Georgia. Kakheti: an expected light.
30 images Created 12 Jun 2016
Going towards the south-east corner of Georgia, the landscape makes a sudden change.
The colour green is replaced by the arid Samgori steppe that stretches away to a hilly horizon.
A washed out blue of the sky, as in the cupola fresco of the Assumption by Correggio into Parma Cathedral, is the background to the landscape and an unexpected light surrounds and transfigures everything.
An almost treeless panorama is encircled by white peaks.
A huge well-irrigated Alazani valley lays in the centre of the Kakheti. Lovingly tended grape-vine, sprawling across dozens of kilometres in either direction. At the end of this valley lays the border with Muslim Azerbaijan. Best Georgian wine come from the Alazani valley.
The cultivation showed no sign of the brutal history associated with this area.
The invading Mongol and Persian armies had marched through it many times during the past centuries from the north to the south.
Strolling down this delight land, it may still hear the cries of the nationalists that have scourged Georgia in the its long history of inter-ethnic struggles and that continues to flare Abkhazia and South Ossetia in this recent times. The consequences of this social tragedy are still so vivid in the hearts of refugees forced to flee from two breakaway provinces and whose souls being haunted by recollections of their lost country.
Kakheti suddenly seem a very fragile place again.
Belonging to a forgotten past, lost Udi people, one of the most ancient native population of the Caucasus, came to Kakheti, about 80 years ago, from the village of Vartashen, in the Muslim Azerbaijan.
They settled in the village of Zinobiani where they finally found a quiet resort to give a meaning to their lives with the strength of Christian religion.
Churches and monasteries punctuate the blissfully land of Kakheti, images of a celestial world reflect on the earth.
Wandering in the countryside, it may caught the breath of ancient spirits of this land that were pursued in the rural poetry by Georgians like Akaki Tsereteli, Alexander and Ilia Chavchavadze and as Pushkin nostalgically wrote in a 1828 poem:
I beg you please sing no more
The songs of Georgia,
For their mournful sounds
Recall for me
A distant life
A distant shore
The colour green is replaced by the arid Samgori steppe that stretches away to a hilly horizon.
A washed out blue of the sky, as in the cupola fresco of the Assumption by Correggio into Parma Cathedral, is the background to the landscape and an unexpected light surrounds and transfigures everything.
An almost treeless panorama is encircled by white peaks.
A huge well-irrigated Alazani valley lays in the centre of the Kakheti. Lovingly tended grape-vine, sprawling across dozens of kilometres in either direction. At the end of this valley lays the border with Muslim Azerbaijan. Best Georgian wine come from the Alazani valley.
The cultivation showed no sign of the brutal history associated with this area.
The invading Mongol and Persian armies had marched through it many times during the past centuries from the north to the south.
Strolling down this delight land, it may still hear the cries of the nationalists that have scourged Georgia in the its long history of inter-ethnic struggles and that continues to flare Abkhazia and South Ossetia in this recent times. The consequences of this social tragedy are still so vivid in the hearts of refugees forced to flee from two breakaway provinces and whose souls being haunted by recollections of their lost country.
Kakheti suddenly seem a very fragile place again.
Belonging to a forgotten past, lost Udi people, one of the most ancient native population of the Caucasus, came to Kakheti, about 80 years ago, from the village of Vartashen, in the Muslim Azerbaijan.
They settled in the village of Zinobiani where they finally found a quiet resort to give a meaning to their lives with the strength of Christian religion.
Churches and monasteries punctuate the blissfully land of Kakheti, images of a celestial world reflect on the earth.
Wandering in the countryside, it may caught the breath of ancient spirits of this land that were pursued in the rural poetry by Georgians like Akaki Tsereteli, Alexander and Ilia Chavchavadze and as Pushkin nostalgically wrote in a 1828 poem:
I beg you please sing no more
The songs of Georgia,
For their mournful sounds
Recall for me
A distant life
A distant shore
