From Sighnaghi we drove West towards Gori, planning to spend
an afternoon there before heading into Tblisi, the capital city. The main
attraction in Gori city is the Stalin Museum in Stalin Square. Very proud of
being the birth place of the great dictator, the city has been somewhat built
around the square which houses not only the museum, but also his family house
preserved under an open-sided brick building, and his personal bullet-proof,
air-conditioned train carriage. The museum itself offered an interestingly
narrow perspective on his life, referring to his policies as “revolutionary
ideas” and focusing more on his exile and his personal life than the world wide
trauma and devastation that he caused. Gifts from other world leaders, and
photographs of Stalin in meetings with Lenin, Roosevelt, Churchill and Mao
amongst others portrayed an image of a reasonable and fair leader. The only
hint at the fact that perhaps everything had not been so lovely and clean was
the reconstruction of the “Room of Repression”. A flick through the visitors’
book, despite only being able to read the messages in English, displayed some
very vocal and controversial ideas; many of the museum’s viewers more than
outraged at the silver-lined portrayal of Stalin’s life.
We were just about to head out of town when we decided to
quickly check Couch Surfing (free wi-fi on the streets) and found that we had a
positive reply from a guy in Gori. A quick phone call later we had a host, so
decided to stay in town. Our host was fantastic, working around us at the last
minute, providing us with a three bedroom house all to ourselves, treating us
to beer, cheese and sausages, and sharing stories and jokes with us. He
presented some intriguing sounding activities, so we decided to stay another
day and see what Gori really had to offer.
Our first stop on the backstreets tour of Gori was the
closed border between Georgia and the Russian-occupied, independent nation,
recognised by the rest of the world as part of Georgia, South Ossetia. Only
26km away from the city centre, we saw remnants of buildings that were
demolished and villages bombed to the ground in the 2008 war. Communities of
small, cloned houses built by the EU have popped up all over the place, housing
many refugees displaced by the war. As we drove, our guide pointed out a narrow
road zigzagging up a steep hillside. The village that the road leads to is in
Georgia, but the road to access it from the rest of the country, now goes
through the Russian-occupied area, so in order to remain accessible from the
rest of the country a new road had to be built. On the bright side, this
village is still in the democratic and free country of Georgia, a country that
built a new road to them in order for them not to be cut off.
The border itself, the first truly closed border any of us
have ever actually seen, is marked by a khaki coloured wall following the line
dividing Georgia. Armed guards manned the section at the road, warning us not
to drive on any of the tracks running parallel to the border and ensuring we
didn’t take any photos or wander off to explore anything we shouldn’t. From a
few hundred metres away on the road, a gap between the trees and shells of buildings
provided a clear view of Tskhinvali, the capital city of the area. Even from a
distance on a sunny day, the bleakness and drabness of the city was all too
apparent. Yet so close to Gori, how different life would be on the other side
of that wall.
We asked our new friend whether there was anything else in
or around the city that had to do with Stalin, other than the obvious which we
had already ticked off. After a minute of thinking, he mentioned that there
used to be a statue in the centre of town, but it was removed a couple of years
ago. It’s far from public knowledge, but somehow he had an idea that it was now
resting in an abandoned building on the outskirts of town. This sounded like a
very unique experience!
Our host directed us off the main road, past a military
base, into a complex of bombed out, dilapidated houses. Having never actually
looked for it before, he asked for directions from a family who we can only
assume were squatting in one of the buildings. The man pointed us behind the
overgrown home to what I suppose would have been the back garden. We picked our
way through brambles and nettles, climbed over some rubble, and realised the
statue wasn’t there. We waited in the jungle of prickles while our guide
climbed a concrete wall, returning a little while later, claiming to have uncovered
the location of the statue. We followed him back through the brambles, nettles
and rubble, and along a slightly more manageable track to a group of
construction/demolition (it’s often hard to tell the difference) workers who
pointed us to another bombed out shell.
Climbing in single file through more prickles and rubble, we
emerged into the small room one at a time, each of us gasping in shock as our
eyes fell upon the 3m tall statue of Stalin. In such a non-descript room,
probably only 4m x 2m and completely open to the elements given the lack of
windows or roof, the statue lay face-down in the weeds, taking up the majority
of the space; a bizarrely humble position for the all too imposing monument. Considering
how seemingly proud the city seems to be of this dictator, how peculiar that
this statue just be left completely open to the elements, theft or vandalism.
We heard that there is talk of the statue being reinstated in Stalin Square,
but in the mean time, we are four of the very few people, possibly the only
tourists, that will witness the magnificent monument in its current degrading
position.
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