Racha - October 2011

In October, a group of volunteers got together and went to Racha, a mountainous region in north central Georgia between the occupied territory of South Ossetia and the high mountains of the Svaneti Region. It was the weekend of Yom Kippur and the beginning of Autumn.

On Friday morning we all met in front of the Radisson Hotel in downtown Tbilisi. There were about ten volunteers and two Georgians in addition to the driver. The two Georgians were our colleagues from the police academy. Marina is a sixty year old English teacher from Utsera, a small village in Racha. We would be visiting her hometown, seeing where she grew up, and exploring the mountains along the way.

Marina is a very extroverted person with a gracious smile and kind heart. She wanted to show us a part of Georgia unexplored by most tourists and Georgians alike. As the president of an NGO focused on rural tourism, showing us her hometown was something of a personal mission for her. Racha is one of Georgians most beautiful regions with forests, rivers, and mountains in all directions and was well worth the drive.

Oni was our first stop. Oni was home to the largest Jewish population in Georgia for hundreds of years. It has the largest not working synagogue in the country. We met the caretaker of the synagogue who upon arrival explained to me that in the 1970s and 1990s most of the Jewish people left this area for Israel and a better life. The only Jewish people remaining were elderly folks who feel that Georgia is there home and don't want to leave. In Tbilisi it isn't much different, but you will find some younger Jews living and working in the capital.

I asked him if there were going to be Yom Kippur services and he explained that they haven't had a Rabbi in many years and that there were hardly enough people left to hold services. In affect, the synagogue was a museum. It was strange for me, being a Jew, standing inside a synagogue on Yom Kippur, and not being able to be part of the high holiday services.

Twenty minutes outside Oni is the village of Utsera. Utsera is a small farming village sitting on the hillside with a population of a few dozen families. There are practically no young people living there anymore and most folks are elderly. The houses are of the farmhouse variety, made mostly of wood, large rooms, and a small kitchen were the only heat in the house came from.

We would later learn that in Utsera, everyone was a Metreveli. That is, everyone had the same last name and came from the same lineage. If someone has the last name Metreveli then you knew they came from Utsera. It was something Marina was very proud of.

Marina grew up in a small country house on these hillsides for the first fifteen or so years of her life before moving to a small city to pursue her education. Her house was built by her grandfather in the mid-1800s and with a few remodeling jobs here and there still remains. The entire lower housing section is close to two hundred years old and reflects a time where people and animals lived closer together. Animal stalls where in one corner of the house to keep animals warm during frigid winters and the kitchen was in another where families spent a great deal of time around the fire trying to stay warm.

The upper section of the house was built during Soviet times from wood, has high ceilings, and multiple rooms usually connected through a series of doors that make farmhouse in Georgia effectively a maze of rooms all connecting to each other. The exterior has a balcony that wraps around almost the whole house. When you look at the house from the road you can see where the rock built house of the 1800s meets the wooden house of the 1900s. It is quite remarkable really to see the contrast between old and new.

On Saturday we took a trip high up into the mountains along a dirt road that crept higher and higher towards the Russian and South Ossetian borders. We had a police escort as we were employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Being foreign employees has its benefits. They squished a dozen of us in the back of a pickup truck and we were off on a two hour off road bouncing-a-thon into the Racha forests and mountains.

South Ossetia is a breakaway region in Central Georgia that become occupied by the Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is effectively off limits to everyone and remains a sensitive topic when talking to Georgians. South Ossetia is also the place were the 2008 five day war with Russia got started when Georgia started a full scale military offensive in respond to claims that villages and town in South Ossetia were under attack. The Russians responded swiftly by occupying parts of western Georgia and defending Ossetia with military force the Georgians could not match. The war ended five days later.

After stopping along the way to sample to stinky mineral water we arrived at a military checkpoint with spectacular mountain views and then proceeded up to the high mountains where all three borders meet on the snow covered peaks of the High Caucasian Mountains. On one side you could see the Russian outposts a little higher up the mountain and on the other side it dropped down into a valley that was the demarcation line separating Georgia from South Ossetia. Some of the volunteers rode horses and posed with AK-47 rifles with no safeties on. After thirty minutes of picture taking we went back down to sample more stinky mineral water and have lunch in an abandoned park that was a tourist destination during Soviet times.

On Sunday we visited the old tourist spot where Soviets of means would go to escape the summer heat. The hotel had been abandoned for more than three decades and all that remains on the grounds besides the old hotel is the stone and wood house that Stalin use to visit. It was sad really. What was once a prosperous beautiful location for tourist to visit was now a forgotten village of twenty or so remaining families living out their golden years while all their children moved to the cities or abroad. The grass was still mowed regularly and I suppose on some level the government hopes that one day someone will come along and bring back the glory days of a forgotten town.

Racha reminded me a lot of Oregon. Mist covered mountains, streams and rivers, and that damp air commonly found in forests in temperate climates. Racha is a beautiful place that is practically untouched. It won't have the ski resorts that Mestia is building. It won't have the historical appeal that you find in more ancient parts of Georgia. It is just the kind of place where one goes to find peace and comfort, to get away from it all.