Georgia Rising

A journey through a country that’s shaken off its troubled past to become one of the world’s most extraordinary travel destinations.

It was after dark when we reached Tbilisi, the city a pour of shadow streaming past the windows of the car that carried us from the airport. Down Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main drag, building façades appeared like specters in flashes of streetlight: curving Renaissance Revival fronts, the domed and striped neo-Moorish edifice of the czarist-era Georgian National Opera Theater, rows of plane trees bending to an arch.

We turned a corner onto a side street and pulled up to the sleek postindustrial façade of Rooms Hotel Tbilisi, once a Soviet printing press, its steel window casings now juxtaposed with panels of reclaimed oak and brick.

“Not quite what I expected,” murmured Roham, my boyfriend, as a bellhop in Wes Andersonian gloves, cap, and double-breasted brass-button waistcoat escorted us through the front doors. We had wanted to come to Georgia for a while, having heard more than a few breathless endorsements from friends and friends of friends who had visited, especially in the past five or six years, as the country has leapt onto the radars of seasoned travelers.

We knew that Georgia, a small country that sits between the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains on the borders of Russia, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, has a remarkably diverse landscape, ranging from the snowy peaks of the Greater Caucasus, to rolling vineyards and semi-desert, to the subtropical Black Sea coast, with its lush palm trees, rainforests, and white sand beaches. We knew that Georgia’s position at the crossroad of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, together with its natural bounty, had made it the site of territorial disputes for millennia — that even in the post-Soviet period, it was embroiled in civil conflicts, secessionist strife, and economic crisis. We knew that less than a decade ago, the country was at war.

And yet somehow Georgia — and even more so, its enigmatic little capital of Tbilisi — is flourishing like never before, with booming arts, culinary, and fashion scenes, thriving businesses and hotels, and a nightlife said to rival Berlin. Its strategic position at the intersection of major geopolitical interests has made Tbilisi a diplomatic and trade hub, drawing people from across the globe. In the past five years, visitor numbers to the country have more than doubled.

Still, whenever I would ask a recent visitor what Georgia was actually like, they would seem to get tongue-tied.

“It’s hard to explain,” they might say. “Not quite European, but definitely not Asian either …”

Does it feel post-Soviet? “Well yeah, maybe a little. But then also, not at all.” And more than once I was told: “You just have to go there to understand.”

We walked through the hotel, reddish light pooling over rich leathers, vintage midcentury furniture, modernist Georgian artworks, dark wood, and custom tiles. We looked out a glass-walled, atrium-like extension onto the inner garden courtyard, where a crowd was drinking cocktails at a freestanding bar built beneath a lattice of lushly overgrown industrial scaffolding. Finally we reached our room, which, with its handmade wallpaper and lavish, retro furnishings, evoked New York in the 1920s and ‘30s. Steel-frame windows looked out to the surrounding neighborhood, Vera, a central ventricle of Tbilisi’s literary and cultural life. We collapsed onto the vast leather- backed bed and melted into a first delicious sleep.

The next day we woke up early to meet Alex, the hotel’s “experience guide,” for a tour through Old Tbilisi. He brought us to the ancient bath district, where legend has it the King of Iberia founded the city in the 5th century AD after discovering the area’s many sulfuric hot springs when his falcon fell into one and died (“Tbilisi” is Old Georgian for “warm place”).

To the east, on the opposite side of the Kura River, which cuts through the center of the city on its way from Turkey to the Caspian Sea, traditional houses and a domed medieval stone church jut out from a vertiginous elevated cliff. Newer futuristic glass-and-steel constructions, like the undulating Bridge of Peace, the swooping Rike Park Concert Hall and Exhibition Center, and the 50-milliondollar Bond-villain-esque mansion of a Georgian banking oligarch, hover over the city like satellites. After crossing the Dry Bridge, where a kaleidoscopic antique and flea market unfurls daily, we opened a door on Atoneli Street and stepped into darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a vast curving stairwell lined with ornate but crumbling trompe-l’oeil frescoes — illusionist brick-effect wall murals with “windows” looking out onto maritime and pastoral scenes — rising to a single skylight, the only source of illumination.

