the grey city

Tbilisi's one exception from the car

Coming back to Tbilisi is for me always a strange feeling. Even with the free bottle of wine handed out at passport control, I still feel like a stranger or perhaps like an old acquaintance - a person you hadn't had time to call for some time, not that it was your fault, you had lots of things on your plate, but you're not quite sure how the other person feels about your absence of contact. But then, they didn't call you either, so you think there wouldn't be any hard feelings. But like that friend, I want to see Tbilisi doing well, growing, and succeeding. Riding through the city in a car or a marshrutka though is depressing. You see all the worst and terrible parts of the city and with a first-person-shooter view of the traffic and you become convinced that your friend is in trouble. 

Tbilisi: the Grey City

The grey city

Jens Lehmann, footballer on the German National team, once tweeted during his visit, "Hello Tiflis, everything grey with one exception." Georgians everywhere locked arms towards this unwanted aggression, combining a defense even mightier than when the South Ossetians and Russians crept the border inwards a few clicks south, they flew to Facebook and Twitter to humiliate and attack Lehmann in an otherwise fair statement. Viewed from high up in the Radisson where he was probably staying, Tbilisi is a grey city. It really can't be argued. And the faces of the city that the visitor might see the most - Dinamo, Ortachala, Didube, i.e. transit stations and stadiums - are surrounded by concrete leviathans. Even the post-modern structures meant to show how contemporary Tblisi is are something of Brutalist throwbacks, horrific architectural tributes to times gone wrong, using only white, grey and blue glass in their architectural themes. While riding in a marshrutka across town, passing frozen, unfinished construction projects, one after the other, dreams that never came to pass, or old Soviet buildings, falling apart and crumbling, the inhabitants doing their best to stitch balconies and wires together, I couldn't help but to think of Lehmann's tweet. Tbilisi is a grey city.

And how depressed was I at first glance. It seemed that my old friend had gotten messed up in a drunken stupor since I had left and got into one too many brawls at the local khinkali parlor. But then, didn't Tbilisi always look like that? A bit rough and edgy? It takes one to get out of the car and to start walking around to discover all the secret gardens, grapevines, new graffiti, lively markets, flowers, woodworked balconies, cliffside houses. Once I got around to this, once I left the realm of the simple visitor and back to the realms of a lover, I was able to once again appreciate the hidden beauties of this weirdly Platonic city. 

Tbilisi: the Colorful City

Erekle II Street

Tbilisi is a hard city to explain. It's a city of so many opposites and contradictions, that just the idea of explaining it threatens to tear apart the fabric that holds the city together. Even the founding of the city is a contradiction, back in the fourth century, the Georgian King Vakhtang Gorgasali founded the city as the new Georgian capital, but archaeological remains show that there was an ancient city here even before that. But the contradictions now are even more compelling than they ever were. The city balances very finely on the summit between two deep cliffs - on the one side, it struggles for Europe, Georgia's latest Holy Mountain, but on the other, it's pulled under the mire of an "Asian backwardness" - Georgians focus on their shared history with Greece and France while at the same time forgetting their shared history with the Arabs, Turks, Azeris, Russians and Armenians. They are held back by long patriarchal traditions that seem to both cripple and empower the people. Women have full equal rights - yet suffer from unrecognized discrimination and harassment, yet again are often held on the pedestal as both breadwinner and foundation of many families. The people often call themselves  ultra-Orthodox, but the wood cross necklace wearing warriors of Christ are usually just staring idly outside of Church, smoking, drinking and eating sunflower seeds. The city itself is in a state of collapse and ruin, but it's also in a flourishing renaissance; buildings are falling apart everywhere, but new ones are appearing almost as fast as the old ones crumble - so many contradictions that all seem to be true at the same time. And it's all of those idiosyncrasies that perhaps help to explain why I - along with a host of other expats - have come to love the city. 

"Gabriadze Square"

How the city seems to not develop, perhaps even regress, and develop at the same time, is as though it were a function on a gigantic clock, the drumhead increasing in pressure, heavier and heavier and heavier, tensions rising but nothing happening, until smack - age old halted construction products transform into finished products all at once, making the city all of a sudden an almost different city. It takes ages to get anything good and productive done, but once one success comes, others come streaming in after it. Even social progress works this way, one might think. Everything relates to the supra, to the massive quantities of watered down wine, where in the beginning it seems you can drink like a titan, and the next thing you know, some floppy breasted grandma is tucking you in into the guest bed made up next to the refrigerator in the kitchen, one too many drinking horns later.