I'm back in Batumi, Republic of Georgia. I've been here for five days, but things have been very hectic until today, so no time to write the blog. I arrived in Tbilisi last Tuesday and then drove across the country with Mamuka, my Georgian colleague, on Wednesday.
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| View from Mamuka's Village |
After a long hard winter with snow for the last two months, it's finally spring here. Apparently, this is the first week it has been warm. On the drive over here, we saw sour cherry trees in bloom all over - small white blooms, magnolias, and daffodills in every yard down here near the coast. On the way here, we stopped in Mamuka's family village up in the mountains. It was very nice, with the sour cherries and forsythia in bloom. There are tiny blue wild primroses in the fields, which are just lovely.
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| Wild Primroses |
The cold weather has really slowed down the citrus, there is no new growth yet and no sign of flower buds. There is a lot of cold/freeze damage with small dead branches and burned leaves. In the Batumi demonstration orchard, there were not as many broken branches from snow as I thought I might see, but plenty of pruning needed to clean out all the small dead branches. Tree canopies all along the roads look even thinner than when I was here before, and many are very yellow or burned brown by cold, so there is pretty significant damage from the cold winter. I hope they get a crop this year. The bloom will be very late, my university colleagues predicted today that it would be another month before bloom, which means fruit will be very late.
Since I arrived here, the weather here has been warm and sunny for the most part. I spent yesterday morning with my interpreter, Izolda. I had told them I wanted to go to church since it was Easter for us. Here, they are mostly Georgian Orthodox, so Easter is next Sunday. So Izolda took me to church...several of them, as a matter of a fact. We started out in a tiny little Georgian church right nect to the hotel, Saint Barbara's (picture below in January blog).
They were selling bunches of boxwood and daffodils outside. On their "Palm" Sunday, they buy these fragrant leaves and then keep them all year. They bring last year's leaves back to the church, where they are burned. So there were people selling the leaves, daffodils, and other flowers outside all around the church. They were also selling red dye and sticks which make red dye for Easter eggs for next week.
There were so many people in the tiny church we could barely get in the door. We bought little tiny candles to light as well. In the orthodox church they don't sit down, they all stand up. So there were all these people jammed in together, holding lit pencil-sized candles...I was sure someone was going to light someone's clothes or hair on fire! We heard a bit of the chanting and music and I could smell the incense, but could not see much of anything. It just kept getting more and more crowded, so we decided to go on to another church.
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| Batumi street |
We walked through some of the older area of town, on cobblestone streets, to another, very large, Georgian cathdral that looked more like a French Cathedral. There were mobs of people there too, but it was so big we could go in and move around. It was lavishly decorated with icons of saints, some of them covered in gold.
Everyone was lighting candles at the icons of different saints...I lit one at Saint Nicholas and another at Mary's icon. Then we walked around outside in the church yard, where people were gathering in a huge crowd by the back door of the church. Izolda said that in about an hour, the priests would come out and bless the crowd with holy water and incense. The crowd was already huge, and growing by the minute, so we decided not to stay there either.
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| Seafront, Batumi |
So we walked to the Catholic church down by the port. It was a very modern, but lovely building. Mass had already happened, but it was open so we went in and enjoyed the peace and quiet! There was only one other person there while we were there. They had a big banner over the altar that said (in Georgian, of course) Christ is Risen, so they had celebrated Easter today. Then we walked around town, enjoying the lovely warm spring weather and all the flowers planted on the promenades. A very nice Easter day!