One of Tbilisi’s famous vintage entrance halls, it belonged to the prestigious 19th-century Hotel London, the first building in the city to have electricity, said Alex. Tchaikovsky was a guest, as was the great Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. By the middle of the 19th century, Tbilisi had emerged as a major trade and cultural center, attracting artists and intellectuals from across Europe, even as it buckled under czarist repression. But like so many of the city’s historic buildings, the Hotel London fell into disrepair in the Soviet era, and today exists only as a run-down residential building badly in need of restoration.

Some areas of Old Tbilisi are undergoing revitalization, like Aghmashenebeli Avenue, known for its classic 19th-century buildings, which was recently revamped and pedestrianized by the municipality. In other areas, new restaurants, bars, and boutiques are bringing increasing numbers of foreign visitors and capital, leading to waves of gentrification.

The fashion scene has seen a particular boost, especially since the meteoric rise of 36-year-old Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia, who in 2014 founded the influential Parisian collective Vetements and the following year was named creative director of iconic fashion house Balenciaga.

“The past three years have been really successful,” said the designer Tamuna Ingorokva, when we stopped by her showroom and workshop. Known for her brightly colored leather creations, she is part of a wave of young Georgian designers helping to put Tbilisi on the map. After the success of Gvasalia, and the 2015 launch of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi, she said, “it feels that Georgian fashion is growing fast and starting to get a lot of attention.”

That afternoon we went to meet Irena Popiashvili, an outsize figure in the city’s burgeoning contemporary art scene who, after 20 years in New York, moved back to her native Tbilisi to become the first female director of the State Academy of Arts. In 2013, she opened the Popiashvili Gvaberidze Window Project, a storefront gallery that is one of the few venues in the city providing a platform for the country’s small but significant current wave of visual artists.

“For the general public, the Georgian art market is here, right on these steps,” she said, gesturing across the street, where local craft sellers were hocking knit figurines, traditional tchotchkes, and miniaturized reproductions of classic Georgian paintings. The contemporary art scene, she added, is still fledgling but making great strides, and the rest of the world is beginning to take notice.

From Window Project, we went around the corner to the former home of Karlo Kacharava, a prolific painter, poet, and theorist who died in 1994 at the age of 30 but left behind hundreds of paintings, drawings, and texts, many of which his sister preserves in the home where they lived. We walked through a puzzle-like matrix of rooms hung wall-to-wall with Kacharava works — dreamy images of strung-out post-Soviet bohemia, laden with text fragments in a distinct, instantly recognizable punkexpressionistic style.

“He really created the story of the Georgian underground art movement that started at the end of the 80s,” said Popiashvili, who staged an exhibition of his work in New York in 2012, part of her wider project of bringing Georgian artists to the world stage. In spring of 2018 this project will reach new heights when she helps launch the Kunsthalle Tbilisi, a roving non-profit art institution that will exhibit the best of the country’s contemporary art together with international works. “I feel that Georgian art needs to be contextualized within contemporary European and American art,” she said. “Fashion and music have been happening here. Now art is really about to launch.”

That evening we headed to Keto & Kote, a restaurant that opened in Vera in 2017 in a lovely traditional townhouse. We were there to have dinner with Valeri Chekheria and Levan Berulava, the CEO and managing director, respectively, of Adjara Group Hospitality, the company behind Rooms Hotels. In the years since the casino magnate Temur Ugulava brought them on to run his ambitious new hospitality venture, few people have been more involved than Chekheria and Berulava — both still in their 30s — with Georgia’s recent resurgence.

In 2012, Adjara Group launched what they hoped would become an international Georgian brand, beginning with Rooms Hotel Kazbegi, housed in a former Soviet workers retreat in the Caucasus Mountains, followed by Rooms Hotel Tbilisi in 2014. Their success was pronounced and immediate, garnering rave reviews across international press and from high-profile visitors like Sting, Sophia Loren, and food guru Anthony Bourdain.

While Ugulava is the company’s creative visionary, involved in nearly every major aesthetic decision, Chekheria and Berulava are its guiding forces. It’s an auspicious undertaking — particularly for two people who grew up, as they did, amid the turbulence and privation of 90s-era Georgia. “We are really these post- Soviet Union kids,” said Chekheria, as our wine glasses were filled with an amber-tinged, deep-red Georgian Saperavi. As a child, Chekheria had to flee his family home on Rustaveli Avenue when it was burned down in street fighting during the Georgian Civil War.

