In a Corner of the Former U.S.S.R., There’s Something for Everyone

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/travel/georgia-former-soviet-republic-family-vacation.html

Version 0 of 1.

The trip began, as so many do, with a moment of family doubt.

“Are you sure it’s the right time to go to a former Soviet republic?” my wife, Courtenay, asked.

I then made the mistake of sharing a map with her. “We’re going to be right on the border of South Ossetia?” she said. “Fabulous.”

Courtenay’s caution was justified. Russia was on the march. The Ukraine war was raging. And Georgia, an erstwhile piece of the Soviet empire, sandwiched between Turkey and Russia in the Caucasus Mountains, had already tasted Moscow’s aggression. Though there’s no fighting now, Russia seized control of two separatist enclaves within Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, and they’re still occupied by Russian troops.

But I knew Georgia was not directly involved in the Ukraine war, or likely to be. And I’d been hearing wonderful things about its food, its wine, its skiing, its culture. This little country lying at the joint of Europe and Asia seems to be popping up on everyone’s bucket list.

So I proposed a one-week family trip designed to sweep in Georgia’s best — a little skiing in the mountains, which our 11-year-old son, Asa, loves; a little history, which Courtenay and I thought he could handle in the right doses; and for mom and dad, a little artisanal wine. Archaeologists credit Georgia as the cradle of winemaking — people were mashing up grapes here 8,000 years ago — and I was eager to sample the latest.

To make my offer irresistible, I promised thermal baths, which the capital, Tbilisi, is famous for. I sealed the deal with pictures of Georgia’s legendary cuisine, popular all over Europe — the gooey, cheesy khachapuri breads and juicy, turnip-size khinkali dumplings.

I was also on a secret mission. Georgia had been conquered by Russia hundreds of years ago, then forcibly attached to the Soviet Union. Long after the Soviet Union broke apart, this nation, just like Ukraine, was still being slammed by post-Soviet winds. I wanted to better understand a chunk of the world that, once again, was shaping history. This meant visiting museums — maybe even a historic site or two.

How much of this would an 11-year-old who prefers bombing down a ski slope find interesting? We were about to see.

Georgians consider themselves Europeans, but for many in Europe, Georgia is still terra incognita. There were no direct flights from London, where we live, so we connected through Paris. As we hustled off our first plane, the Air France transit representative asked, “Where next?”

“Tbilisi!” I declared.

She paused and said, “Ooh.” Then she swiped through about 16 screens on her iPad before finding our gate. As we boarded, I met an American woman with ski boots dangling over her shoulder. I asked her what she knew about Georgia. “Not much,” she said. “I’m kind of going in blind.”

Customs and immigration at Tbilisi’s new, small international airport went smoothly. After I changed some dollars for lari, the local currency, I asked the woman behind the glass about getting a taxi.

“You can go with that guy,” she said, pointing to an older man hanging around the arrivals area. As soon as we got outside, he pulled the classic switcheroo and called someone else to take us.

When that driver pulled up, he glared at us with a special rage. As Asa climbed into his car, he grazed his gym shoes on the back seat and the driver reached around and actually swatted Asa’s back, unleashing a tirade of what I can only presume were not nice words in Georgian.

We drove off in silence. I started thinking: “Is this the right place for a family vacation?” It was 10 p.m. We were moving down a dark highway. The driver kept accelerating, braking, accelerating, braking, muttering into his phone and then muttering at me.

One of my goals in traveling with kids (we have another son, Apollo, who’s 13, but he was visiting his grandparents), is to teach them to take risks. But in this case, I thought, we should have gone with an official airport taxi or lined one up ahead of time.

“We could write a long story about this ride,” Asa finally piped up from the back seat. “The title: ‘Wrong Decision.’”

Things improved dramatically when we stepped into the lobby of the Stamba Hotel in downtown Tbilisi. Housed in a magnificent slate-gray edifice that during Soviet times was a publishing house that printed Communist newspapers, the Stamba has soaring ceilings, thousands of books, a stunning sense of scale, cool music and an industrial vibe.

And there was no other issue that night, or for the rest of the trip.

The next morning we strolled up Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s main drag. I’d never seen so many disparate architectural elements. Part of it looked like Paris, the elegant apartment buildings trimmed with wrought iron balconies. Other neighborhoods were built into the rocky hillsides and reminded me of Jerusalem. Soviet leftovers were still hulking around, too, like the Stalinesque Academy of Sciences, alongside some very old churches — Georgia is one of the oldest Christian nations.

