DAY NINE

The sun was out from the time I woke up, the first time all week.  The sky was brilliant blue with huge billowing clouds capping the mountains surrounding the village.  The river raged brown and full from the rain of the last few days.

Today was another half-day.  School started at 10:00, and I spent the day with teachers as they showed me what paperwork means to a Georgian teacher.  Plans were also in the works for an excursion later in the afternoon to Chiatura, a town very near Sachkhere.  First though, after school, I hiked to the top of the mountain behind School #2 to see the castle visible from the windows of the school.  The castle is called Modinakhe or “Come and See.”  Legend has it that long, long ago, a young man wanted to marry a noble maiden.  Her parents said until he had a castle to call his own, he could not have her hand in marriage.  He built his castle in the most prominent place on the mountain and then told the family to come and see the home he had built for his beloved.

The walk was steep, along a road sometimes in good repair, sometimes crumbling.  A couple of vehicles passed me on the way up, and once I had to maneuver among several cows.  A cable car station lay in ruins at the top of the mountain, now no longer in service since the earthquake in ’91 that toppled the three remaining towers of the castle and much of the town.  The views were stunning, the entire town laid out at my feet.  From the peak of the ruined castle walls, I experienced vertigo, the piney slope falling steeply down to the town.

Twenty minutes away by car, Chiatura was once a thriving mining town, full of Greeks, Ukrainians, Russians and others from around the Soviet empire.  There are graceful pre-Soviet buildings along the tree-lined avenue bordering the river and cable cars sailing high above from cliffside to cliffside.

Now however, though the mining continues, it is on a much smaller scale, unemployment is rife and the buildings are in decay, but one can see the charm that once made it a proud town.  On the return trip, we stopped at a monastery built directly into a cliff.  We walked up the steep stone stairs to the foot of the sheer wall where halfway up was a gated door set directly into the rockface.  Narrow metal stairs climbed to the doorway that was now unfortunately locked.  We had arrived too late.  The nuns had closed the door.