“This was a very dark period of time — no electricity, no gas, no heating,” said Chekheria. “But we were having fun. The young kids, we didn’t realize it was this big drama. We would wake up in the morning and my sisters and I would be like, ‘Hey Mom, do we have any food today?’ Then we were spending the whole night in a queue to get literally a piece of bread.”

Berulava spent his early childhood in the Georgian region of Abkhazia, where his family is from. When it erupted into sectarian conflict in the early 90s during the breakup of the Soviet Union, he fled to Kiev with his family. He and Chekheria met in their early 20s while working in Georgia’s Ministry of Finance in the first years after the country’s peaceful pro-Western Rose Revolution in 2003. They applied together, and were accepted, to a graduate program at Columbia University in New York City. “This was always my big dream because of the movies — I wanted to have my own locker!” joked Chekheria. “When I got there, I realized the masters program doesn’t have any lockers.”

Chekheria and Berulava were immersed in a rigorous academic environment, and they both worked for the United Nations, where circumstances thrust them into the center of diplomatic efforts at the outbreak of the Russo-Georgian War in 2008.

Living in New York, they were also exposed to art, culture, and luxury at levels they had only dared imagine. So when Ugulava put them in charge of Adjara, they were determined to return home and do something extraordinary.

Instead of looking for staff trained in hospitality, they recruited from local film schools and art academies, hiring young people they liked — people with tattoos, good taste, and open minds — and then sent them on research trips to the Crosby, the Ludlow, Gramercy Park, and Waverly Inn, so they could understand where the bar was set.

“Before, in Georgia, it was not so cool to be a waiter,” said Berulava, whose puckish, fast-talking demeanor offsets Chekheria’s relaxed, soft-spoken affability. “We wanted to change that mentality, to make the culture of, ‘hey, you are a student. It’s cool to be a waiter. You will have money, and then we will all dance together with the owner at Bassiani!’,” he said, referring to Tbilisi’s best-loved techno club.

After the success of Rooms Kazbegi and Tbilisi, they opened Lolita in 2016, a buzzy bistro and late-night hangout, and Fabrika, a hip 400-bed hostel and arts and retail complex housed in a Soviet-era sewing factory, which includes a skate shop, a vintage boutique, and a ramen bar. There are other projects in the works, from a beachside bungalow complex set amid the lush tropical Black Sea coastline near Georgia’s second city, Batumi, to a just-announced ski resort, Rooms Hotel Kokhta, in the central Borjomi region.

In 2018 Adjara will launch its most ambitious project to date — Stamba Hotel — a five-story property with a rooftop pool, upscale casino, and basement-to-sky atrium built in High Line-esque, wild-urbanist style in the Soviet-era printing press that houses Rooms Tbilisi.

Beyond hotels, Adjara Group has been instrumental in supporting the country’s cultural scene, from filling its hotels with works by Georgian artists, to sponsoring events such as Stream of Unconsciousness (SOU), an ambitious two-year-old festival of contemporary music and visual arts that most recently brought Björk to Georgia for a nine-day tour that included two concerts in the capital.

As our evening wore on, our table was laden with a dazzling spread: fresh cucumbers and plump, deep-red tomatoes served in a crushed-walnut vinaigrette. There were hot kidney beans stewed with coriander, walnut, garlic, and onion served in a clay pot, and, of course, khachapuri — Georgia’s most famous culinary export — oven-baked bread with fresh sulguni cheese either cooked into the dough or melted into the center with butter and a sunny-side-up egg.