We ducked inside the Kashveti Church, where the walls were a cool, pale stone and covered with gold-framed icons. We saw people buying candles from a kiosk, so we bought some, too. Asa was happy to be tasked with lighting them. In every corner, people were praying and kissing the icons. The air was fragrant with frankincense and wax.

After we left, I asked Asa if he had felt comfortable inside. “Yes and no,” he said. “It wasn’t my space, but I felt fine to be there.”

Was he game for a snack? “Ice cream?” he asked hopefully.

We found a charming gelato shop with red-and-white Georgian flags taped to the walls. When Asa couldn’t choose between lemon and chocolate, we got both and strolled on.

Everything about Tbilisi felt distinctive and classy; it was a wonder to me how it had survived the Soviet impulse to homogenize everything.

“Georgia was like the Soviet Riviera,” explained Cristina Florea, a historian at Cornell University who specializes in Eastern Europe. “The elites would go there for vacation, for good wines, delicious food. There was always a mystique about Georgia.”

The fact that Joseph Stalin hailed from a small town near Tbilisi only compounded that. We were told there was a museum dedicated to him — one of the most notorious figures of the 20th century.

But for the moment we put that on pause. We had some skiing to do.

Georgia is trying to carve out a reputation as an alternative to the Alps. It may not be as fancy or well developed — Gudauri, for instance, Georgia’s top skiing spot, has a handful of chairlifts (and often they are not all working), compared with the dozens at, say, Zermatt. But lift tickets are about a fourth of the price, the mountains are as high, and part of the draw is that it’s not the Alps. We met Israelis, Russians, Thais, South Africans, a few Americans, Saudis, Jordanians, Indians and plenty of Europeans.

It’s a two-hour drive from Tbilisi to Gudauri, and as we progressed the road grew curvier and steeper. The scenery was exquisite: ice-crusted rivers, suspension bridges, ancient stone churches clinging to the cliffs and, beyond them, the white peaks of saw-toothed mountains cutting into the sky. By the time we arrived, the clouds were dumping snow.

“We’ve been waiting all season for this snow!” a receptionist at the Gudauri Lodge said. The hotel was a true ski chalet, ski in, ski out. Imagine windows staring at the mountain, an outdoor hot tub big enough for a ski team, and a rental shop and lockers on the ground floor. In the morning, we could trudge a few steps from our room and hit the slopes.

I woke up to the sound of barking dogs. “Dad?” Asa said, standing by our window. “There’s something out there. It looks like a bulldog but much bigger. And it has thicker hair.” I glanced out to see a pack of woolly strays scratching themselves in the middle of a ski run.

Only one lift was working at first — the others were closed because of high winds, we were told by a ski instructor, though it didn’t seem that windy. We waited 20 minutes in the lift line, partly because the guys running it, who had cigarettes hanging off their lips and wore uniforms that said “Police,” sent up chairs with only two or three people, instead of six.

But the skiing was excellent. Our skis happily squeaked on the fresh snow. Though the lower slopes were so congested you had to ski around people, the upper slopes were wide open, allowing Asa to “unleash” himself, as he put it.

Most hotels strung along the mountain offered their own bar and restaurant, often with live music, and after skiing it was easy getting around by taxi — or even walking along the snow-dusted roads.

Another skier insisted we eat at a mountainside inn called Ati Ambavi (10 Stories). Each of the 10 rooms is decorated differently and tells a different story, including one about George Balanchine, a Georgian who is considered the father of American ballet.

Ati Ambavi’s restaurant oozed character and coziness. When we walked in, we found the windows steamed up and candles flickering on the wall. The smell of fresh bread mingled with fragrant spices, and people swayed at their tables, singing along with a piano player in a tux. His repertoire ranged from Sinatra and Lennon to old Russian songs that made everyone’s eyes glow. There was so much love in the air that a Russian man at the table behind us got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend. The entire restaurant burst into applause.

And the food was unreal. We started with lobio, a flavorful bean stew served with doughnut-shaped disks of cornbread. We moved on to local trout, chicken soaked in garlic and milk, a classic Georgian salad of tomatoes and cucumbers drizzled with walnut dressing, and eggplant rolls in a walnut sauce. They’re big on walnuts here. Georgian food tends to be heavy — Asa called it “thick food.” But we were all hungry after a day of skiing, so thick or thin, it quickly started disappearing.

