Asia Minor – Red Branch Chronicles

A mini bus from Trabzon, on the far north east of Turkey’s share of the Black Sea, snaked past a long line of trucks queuing up to ender Georgia, many of which were backed-up in one of a string of tunnels leading up to the Turkish exit border post at Hopa. The bus could only go so far before we all had to get down and walk across the border through creaking, makeshift corridors of bare plywood and on into a no-man’s land where a very impressive Georgian border post, sparkling white in the sunshine, waited. No visa is needed for Georgia but my passport was scrutinised lengthily by a serious faced official before being smudgily stamped.

Out into Georgia proper and there’s a waiting, but already packed, minibus on to Batumi, Georgia’s premier port that I decline clambering in with a backpack. I wait for another emptier mini bus to materialize. One does and I scramble in along with another horde of people crossing the border and off to Batumi, all for about thirty Australian cents!

Asia or Europe or Asia Minor or even Eurasia? I couldn’t tell. The people didn’t look Asian the way people in Vietnam, Hong Kong and Malaysia looked Asian – they all seemed fair-skinned with blue eyes and dark hair, although many girls dyed their hair blonde. Caucasian or Circassian?

I suppose Batumi, the bustling seaport where the mini bus from the border dropped me off, had a hint of Asia with its grubby street market where spices, fruit – cherries and raspberries – veg and cheese were loudly hawked from stalls and barrows. Grimy Thai massage parlours, decorated with twinkling fairy lights, were shoulder to shoulder with casinos and slot machine joints. The beckoning and giggling girls in the doorways were definitely Thai – I stopped to chat to some of them – but their business was mostly with Turkish men who come over the border for a bit of fun. Where in God’s name is there any border with a town on either side where one side always appears better / more attractive / cheaper /more appealing than the other (and where there are truckloads of cross border trade)?

Pick anywhere on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic (Irish butter was always cheaper over the border in N. Ireland), or the border towns north of Khota Bharu in Malaysia and Sungai Golok and Narathiwat on the Thai side, or Hong Kong and Shenzhen, or Tijuana in Mexico and some place in Texas, and Temungong in Brunei Darussalam and Limbang in Malaysia but you get the idea. Oh, let’s not forget the overland border crossing from Saigon into Cambodia. Border towns worldwide always seem a bit seedy but all have that same frísson of excitement on first arrival.

Anyway, away from the market area and into a beautiful cloister-like square (Georgia became a Christian country in 301 C.E.) with restaurants on three sides. A pretty red-haired waitress dressed like a flight attendant with a jaunty blue hat, served me my first and excellent Georgian beer. I don’t know the name of the beer because it was written in the Georgian alphabet, which, to my eye looked unintelligible, full of squiggles, radii and what looks like badly written numbers.

What I did like about Batumi in particular were the mosaic style cobbled streets, the Botanical Gardens overlooking a muddy and uninviting Black Sea, the Cable Car that went to nowhere – well, there was a cafe and below that there was an empty, church tower – the musical fountain near the Ukrainian restaurant that had a dress code (I was not allowed to eat up on the balcony) and the somewhat gaudy buildings, the impossibly tall column of Medea (of Jason and the Argonauts fame),the excellent craft beer – although I meant to drink Georgian wine specifically! But what really bowled me over was the certainty on the part of everyone I spoke to that the Georgian language was directly related to the Basque language and that in the past Georgia had been called Iberia and that just proves it! Fantastic. Yes, I know this bottle does not say Iberia but then aagain I find it hard to believe Georgian and Basque languages are related.

When I was in school, I used to enjoy Geography and was proud of my childish ability to name European capital cities. Then the world seemed more compact, comprising of Western Europe, The USSR, Asia, Africa, The Americas and Antarctica. Then, of course from the ethnocentric European point of view, there was the Near East (Egypt and Suez), the Middle East (Syria, Turkey) and the Far East (China, Japan) and, intriguingly, Asia Minor or was it Eurasia? And then there was something called the Balkans, famously described by Bismarck, I think, as the ‘sick man of Europe’ and the Caucasus, which, in my mind, was a sort of no-go area. Nevertheless, none of those areas was ever clarified in my mind.

Confusingly too, in American crime news and novels, there were always references to “Caucasian males, armed and dangerous, if encountered, do not approach”. Who or what they were I was never quite sure but I suspected that I might be one of them – no, not the armed and dangerous bit, of course.

Anyway, as I learned recently, the currently outmoded system of classifying our species depended on a 19th century German physiologist and anthropologist, Blumenbach. He classified human kind in traditional terms of Caucasian / Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid and Negroid, but it was the use of the term Caucasian that fascinated me.

The Caucasus Mountains in modern day Georgia, and specifically the southern slopes,

Wine Qveri — Ancient Wine amphora or Qveri from Batumi in Georgia

were apparently the home of, not only the autochthones – the original members of mankind – and the site at which Noah’s (of the Ark fame) son, Japheth – the traditional Biblical ancestor of the Europeans – established his tribes before migrating into Europe proper but also the birthplace of wine more than 8,000 years ago!With a history like that, what was there not to like about exploring this hitherto unknown – to me – part of the world.

Factually, the Caucasus is the area of land, composed mostly of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan (along with lesser, recognised and / or unofficial Republics of Ossetia (north & South), Abkhazia, Adjara, Ardsakh, bounded in the north by the Greater Caucasian Mountains and about 100 kilometres south by the lesser Caucasian Mountains.

188px-Kaukasus — Satelite view of the Greater and Lesser Caucasus Mountains

Nevertheless, without bothering particularly to look at maps, I arbitrarily decided for myself that my Caucasus (trip) would start in Istanbul where the Bosporus drained from the Black Sea and would encompass everything as far as Baku in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea. It seemed simple – Black to the Caspian Sea with the Caucasus somewhere in between – and the wine bit sounded good, to me at least.

Caucasus 2 Map — Istanbul to Baku, The Black to the Caspian Sea.

I remember, years ago, I dozed through a class called Comparative Analysis of an Uncommonly Taught Language, Turkish and English. The only definitive thing I took away from that class was that Turkish is an ‘agglutinative’ language. I could still remember a smattering of Arabic phrases from my time in the Gulf so language shouldn’t be a problem! All I had to do now was get to Istanbul and start discovering 8000-year-old wines!

Tag: Asia Minor

Georgia – First Impressions

Crossing the Caucasus