I had been waiting for this, having lived for a year in Russia, where Georgian cuisine is as beloved and ubiquitous as Mexican in the United States or Indian in the UK. Georgia’s diverse terrain, fertile, mineral-rich agricultural lands, and its position on ancient trade routes like the Silk Road, resulted in a singular national cuisine, rich with spices and aromatic herbs and bearing influences of Persian, Turkish, Russian, East Asian, and Western European culinary traditions. Lately, Georgian food has been making its way to hip enclaves of New York, London, and Berlin.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s dining scene is being reimagined, as new restaurants, like decadent Keto & Kote, refined Alubali, French-inflected Cafe Littera in the historic Writers’ House of Georgia, and Ezo, in a Sololaki courtyard, are taking bold, sophisticated approaches to classic recipes. Many source their products from oncelanguishing independent growers through the upstart Georgian Farmers Association, a platform partially supported by Adjara Group that connects small farmers with restaurants and hotels and has helped to kick-start the country’s ascendant farm-to-table movement. “Without the development of Georgian products, it’s impossible to develop hospitality,” said Chekheria.

Just as our glasses were being refilled, more dishes arrived. We raised our glasses to the chef and to the future and, naturally, to friendship old and new. Meals in Georgia can last hours, with many courses, free- flowing wine, and copious toasts. There’s even an official Georgian feast ritual not tied to any particular celebration — the supra — officiated by a designated toastmaster, or tamada. The great hospitality of the Georgian people may be a cliché, but it was one of the most visceral, undeniable facts of being in the country.

“I think people are missing this in Europe and America,” said Berulava. “That’s why whenever they come to Georgia, this is one of the main reasons they love it here.”

A long decadent meal led, as it often seems to, to drinks around the corner at Rooms. On the way, we stopped to wave through a window at Kakha Kaladze, a friend of the guys and a former soccer star who was running for mayor and had headquartered his campaign in a vacant section of Rooms Hotel Tbilisi (a few weeks after our trip, he won the election).

Back at the Garden Bar, more friends began to arrive. One of them, a lithe jewelry designer named Tamara Khoshtaria, presented Chekheria with a delicate geometrical lapel pin of sterling silver that she had made that day in her workshop. “We get together every single day,” said Berulava. “Georgians are very much into friends and family culture.”

But this was more than a mere sense of community. What was so extraordinary about being here in today’s Tbilisi was that the communal spirit felt tied to the very destiny of the country. Artists and diplomats, DJs and executives, waiters and politicians share social circles, ideas, inspiration. Some have experienced success abroad and then returned home to give back. Others stayed, working to remake Georgia from the inside, embracing the spirit of transformation pulsing through the country.

Berulava began to order chacha, a strong Georgian brandy made from grape pomace, and the head mixologist invited us to a new electronic music festival she was launching with some friends. Soon we were joined by two Americans in town on business — specialists, one of them said, in “pre-emerging markets.”

Pre-emerging? He gestured grandly toward Rooms, as the bartender cranked up the music: “Well, here is already emerged.”

The next day we woke up, hungover but happy, and loaded a car for the mountains. We followed a storied route once known as the Georgian Military Highway, which crosses the Caucasus on its way to Russia. We drove along the right bank of the Kura River, past the country’s historic capital of Mtskheta, then over the wide floodplain of the Tetri Aragvi and past the medieval fortress of Ananuri, stopping only occasionally to buy dried, pressed fruit from a roadside grandma or drink ice-cold water from a mountain spring.

The temperature dropped as we drove, winding higher and higher into the Georgian Caucasus, gray-green rock cutting against a watery cobalt sky. I saw milling sheep, towering skeletal oil rigs and, once, wild horses running across a hill flank, their manes whipping wildly in the mountain air. Finally we crossed the Jvari Pass into the village of Stepantsminda, and there it was, perched 1,800 meters above sea level amid a spectacular terrain of gorges, ridges, and snow-covered slopes: the Brutalist glass-and-wood structure now known as Rooms Hotel Kazbegi.

The air was cold and clear as winter as we walked toward the hotel, once a Soviet-era workers’ resort, and into the open-plan lobby, which had been recast with raw timber, antique Georgian rugs, iron chandeliers, and deep leather armchairs — an interior motif I recognized from Rooms Tbilisi — offset by vintage Soviet posters and teeming bookshelves.

But all of this was dwarfed by the jaw-dropping view through floor-to-ceiling windows: Mount Kazbek and the towering peaks of the Caucasus Mountains. On the closest summit, hung in silvery mist, I could just barely make out the stone Gergeti Trinity Church, a popular destination for intrepid hikers, with a history dating back to the 14th century.