For drinks, the waiter plunked down a jug of compote — a sweet, strawberry-colored concoction of preserved fruit — in front of Asa. And for us, a squat bottle of chacha.

Beware of chacha. Made from pomace, like grappa, it sometimes reaches 80 percent alcohol. You’re supposed to chase it with a slice of orange, though it goes down remarkably smooth.

“You know,” Courtenay said, as we were finishing up — she was sucking on a slice of orange, her eyes happily glazed. “We are so myopic in the Anglo-American world. There’s a whole sophisticated scene out there. We don’t see the rest of the world for what it is.”

As the waiter brought us dessert — one panna-cotta-like pudding with three spoons — I said, and maybe it was the chacha speaking, “I don’t want to leave.”

“Don’t,” he responded.

But there’s always more to see, right? We left Gudauri two days later.

We stopped in Gori, Joseph Stalin’s hometown, to see the Stalin Museum, which became a shrine to him after his death in 1953. It seemed frozen in Soviet amber; it even smelled old. The Georgians have plans to change everything, but right now the exhibits still matter-of-factly detail Stalin’s life, from dropping out of the priesthood and becoming a radical to taking over the Soviet Union and defeating the Nazis.

There’s little on how he starved Ukraine. Or the thousands of people he ordered shot. The musty displays featured his furniture; his pipes; his tiny childhood home, perfectly preserved; his death mask.

Asa had been briefed on the fuller Stalin picture, so I asked him for his impressions after we left. “It was just a museum for his good side,” he said. “That’s why it wasn’t so big.”

We only had a few days left. We rented a private room at a bathhouse; Tbilisi’s thermal springs, high in sulfur, were absolutely delicious to soak in in the middle of winter. I volunteered for the body scrub and winced as a man sanded my back with a rough sponge and then covered me in bubbles. It was like a human carwash. Asa liked the bubbles, the scrub not so much. Courtenay wisely stayed in the hot pool.

We tried several restaurants that served everything from classic soup dumplings to upscale fare at Keto and Kote and Ninia’s Garden, both gorgeous spaces with scrumptious food. Barbarestan paired its dishes with Georgian wine, including amber wine, which is fermented in a centuries-old process in which the grapes, along with the skins and stalks, are placed in a huge clay pot and buried for months. I found it somewhere between a red and a white in heaviness.

But it was Georgia’s history that was most fulfilling. We explored Uplistsikhe, an ancient rock-hewn city more than 3,000 years old, near Gori. Back then, just like now, this area served as a bridge between East and West. Trade caravans journeying from Asia to Europe once crossed these craggy hills. Asa had no problem scampering over the rocks, reaching the next placard long before me or Courtenay. “Check this out,” he said, pointing to a set of neat holes carved into the stone floor. “This is where they made their wine.”

On our last day, we visited the Georgian National Museum on Rustaveli Avenue, where there were stunning displays of pre-Christian gold jewelry.

But it was the “Museum of the Soviet Occupation” exhibition upstairs that stopped me. It tracked, through old photographs, old films and meticulously preserved documents, captioned in Georgian and English, the elimination of Georgia’s intellectual class and the growing resistance to Soviet rule that culminated in Georgia’s declaration of independence in 1991.

It was the most moving thing I saw on the entire trip. The story it told centered on Georgia’s eternal battle to protect its culture. There were unmissable echoes of what is happening in Ukraine. This part of the world is trapped in a push-pull relationship with Russia, which I find endlessly fascinating — and tragic. The week after we left, anti-Russia protests erupted, connected to some proposed legislation. The demonstrations quickly ended, but revealed the depth of emotion of anything related to Russia.

At the museum, Asa moved with me from exhibit to exhibit, right by my side. He read the documents, stared at the faces on the wall, stood with me watching the grainy black-and-white footage from a hundred years ago that made people look as if they walked in choppy steps.

But how much, really, could an 11-year-old absorb? “Hey guy,” I said, as we stepped outside. “Did you find that interesting?”

“Yeah,” Asa said. “Very.”

Good, I thought. Because there’s another museum up the road. And sunlight was pouring over the grand buildings on Rustaveli Avenue, making it a perfect day for a long walk, with maybe an ice cream cone thrown in.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.