FIFTEENTH DAY: PRISTINE VILLAGE

When we enter Shatili, a thought crosses my mind- all hail to the folks who were able to conquer this road with Jawas. Kārlis was right about refuelling. There are no gas stations on the road for 100 km, so we had to fill up our tanks and take some extra with us, because for 70% of the road, you only get to use the first 3 gears. The road has been opened recently, and, as it is with Georgian mountains, the spring is not here yet. There’s almost no traffic and that gives us a chance to enjoy the ride. On the mountain pass, we once again meet Hannes from Austria with his old Yamaha Super Tenere, he’s returning from Shatili. He isn’t pleased about his decision to go to Shatili because ‘the road is horrible and there’s nothing to see in the destination, and overall, everything is ‘Shaize’’. He says it’s an abandoned village with no people and one guesthouse. He also decided not to go to Omalo and will start driving in the direction of Armenia today.

When we get to the sunlit village, I am full of appreciation with the nice road that took us here. The village is a unique building complex carved into a cliff. Right on the other side of the fortress and the river we find simple wooden houses and the owner Niko, who offers us to spend the night. The view from the veranda is exquisite. As the only tourists in the village, we can enjoy the sounds of the river, the birds and the amazing views. Only two kiloteres from here is the border with Chechnya. There are a few Kevshureti families left in the village, and they all have the same surname- Chincharauli. There are 14 students in the school and Mary, the teacher, invites us to come to the school tomorrow and tell the children about Latvia. My sidekicks are thoughtful after the long journey- Normunds’s dislocated ankle still hurts and his BMW’s rear brakes are lost. Osis is enjoying the views but he would prefer to enjoy them on an asphalt road. They both don’t know yet about Omalo. At seven p.m., a bad storm begins. All of us are happy we chose not to stay in tents. 

Shatili.

The village of Shatili squats on the northern slope of the Greater Caucasus mountains in Georgia. Even today the area is considered isolated and remote but in centuries past the villagers could not rely on distant authorities to afford them protection. In early medieval times the villagers hit on a solution which was to shield them from their enemies for hundreds of years. They made their village in to a fortress. The village effectively became a fortress, standing guard over the north-eastern border of Georgia. There was good need. Even as recently as the eighteenth century the village was attacked by a force of thousands of Chechens and Dagestan warriors. Its inhabitants, the Khevsureti, endured and become legendary as highland soldiers who epitomised the traditional Georgian qualities of bravery, sincerity and righteousness, community, objectivity and love of autonomy and independence. Governance of Shatili was communal. 

There was a single building called the Sapekhyno which was empty but for stone chairs. Here village elders would discuss the issues at hand but all were expected to join in and have their say – even the children. However, one thing was kept from the children – as it was from any new daughter-in-laws that had only recently joined the community. The livestock which would be used in any siege was evident to the eye – one only had to set foot in to one of the houses to hear them. But what of water? A secret copper tank contained enough for the village for a week. Sadly, the village could not withstand the tidal wave of twentieth century political dogma. The very qualities which had sustained the Khevsureti for so long were looked upon with suspicion and considered potentially very dangerous by the soviet authorities. Although the country had been invaded and taken over by the Red Army in 1929, it was only during the Stalinist period that the issue of the Khevsureti would be fully addressed. In the early 1950s the villagers were persuaded to leave their ancestral home. They and their kin had lived there for an estimated thirteen hundred years but the tower blocks of the Georgian capital Tbilisi were to be their new home, 140 kilometres away. Yet culture and a sense of belonging to a region cannot be easily displaced or destroyed. In the 1980s when the communist stranglehold lessened about twenty families returned back home to Shatili.