Great Journey 🏍 Day 351
Tbilisi or Tbilisi - no matter what we call the city, we are in love. We take a few days. Stroll through the old town, admire churches, mosques and synagogues, boot up to the fortress and drop in on Mother Georgia.
When our feet start to hurt (cobblestones everywhere!), we find the botanical garden and stroll through it, only to end up in the spa district a little later.
Georgia's capital is a great crossroads of trade routes, a melting pot of many cultures and a single gourmet mile, full of enchanting alleyways where wrought-iron balconies usually adorn the fronts of houses and wooden balconies the courtyards. (The Tsar, by the way, banned wooden balconies from the fronts of houses, saying it was too peasant!). The house owners, cleverly, have now added wrought ironwork to the street frontage, but the wooden balconies, instead of being disposed of, have moved into the inner courtyards, where they bring a nice cosiness. Meanwhile, the balcony materials are mixing again.
Mother Georgia, high above, looks proudly over the city. In Soviet times, she still looked down humbly; after independence in 1991, the sculptor who created her in 1958 once again laid hands on the mother and tightened her bosom (a little bigger, a little higher, just in keeping with the times), raised her gaze confidently and added a few laurels. We can't find father Georg, maybe he's out getting bumpers.
The Botanical Garden in the Fig Tree Ravine is a place of tranquillity, a place to breathe. During the Middle Ages, fruit and vegetables were already grown here for the respective rulers. Once again, it is the largest/most beautiful (?) of the Russian Empire, or at least of the Caucasus region.
For us, because there are no labels, it is simply a nice place to linger. And since we are not really familiar with the realm of plants, we just look at everything and think to ourselves that one or the other plant must be a very special one. Knowing that, we feel wonderful.
#bilisi #BotanicalGarden #KartlisDeda #mothergeorgia
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