Gori

Gori grew where the Great Liakhvi joins the Mtkvari, on a natural crossroads between eastern and western Georgia and the routes leading north into the Caucasus. Settlement in the area is ancient — the rock-cut town of Uplistsikhe a few kilometres east was a religious and urban centre in pre-Christian times — but the town itself is associated with the fortress on the rock at its heart, recorded from the Middle Ages and traditionally linked with King David the Builder, who is said to have fortified the site and settled Armenian refugees here in the early twelfth century.

Its position made it a prize. Mongol, Timurid, Persian and Ottoman armies passed through, and the fortress changed hands repeatedly between Georgian kings and their invaders; a Persian garrison held it in the eighteenth century. After Russia annexed the kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti in 1801, Gori became a district capital, gaining a grid of streets, schools and a seminary tradition that sent local boys to Tbilisi to train as priests. One of them, born in a small cottage in the town in 1878, was Ioseb Jughashvili, later known as Stalin.

An earthquake in 1920 badly damaged the fortress and much of the town. Soviet rule brought factories, apartment blocks, a broad central avenue and, in the 1950s, the museum that made Gori a place of pilgrimage for Soviet visitors. In August 2008, during the war over South Ossetia, the town was bombed and then briefly occupied by Russian forces, and thousands of people from villages to the north left their homes; settlements of small identical houses were built for them on the plain nearby. The boundary line remains close to the town, and its proximity shapes local life.

Gori's public identity is inseparable from the question of Stalin. The museum on the avenue, his preserved birth house and the memory of the statue that stood in front of the city hall until it was removed in June 2010 draw visitors from around the world, and the town has debated for decades how to present a native son responsible for mass repression. Locals differ sharply: some treat the association as heritage and a source of income, others find it an embarrassment, and the museum has long been criticised for the way it tells the story. Nearby, memorials remember the victims of the 2008 war.

Beneath that, this is a Kartlian market town with the manners of inner Georgia: the eastern Georgian dialect, a strong Orthodox calendar, and the supra, the long feast with wine and toasts through which families mark births, weddings and funerals. Gorijvari, the hilltop church of St George above the town, is a place of pilgrimage, and its feast day brings people up the ridge for services and picnics.

The town keeps a modest cultural life of its own — a theatre, a music school and museums — and its identity is also agricultural, tied to the orchards of Shida Kartli and the wine of the Ateni valley. Since 2008 it has absorbed displaced families from the villages to the north, who have added their own village traditions to the town. Visitors are met with the same quick hospitality found across Georgia, often with an invitation to eat.

Gori is the fifth most populous city in Georgia and the administrative centre of Shida Kartli, a town of tens of thousands on the plain between the capital and the west. The population has shrunk since Soviet times through emigration, though it was partly offset after 2008 by families who moved from villages near the boundary line into the town and the purpose-built settlements on the plain.

The economy rests on fruit and agriculture, trade along the main highway, administration, schools and a university, with tourism adding a steady stream of day visitors to the museum and to Uplistsikhe. Shida Kartli's orchards are among the most productive in Georgia, and in late summer and autumn lorries of apples and peaches move through the town; the Ateni valley adds wine. Soviet-era factories have largely gone, and many households rely on seasonal work, remittances or small enterprises.

Daily life runs early: the market opens at dawn, business is done in the morning, and the avenue fills in the evening when families walk and children play in the square. Wages are low, and younger people commute to Tbilisi, an hour away, or leave altogether. The most distinctive strain on the town is its geography — the fenced boundary line lies just to the north, dividing farmland from villages and making incidents on the line a regular concern for people living in the surrounding countryside.

Gori eats like inner Kartli: wheat bread from the tone, the clay oven, rather than the cornbread of the west, and a table built around grilled meat, cheese and vegetables. Mtsvadi, chunks of pork or veal cooked over vine cuttings and served with sliced onion and tkemali, a sour plum sauce, is the celebratory dish, and khinkali, the twisted dumplings filled with spiced minced meat and broth, are eaten by hand with black pepper. Khachapuri appears in the round Imeretian form and as the layered, buttery version.

The countryside is fruit country, and that shows on the table. Apples, peaches, plums and pears fill the market in season; the sour plums become tkemali, the rest are dried as chiri or boiled down into tklapi, sheets of fruit leather, and churchkhela, strings of walnuts dipped repeatedly in thickened grape juice, hang in rows on the stalls. Preserving is a household skill here, and jars of pickles, jams and pressed juice line shelves through the winter.

Wine is the valley's other product. The Ateni gorge south of the town is known for a light, lively white with a slight sparkle, made chiefly from the Chinuri and Goruli Mtsvane grapes that are blended for sparkling wine in eastern Georgia, and many families still ferment their own in a qvevri, the buried clay vessel typical of Georgia. Chacha, the grape spirit, follows at the end of a meal, and non-drinkers turn to the mineral waters bottled in the mountains to the west.