A VILLAGE OFF THE MAP AND OUTSIDE THE CLOCK
A EurasiaNet Photo Essay by Giga Chikhladze: 6/20/03

Akhalsopheli village, in northwest Georgia, is so small that one cannot find it on most maps. Villagers never lock their doors, worry about getting fired, or introduce themselves to strangers. It is not hard to know the entire town: its population consists of fewer than 50 elderly couples. Their children have moved out to cities long ago and rarely visit.

Yet most villagers do not consider themselves unlucky. "I could never live in a city", says Vano Bakradze, local peasant, "Everything’s different there. It’s not my cup of tea."

This is not affected quaintness. The village has no nearby resorts or spas, ancient fortresses or temples, so there is nothing here to attract tourists. The village is nestled in a small valley surrounded by hills overgrown with bushes. Not far away a river flows in a stony gorge full of piled up boulders. The village is enclosed with other valleys covered with dense woods. Akhalsopheli dwellers, accustomed to beautiful views of local landscape, generally don’t carry watches because they are used to telling time by looking at the sun. And local people have no urgent appointments or pressing matters which need to be looked after.

Life works much the way it did before the invention of the automobile, much less the jet or the Internet. Little houses with tile roofs are encircled with trees. Peasants irrigate fields and gardens via a dozen streams of muddy waters that run through the village. They milk cows, water pigs in troughs, feed and shear sheep. Between minding animals in the mornings and evenings, villagers work in the fields where they grow beans, maize and grapes. Shearing of sheep is a rare diversion.

Money does not circulate here – pensions are brought to the village infrequently. People exchange wine, eggs, corn and nuts for salt, sugar, matches and kerosene in the shop in the next village. They don’t seem to need anything else. They grind corn in mills together and share the results, in some sense living a socialist ideal. They also cut trees for firewood, which violates a law that authorities never enforce. Akhalsopheli has no gas or electricity supply. The closest official state agency is 12 miles away.

With this preserved economy come preserved customs. "When my children last arrived here, they stayed only for three days," says Manana, a local woman: "They told me they had little time. I wonder what they are doing there. How busy can city life be?" Villagers make wine-drinking a key element in their social lives. The key moment is uncovering huge wine jugs embedded in earth and tasting the contents. If it proves to be savory enough, neighbors are invited to try it the same evening.

Villagers also have never evolved political views. There seem to be no working television sets (or people who could repair the local ones) and people seem ignorant of events in the outside world. In the evenings they meet each other, drink wine and talk about Stalin, Churchill and happy times when the permanence of the Soviet Union seemed as sure as the daily sunrise. "Everything went wrong after Stalin," reasons Sergo Ivanidze, 83. "Such people aren’t born anymore."

When a villager dies, all villagers share in the funeral. They make the coffin, dig the grave and see the deceased off to another world. As these photos show, people of Akhalsopheli have little appetite for change.

Editor’s Note: Giga Chikhladze is a journalist and photographer based in Tbilisi.

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Posted June 20, 2003 © Eurasianet
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