Chiatura Is My Pride

This week, I teach alone for the first time. It’s not some step in the natural order of things—I’m not supposed to teach alone ever—but rather my counterpart has the flu (not bird flu). Things went fine on Monday, despite my certainty that the school day would end in disaster, and barring any problems with my inability to communicate with the 5th graders tomorrow, I foresee a middling performance on my part, which I shall label success.

All of the following facts that couldn’t be ascertained from first-hand looks are courtesy of Senora Heidi, a sonorous laugher, Texan, and proponent of Stalinesque classroom discipline.

I spent the weekend in Chiatura, a former Soviet model city of 50,000 which now boasts 10,000 occupants and about 30 artistic renditions of Stalin. It would have been 31 if his likeness hadn’t been removed from the Hollywood-esque “Chiatura—My Pride” sign on the side of the gorge, where the only remnant is empty scaffolding. Unfortunately for all, the mood Lenin head that glowed red, blue, and green according to the time of day has also been disposed of, as has the oversized clock that told good proletariat citizens when it was time to start working.

That’s pretty much the essence of Chiatura… it’s surreal in that you feel like this was the alternate universe that angels would have shown Trotsky in It’s a Wonderful Life when he was about to jump into the river (“This is the USSR without you!”). Many of the Soviet signs and buildings are still up, but one and all are decrepit. The Georgians are rebuilding in the center of town, and it’s turning out pretty well, but the town itself has a lot of falling apart to do before it can reidentify itself as Georgian. Being in Chiatura is the closest I’ve ever come (and probably will ever come) to existing behind the Iron Curtain during Soviet times. You find yourself imagining this gorge town filled with people who all believed that they were living in an ideal future society, and with the giant clocks and the Lenin head in place, I can see how it would be difficult to see otherwise.

What other gems are there? Well, being a gorge, Chiatura has developed a lovely little system of cable cars—sabagiroebi—that will cart you up and down the hillsides for a fee of twenty tetri ($.12). If you’re too manly to take the quality-implied sabagiroebi, you can roll on over to the mining cable cars. Since Chiatura is famous for its manganese deposits, mining is a big industry. In fact, it’s the only remaining big industry—just ask the manganese-filled black river! Delicious! Anyway, those mining cars will take you up up up at a cool 80 degree angle, and just when you’ve reached the top despite all odds that you’d crash into the cliff, you look at the slope of the rope your car will have to ride down and you wonder if there’s a walking path instead, or perhaps you decide that returning is overrated.

I love Chiatura for all the above reasons. It’s one of the most fascinating places I’ve been to here, and when Heidi gets her own apartment (4 rooms for $45 a month… that’s what happens when 10000 people live in a city formerly housing 50000) I will make it my second home, regardless of her consent. I won’t hold it against the city that the nuns kicked me out of the cool cave monastery for wearing a headscarf tucked into my pants in lieu of a skirt. And if you don’t mind (but you will), I’d like to reappropriate the slogan of a quaint little town I know in America.

Chiatura is Gorges.