November 10th – the Anatomy of Georgian Melancholy

November 16, 2013

Razzle Dazzle of Three Urban Dwellers in the Forest by Nikos Pirosmani

One day in 1993 a young refugee from Abkhazia arrived in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, with next to nothing to his name. Starting life again from zero he decided to try to get on by teaching himself English from a copy of Richard Burton’s 17^th century classic “The Anatomy of Melancholy” which he’d bought from a stall and a Russian-English dictionary which he’d found on the street.

“The Anatomy of Melancholy” is an unusual book which analyses the causes of misery, finding explanations ranging from the activities of ghosts, evil spirits and witches to others which this young refugee would have recognised such as war, displacement and fear of the future.

I cannot imagine how cool your English would end up sounding if you had learnt the language from such a source, but I only hope that the young refugee, the artist Lado Pochkhua, is still speaking like this in his new home New York. Perhaps he would sound something like a shopkeeper I met in India who memorably told me when I was asking for directions in Jaipur “look to yonder roundabout where the buses are going hither and thither.”

Lado Pochkhua’s photographs from his refugee days were being exhibited in Georgia’s National Gallery under the title “the Anatomy of Georgian Melancholy.” And it was a fascinating and fantastic collection, stark black and white portraits of fellow refugees, pictures of boys playing football in the snow and simple images which contrasted a refugee’s dream of escape to elsewhere with the everyday details of life trapped where they were – the trail left by a plane in the sky above the bare branches and twigs of winter trees.

But even more interesting than the pictures, for me, was the artist’s commentary. Writing about a shot of peasant refugees sat around a picnic table he discussed the effect that losing their land has on people. For him the loss left the peasantry utterly bereft, as the rhythm of their days and years was utterly dependent on working the land and without it they were left without any sense of time or any hope for the future.  

We’ve spent lots of time on our travels with people in tropical countries who, although cash poor, are land rich, and it is my belief that anything which takes that land away from these traditional owners, such as the activities of rapacious governments and robber barons CEOs, is one of the great evils of our time.

Away from the photography the collection of paintings focused mainly on the early 20^th century works of two Georgian masters, Nikos Pirosmani and Lado Gudiashvili. Though different in approach, Pirosmani’s naive simplicity contrasting with Gudiashvili’s more sophisticated and sensual style, the two artists produced lots of similar, typically Georgian, scenes. Paintings of drinking and feasting featured prominently with rows of surprisingly stern faced, black-clad men sitting at tables in fields with mountains of food in front of them. Elaborate toasts are a touchstone of Georgian culture and the men invariably held half-raised horns of wine in their hands.

Even with such subjects that should have been jolly, I couldn’t help but notice the darkness of all the paintings, not just in the clothes being worn by the feasters but also in the surrounding landscape, and especially the skies which were invariably black-blue or pure black. It seems that there is a strain of melancholy running through all of Georgian culture, even amongst those people not affected by war and landlessness – so I guess it must be down to the ghosts and witches.

As we had arranged two couchsurfs in Tbilisi, yesterday we left the place of our first host Zura to move to that of our second, Scott a Canadian geologist. Zura had first introduced us to Georgian cooking with a plate of the national dish, khinkali, a kind of dumpling which in Himalayan India and Nepal would be called a momo. The unusual cuisine of Georgia is apparently one of its tourist attractions, and Scott expanded our experience of it with such dishes as aubergine with walnut sauce and pomegranate and lobiani, a bean dish reminiscent of an Indian urid dal. Georgian food does seem a unique mix, but I haven’t yet seen anything here to equal the oddity of Turkey’s “chicken breast pudding.”

Over dinner Scott produced his party piece, a fragment of rock from Greenland, which, at around 4 billion years old is one of the most ancient on the earth. Somewhat struggling to top that we produced a fragment of flintstone from Göbekli Tepe which we had been told was 8,000 years old but, understandably, Scott didn’t seem very impressed.

As well as his geological work Scott is also translating a series of satirical Russian children’s stories by an author from Archangel, where he lived pre-Tbilisi. While discussing the translation I learnt an interesting Russian idiom, “an American smile”, which means an insincere one. Russians apparently are very scathing of people who smile when they don’t mean it, and they reserve their own smiles for when they are genuinely delighted.

Georgia may have its melancholy but after a great day and with a bellyful of beer I went to bed grinning like a Russian.

 

 

Written by travellinfool Posted in Hitch-hiking Iraq to Liverpool Tagged with Art, couchsurfing, Georgia, Georgian Food, Georgian National gallery, Lado Gudiashvili, Lado Pochkhua, Nikos Pirosmani, Refugees, Tbilisi, the Anatomy of Georgian Melancholy, Travel