No travelogue to Georgia is complete without a visit to Gori, the birthplace of Stalin and home to a huge museum, statues, etc. celebrating him. It's a little bit of leftover Soviet kitsch that few western writers can resist. I thought that I was going to be one of those few, until my trip from Abkhazia to South Ossetia required me to stay overnight in Gori.
I got in at about 11 pm, and went to the Hotel Intourist, for which "faded glory" is too mild a term. Maybe "decrepit monstrosity" or "collapsing tackiness." (Readers who have been there are welcome to suggest other terms.) It was nearly dark inside, and cold, and the receptionist was in a little glass case that took up about one percent of the total volume of the lobby. She showed me to a room, down this hallway...
...and then to the room, which, despite the fact that there was no light in the bathroom, no hot water and the toilet didn't flush, was fine. (And they helpfully provided a bucket for the toilet.) It was a bit odd, though, in that the ceiling was higher than the room was wide or long, so it was kind of like being in an elevator shaft. And the only thing on all this wallspace was one photo of an angelic little girl praying, so high up the wall that it clearly required a ladder to put it up there.
The room was warm and clean, though, and that's all I really cared about. But I needed to eat dinner.
I found that I had only four lari, about $2.50, which was not going to be enough to get a proper meal. So I grabbed the ICG report on South Ossetia, figuring I would read that over a quiet dinner by myself, and went back down to the receptionist to ask if I could change dollars or rubles at the hotel. No, she said, but come with me. We walked through the hotel restaurant (which was taken over by a wedding that had accordion music blasting at about 120 decibels) and to the big kitchen, where the hotel staff were finishing up their dinner. Anna, the cook, said "You are our guest!" in pretty good English. So they served me up some tasty stew, pickles and bread. And of course, a plastic bottle of white wine. One of the hotel workers, David, got a couple of coffee cups and we toasted: our parents, our sisters, our current or future families, American-Georgian friendship, God, and all of humanity. Each of these toasts required chugging a full coffee cup of white wine after every one, and so we polished off the 1.5-liter bottle in about 30 minutes.
Here are David and Anna:
The next day I went to change money, and on the way found the pig market shown earlier. The unearthly squealing of these pigs is not something I will forget soon.
Finally, I checked out the Stalin Museum, which was just across the street from the hotel. The entire town, actually, is laid out around his birth home. He was born in a little two-room shack, which is now encased in marble:
Apparently the Soviet government tore down every building within a kilometer of this little hut and oriented the entire town around it. So this is now the center of a huge boulevard (no prizes for guessing the name of the boulevard) around which the whole rest of the town is built.
The museum wasn't too remarkable, to tell the truth -- a lot of photos, gifts to Stalin from his contemporaries, etc. Like most revolutionaries, before he became a horrible despot he seemed to be a sort of dashing, romantic idealist:
After the tour I talked for a while to one of the English-speaking guides, and she told me they're planning to change the exhibit soon, to include people like Trotsky, who were black sheep in the communist family at the time the exhibit was set up. And oddly, despite the fact that they have jacked up the entrance price to about $9, and that I was told by one museum worker in Tblisi that her salary had been increased tenfold since 2003, the salaries at the Gori museum hadn't gone up at all.
Then it was off to Tskhinvali, which you've already heard about...
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