Kutaisi

Kutaisi is among the oldest cities in Georgia, and archaeology points to settlement on the Rioni long before it appears in writing. It was the political centre of Colchis, the kingdom that Greek tradition attached to the story of the Golden Fleece, and the gold and bronze objects found at nearby Vani show how wealthy that society was. In about 786 Leon II moved the capital of the kingdom of Abkhazia here, and it remained the seat of kings who ruled western Georgia, and when Bagrat III inherited both western and eastern lands around the year 1000 Kutaisi became the capital of a united Georgian kingdom, which it remained until 1122. Bagrati Cathedral, whose floor was laid in 1003, and Gelati Monastery, founded by David the Builder in 1106 as a church and a school, date from that period.

After the united kingdom broke apart in the fifteenth century the city remained the capital of the separate kingdom of Imereti, which stood between Ottoman and Persian power and was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1810. Ottoman troops wrecked the cathedral with a cannonball in 1692, leaving it a ruin for centuries.

Under Russian and then Soviet rule Kutaisi became a provincial capital and an industrial town, with a large truck factory, engineering works and a railway junction. Industry collapsed after independence in 1991, and the city lost jobs and people. From October 2012 until December 2018 the Parliament of Georgia sat in a new building on the edge of the city, before a new constitution returned it to Tbilisi; the airport and the restored cathedral date from the same period of investment.

Kutaisi carries itself as an old capital rather than a provincial town, and residents are quick to point out that the city was a seat of kings when Tbilisi was a frontier post. The identity is Imeretian: talkative, musical and attached to the table. Western Georgian polyphonic singing is sung here in a style distinct from the eastern one, and choirs, the drama theatre named after Lado Meskhishvili, and the city's opera and puppet stages have long histories.

Religion is central to public life. Gelati was the intellectual centre of medieval Georgia, where philosophy and theology were taught, and it remains a working monastery with its academy ruins beside it; Motsameta draws pilgrims to the tomb of two brothers venerated as martyrs. The city also had a long-established Jewish community, concentrated around its synagogues, one of them built in 1885; emigration in the later twentieth century reduced it, but the buildings and the street names remain.

Hospitality follows Georgian form: guests are fed generously, toasts are proposed in sequence by a tamada and drunk in full, and a refusal is taken as coolness rather than restraint. Football is followed closely, the local club Torpedo Kutaisi being the second most successful in Georgian history. Markets are places for conversation and bargaining, and the pace of the day, slower than in Tbilisi, is something residents defend.

About 160,000 people live in Kutaisi, making it the third largest city in Georgia after Tbilisi and Batumi, and many households have relatives working in the capital or abroad. Households spread across the low-rise streets of the centre, the hillside lanes below the fortress and the blocks of flats in the western and northern districts, and remittances from relatives working overseas support many of them.

The economy rests on three things: the airport and the tourism it brought, which turned the centre into a place of guesthouses, hostels and car-hire offices; trade, from the bazaar to small workshops; and public employment in schools, the university and hospitals. The Soviet factories that once defined the city, above all the truck plant, are largely gone, and unemployment remains a problem. Farming in the surrounding villages supplies the markets with vegetables, fruit, maize and wine.

The day starts early at the bazaar and around the bread ovens, slows in the afternoon heat of summer, and picks up in the evening, when the square, the riverside and the cafés fill and families walk. Traffic, air quality, the state of the pavements and the loss of old wooden houses are recurring local complaints, along with the question of how much of the airport's traffic actually stays in the city rather than moving straight on to Batumi or Tbilisi.

Imereti has its own cooking, lighter and more herb-led than the eastern Georgian kitchen, and Kutaisi is the place to eat it. The regional cheese, Imeretian sulguni's fresher cousin, goes into imeruli khachapuri, a flat round cheese bread quite different from the boat-shaped Adjarian version served on the coast. Herbs, walnuts and tart flavours run through the rest: satsivi, poultry in a cold walnut sauce eaten at festivals; badrijani nigvzit, aubergine rolls filled with walnut paste; pkhali, vegetables chopped with walnuts, garlic and herbs and served cold; and ajapsandali, a stew of aubergine, pepper and tomato.

Maize rather than wheat was the staple of western Georgia, and it survives in ghomi, a stiff maize porridge served hot with cheese melting into it, and in mchadi, dense maize bread. Bread elsewhere means shoti, baked against the wall of a clay tone oven. Chicken with garlic sauce, spicy kharcho and trout from the hill rivers are common on menus.

Imereti is a wine region in its own right, working with grapes such as tsitska, tsolikouri and krakhuna, and some producers still ferment in buried clay qvevri. Churchkhela, walnuts threaded on string and dipped in thickened grape juice, hangs in every market, and chacha, the grape spirit, closes many meals.