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In search of cultural adventures, some make the rounds of local bars, while others frequent art openings and attend film festivals. I prefer to hunt up local history where it is most firmly planted: in the city's cemeteries.
I was in the mood for a languid day-long stroll and a visit to a few local cemeteries seemed the perfect way to spend some time and gain a little cultural insight into this multi-faceted, complicated, amorphous experiment called Sakartvelo. The weather was perfect for it—warm enough to catch people cleaning grave sites, sunny and windy enough for mourners and observers alike to benefit from a bit of cognac.
On my first stop I encountered a magnificent tribute to a sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1946, marked by an oil painting that showed her smiling on a bridge. I also saw a marble bust inscribed "Last Gift for Mother," and a photo etching of the happiest Georgian policeman ever seen, complete with smile, dancing hands and disheveled uniform. It made me laugh out loud. Cops around here aren't generally perceived in this light.
Sometimes it's written on the stone how the person died. I asked one of the women there: "Have you noticed all the young men buried in the same year throughout the cemetery? Was there a big accident?" The reply: "Stalin."
Evidently a number of Georgians were swallowed up by the violent, capricious hunger that drove the student purges in Moscow. It was powerful to see how a proper burial was in itself a form of protest against the student repressions taking place at the time. Before I understood the significance of the year, I found it a bit odd that a young man would be forever memorialized as a "Good first year student of the Foreign Languages Institute in Moscow."
Curiosities and historical markers like this kept me creeping through the cemeteries in Vake, Saburtalo and Didube. I took guilty pleasure in prancing around the cemetery, camera in hand, simply enjoying myself. The cemetery as an institution is an open-air museum—historical data waits for any wandering eye on each and every stone, architectural details abound as eternal forms of self-expression. My favorite epitaph was found on Mtatsminda's Pantheon, a single sketched flower.
There's a lot to appreciate in Tbilisi's cemeteries. Some made use of the table built at almost each and every grave; although I chose to quietly skip past the areas I saw occupied by those focusing on libation as their preferred form of remembrance. And I skipped quite a bit, as many had availed themselves of the pleasant weather.
In Saburtalo, a portion of the cemetery was added on during the civil war. It slowly crept uphill as the war went on. All along the right hand side in an eerily precise order, are rows and rows of very young men. Many are depicted in uniform, weapon in hand. Many others look as though caught in a moment of repose. When I asked about another tombstone, I was told that what appeared to be an epitaph was in fact a list of the fronts he'd fought on, ending with the village in which he finally perished.
Then, the guy I had been talking to excused himself to leave a cigarette at his brother's grave. "You've no idea how much he loved these cigarettes," he said and turned to bury it slightly beneath a modest wooden cross. Small stones had been placed nearby to spell out his brother's name "Mamuka" and he explained that it had cost them the sale of a small flat to pay for the space. There wasn't any money left over for a stone marker. This isn't untypical. An old man had told me in the Vake Cemetery: "Look at us. Despite the costs, look at what we do to bury our own."
My short visit through a few of the local cemeteries was pleasant, intense and educational. These rituals of cleaning, drinking and remembering reflected more than a specific cultural habit of the Georgian people. It served as a window into an alternate way of experiencing a cemetery and of celebrating a brisk morning.
The art of the tombstones and large stone monuments was interesting, but the real beauty of the day was found in observing the interaction between people and their loved ones, between the present and the past.
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