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I pause at the beginning of the year, back from snowless Kakheti holidays to snowbound home, to remind myself WHY. The stuff coming off the roof on the relatively sunless north side had built up high enough that the living room got hardly any window light, prompting me for the first time ever to get out there and shovel it down. However, so far, it’s also the first winter in which our water pipe to the house hasn’t frozen, nice and mild in spite of all the snow, so one cannot simply hate being here. What do I love?
This place, much more than equally wintery but much-readier-for-it Canada, teaches me the infinite immutability of water’s forms, especially the solid ones. Snow and ice are art in nature. Flakes, icebergs (remember the unsinkable Titanic!), glaciers, frost flowers on windows or in mud or covering whole fields or even, I have seen it, blooming up from a tray of ice-cubes! Icicles forming off roofs, but changing their angle from vertical to inward-bending as the snow behind them slowly pushes them around: they end up resembling a wonderfully scary set of rows of fangs. The deadly tone of blue from light coming through a thickness of snow, the very hue of fierce cold for me. The miracle of still ice forming across a flowing river – how?
The towers, thousand-year-old witnesses to a history largely unwritten, so tall and straight and silent. What have they seen?
Svan salt, the real thing in all its local variations, not the ones you buy in big city markets but from all local ingredients, its smell evoking its origin for me anywhere in the world.
The landscape, dominated by Mt. Ushba, in any season. Speaking of seasons, their strong separation into a set of four, presided over by winter’s length but each distinct.
The treasury of art in Svan churches and museums, from a time when this was the uninvaded safe place for Georgia. Ditto the language, preserving more of the ancient proto-Georgian than any other member of the Kartvelian family, much too incomprehensible to other Georgians properly to be called a mere dialect, indeed having four dialects of its own, with eighteen vowels scattered among them!
The smell of pine resin, and also its taste, because where else would they dare or want to make crystallized pieces of it “Svan chewing gum”?
K’ubdari, the meat pie which crowns Svan cuisine: sorry, vegetarians, but there are other dishes here for you.
Ingredients for the liqueurs I make: rose petals and hips, blackberries, elderflowers and berries, a local marjoram, dandelion flowers and roots, double distilled honey vodka as a base, pears, cherries both sweet and sour, plums, sour plums, apples, walnuts and hazelnuts. I do make other varieties using non-local flavors, but these are some of the ones I have tried here.
The Svan men’s skull-cap, of thick felt, in traditional colors of gray, black, white or brown, each with its special meanings: thick and solid!
Svan polyphonic song and dance. These art-forms are, of course, different in every region of Georgia, and one’s tastes will determine why this is preferred over that, when they’re all wonderful.
Overall, the constant inspiration for creativity which this place infuses into me. I was a photographer, a writer and more before I came here, but Svaneti simply has given me more for these expressions than anywhere else. I owe a debt.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1800 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti