire supra, I suppose so that the servers wouldn’t have to open it each time they came. So we had a fire, but we had the door open too. I thought about that for a while until we sang another song. You see how numb my brain was?

All in all, it was a great morning. Tsunda Church was opened again to services after three hundred years of dormancy, and we enjoyed an incredible meal with the bishop and local guys. And I rediscovered the joy of sunlight, praise God there is a Sun. “Mze Shina” as the ancient pagan hymns used to say, ‘the sun is shining.’