We dropped our bags in the room and headed to the hotel’s subterranean wellness area, built into a slope so steep that even here underground, giant windows looked west onto the mountains, letting the sunset drench the swimming pool in shimmering gold. Guests lounged in white robes along the terrace, sipping herbal tea and the night’s first glasses of Saperavi.

Eventually we headed for dinner at the hotel’s groundfloor restaurant, which is popular for its hearty regional fare, all sustainably produced and locally farmed. We had a chicken-and- tarragon soup renowned as a hangover cure (I can vouch: it works), then worked our way to khinkali, the glorious Georgian dumpling, which must be eaten by hand. Local etiquette demands diners grab it by its doughy knob and take a bite, first sucking out the savory broth, then devouring its juicy center of minced meat, onion, chili pepper, salt, and cumin.

After dinner, we decamped to the vast, wrap-around wooden terrace where the jagged mountain skyline darkened against the last vapors of daylight. Hotel guests had clustered on lounge chairs under woven blankets to drink and laugh as stars twinkled awake across a black Caucasian sky. Finally, blissed out on food and wine and mountain air, we fell into bed in a haze of contentment.

On our way back to Tbilisi the next day, we made a detour through the wine region of Kakheti in eastern Georgia, passing rolling, amber-hued vineyards stretching to the Azerbaijan border where Persian invaders once entered the kingdom. We stopped at Temi, a winery and social organization that was then in the midst of a harvest festival.

We watched as brawny, sunburned men pressed giant vats of grapes, pouring the juice, skins, stalks, and pips together into large clay vessels called qvevri, to be sealed and buried underground to ferment. It’s a process that’s been used to make wine in Georgia’s fertile valleys for millennia. As of 2017, when archeologists discovered several 8,000-year-old clay wine vessels similar to today’s qvevri near Tbilisi, Georgia is officially the oldest wine region in the world.

We arrived back in Tbilisi after dark, did a quick costume change at Rooms, and were out the door by midnight on our way to the official season opening of Bassiani, a cavernous techno club in the basement of Dinamo Arena, the national soccer stadium.

Despite rigid drug laws and lingering — albeit lessening — homophobia, Tbilisi’s club scene has exploded in recent years, with Bassiani at the thumping center of the action. Complemented by smaller venues like gay-friendly Cafe- Gallery, open-air Vitamin Cubes, and newer venue Khidi (all of which use varying door policies to protect a spirit of liberal tolerance), Bassiani has been drawing party people and techno heads from across the world to a scene that, many say, maintains the sense of enthusiasm and transgressive adventure that can be hard to find these days in more established clubbing cities like London and Berlin. Just don’t call them the next Berghain.

“We really want to have our own thing,” said Zviad Gelbakhiani, 26, who since opening Bassiani in 2013 with two friends, has overseen an ambitious program of local DJs and international acts like Nina Kraviz, Speedy J, and Ben Klock.

By the time we arrived, upwards of 1,000 bodies were already moving with abandon in the emptied-out Sovietera swimming pool that serves as Bassiani’s main dance floor. Steam rose toward the towering ceiling as Irish DJ Sunil Sharpe, perched over the deep end, blasted hard techno through the club’s world-class Funktion- One sound system. Upstairs, in the smaller room, the Detroit dub-techno DJ Luke Hess presided over a raucous, upbeat crowd. We saw so many of the people we’d met over the past days on the dance floor. Everyone greeted us like old friends.

Seeing them all there together — artists and entrepreneurs, workers and students, designers and hoteliers — we knew we were witnessing something extraordinary. This was a country coming together to cast off its troubled past and rewrite its own future. And they were succeeding.

We danced into the morning, leaving the club as a pale sun rose over Tbilisi. Soon we were headed for the airport, the city already a fading, halcyon blur. I knew that later, back home in Berlin, someone would ask me what Georgia was really like, and I would tell them the only true thing I could.

You just have to go there to understand. ■

Charly Wilder is the editor in chief of Directions and a writer who contributes frequently to The New York Times. Despite her recent immersion in Georgian culture, she remains only 80 percent confident she can correctly spell the word “Caucasus.”

by Charly Wilder

Photography Robbie Lawrence & Daniel Flaschar