This week’s dream: a journey into the wilds of Georgia
“In the jigsaw of nations that is the Caucasus region, the most accessible, the most sophisticated and the jolliest is Georgia,” says Stanley Stewart in The Sunday Times. Russian romantics always had a thing about it, coming here to cheer up and “run off with a chambermaid”. It is beautiful, wrote the soldier, writer and diplomat Fitzroy Maclean, half a century ago, but its true charm lies in its people, who combine a “Mediterranean expansiveness” with “the dash and hardiness of the Highlander”. Little has changed since then, bar independence from the Soviet Union, which came in 1991. The wine is still “fabulous”, the food “wonderful”, the traditional vocal music thrilling. The capital, Tbilisi, is lovely, and beyond it, “gorgeous landscapes roll away beneath wide skies” to the snow-capped Caucasus Mountains.
At Katskhi, a monk lives on top of a pillar of rock, like a Syrian stylite 1,500 years ago. At Tsinandali, the grand estate of the Chavchavadze family, there is an “elegant” library where Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas attended literary salons. In Gori, you can visit the house where Stalin grew up. (The city seemed “a trifle conflicted” about its famous son. “He may have been a bastard, but at least he was our bastard,” seems to be the official line.) And then there is Svaneti, a beautiful, remote region generally said to be “the most purely Georgian” part of the country.
The road there winds through mountain gorges, and past meadows and woods that blaze with colour in autumn. Shepherds in white felt cloaks lean on crooks and watch you pass. In Ushguli – considered to be the highest village in Europe, at 6,900ft – many of the houses have fortified stone towers, making the place “feel like a refugee from the Middle Ages”, and there is a tiny church where the congregation consists of a few “black-robed” monks and an apparently devout tabby cat.
Steppes Travel (01285-601050, www.steppestravel.com) has a nine-day trip from £2,195pp, including flights.