Zacho Gets All Spiritual and Stuff

            I was talking to a friend of mine today, British Chris, about Dostoyevsky, a writer I both hate and admire and hate to admire. Dostoyevsky says that ‘it is not miracles that incline a realist towards faith...in the realist it is not faith that is born of miracles, but miracles of faith.’ As a realist, I tend to agree with Papa Fyodor, I mean the man was a true Russian badass: his writing got him sentenced to death, reprieved, put into a Gulag, released, and made him wealthy before he gambled it all away. So what happens when a realist is presented with something so awe-inspiring, so humbling, and so deeply spiritual that it appears as an undeniable miracle to their eyes? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Vardzia.

            Perhaps it’s a place you have to see with your own eyes, but I’ve trekked to Machu Picchu and I’ve been to the Mayan temples at Chichen Itza, I’ve seen places like Stonehenge and Notre Dame de Paris and countless other sites where faith meets ingenuity and the human character triumphs...but I’ve never felt as strong of a spiritual connection to the world as I did at Vardzia. I swear it wasn’t the chacha.

            Vardzia was built sometime in the 12^th century, an entire monastery built within a mountain in order to protect the monks from the weather, Mongols, Persians and Turks. The Persians and Turks ended up sacking the place, driving the monks away for a final time back in the late 16^th century. The human spirit persists, however, and the monks have started coming back to live and pray in the caves.  

            I do not know what it was that really struck me about this place in particular. It was visually stunning, sometimes eerily quiet, and placed in a perfect green valley with a trickling blue river. I don’t believe it was the physical nature of the place. I think it was the fact Vardzia illustrates the lengths that people will go to protect something that they believe in; and as I’m not a religious person, the metaphor appeared even stronger to me. If we, as the present incarnation of the human race, could stand by our convictions to such an extent that we would excavate a goddamned mountain by hand to preserve them, what are we truly capable of?

            Vardzia was just one stop in a weekend full of adventures, however. It was a dear friend’s birthday, the name of whom I can’t quite recall, but we assembled in Borjomi, a little town in the Lesser Caucasus, to celebrate. We walked through a forest that was so calm and peaceful that we forgot we were in Georgia. We explored a castle, swam in a hot spring reputed for its ‘healing powers,’ and we crossed a river on a log and built a fire on the far shore. We also drank a lot of terrible Georgian wine.          
             All in all it was a terrific weekend, a much needed reprieve from the village life. I doubt I can stretch another 25 days straight here without going insane but I’ll just have to wait and see; the 10 hour round-trip out of the mountains in the most horrible form of transportation imaginable, the marshrutka, is a heavy price to pay just to stop myself from talking to the livestock. I’m going to finish off this post with some pictures of last weekend, I hope everyone that is reading this back home and around the world gets a chance to find something that gives them a little faith, even if it’s simply a little faith in humanity.

Kargad!

-                    - Zacho