Borjomi

The mineral springs in the gorge were known to local people for a thousand years or more before they reached wider recognition, in an area that the Middle Ages knew as the province of Tori, guarded by forts that still overlook the town. Their modern history began in the 1820s and 1830s, after Russia took control of the area, when soldiers of an imperial regiment garrisoned in the valley rediscovered the warm, salty water and found it eased their ailments. Doctors were sent to analyse it, the first bathhouse was built, and a small resort began to form in what had been a thinly settled, heavily forested gorge.

Imperial patronage made the town. The viceroy of the Caucasus, Mikhail Vorontsov, promoted the waters in the 1840s, and later the Romanov family took the valley as a summer estate, building the palace at Likani in the 1890s. Parks were laid out around the springs, villas and hotels went up along the river, and bottling began in the nineteenth century, carrying the name Borjomi across the Russian Empire. A narrow-gauge railway was built up to the plateau at Bakuriani, and a branch line linked the town to the main Transcaucasian route. By 1901 Russian residents outnumbered Georgians in the growing town.

Under Soviet rule Borjomi became a mass health resort, with sanatoriums, rest homes and a bottling plant that supplied the whole union; the Likani palace served as a state dacha. The collapse of the Soviet Union cut both the visitors and the export market, and the 1990s were hard. Bottling and the resort trade recovered in the 2000s, and a fire that burned more than three square kilometres of the national park above the gorge in August 2008 underlined how much the town depends on the woods around it.

Borjomi's identity is bound up with water. Taking the cure — drinking a measured glass of warm mineral water each morning, walking in the park, bathing in the baths — is a habit passed down from imperial and Soviet times, and Georgian families still come for a fortnight of it in summer. The rhythm of the spa town, with its promenades, kiosks and benches under the trees, is quite different from the working towns of the Kartli plain below.

The architecture reflects that history: timber balconies and carved eaves on nineteenth-century villas, the domed glass pavilion over the spring, Soviet sanatorium blocks along the gorge, and the eclectic palace at Likani. The town sits on an old frontier between Kartli and Meskheti, and Meskhetian traditions of dried fruit, cheese-making and mountain hospitality mix here with the eastern Georgian supra, the long feast run by a tamada.

Everyday manners are those of small-town Georgia: quick invitations to eat, generous toasts, and a strong attachment to the Orthodox church, whose feast days empty the streets and fill the monasteries of the gorge. The forests matter culturally as well as economically, and mushroom and berry gathering in autumn is a family activity. Bakuriani, the resort on the plateau above, has been a winter sports centre since Soviet times and gives the area a second, colder season of its own.

About 11,000 people live in Borjomi, which makes it a town rather than a city, strung along a few kilometres of the Mtkvari gorge and rarely more than a few streets wide. It is the administrative centre of the surrounding municipality, whose villages and the resort of Bakuriani depend on it for schools, the hospital and the market. The population has fallen since Soviet times, as it has in much of rural Georgia, with younger people leaving for Tbilisi or abroad.

Two things support the local economy: the bottling of mineral water, which is one of Georgia's best-known exports, and tourism, which brings Georgian and regional visitors to hotels, guesthouses and sanatoriums through the summer and sends others on to the ski slopes above in winter. Forestry, small-scale farming and work in the national park add to this, and many households keep fruit trees, bees or a few animals.

The daily rhythm is quiet and seasonal. Mornings begin with walkers heading for the spring, the market fills early with cheese, honey and vegetables, and the park is busiest in the evening, when families walk, children ride the roundabouts and the cafés at the gates fill up. Out of season the town empties and many businesses close. Its persistent concerns are the same as those of other Georgian mountain towns: depopulation, ageing sanatorium buildings, and protecting the forests and the aquifer that give the place its living.

Borjomi's most famous product is not a dish but a drink: naturally carbonated, mineral-rich and distinctly salty water that rises warm from volcanic rock and has been bottled since the nineteenth century. In the central park it is drunk straight from the spring, noticeably warmer and stronger than the bottled version, and Georgians treat a glass of it as medicine as much as refreshment. Other springs rise elsewhere in the gorge, including at Likani.

The cooking is eastern Georgian with a mountain accent. Khinkali, the pleated dumplings filled with spiced meat and broth, are eaten by hand and with plenty of black pepper; mtsvadi, meat grilled over vine cuttings, appears at every celebration; and khachapuri, cheese-filled bread, comes in the round Imeretian and other forms. Soups such as chikhirtma, thickened with egg, and kharcho, made with walnuts, suit the cool evenings, as do beans in a clay pot, lobio, served with mchadi cornbread and pickles.

The forests and orchards supply the rest. Market stalls sell chiri, sun-dried plums and other dried fruit typical of the Meskheti side of the region, tklapi, sheets of fruit leather, churchkhela, walnuts dipped in thickened grape juice, and jars of honey, wild berries and pickled mushrooms. Cheese from the plateau villages, walnut sauces and tarragon feature strongly, and meals end with Georgian wine or a small glass of chacha, the local grape spirit.