The Kura River, which has its headwaters in Turkey, cuts eastward into Georgia, where it is called the Mt’k’vari. National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek recorded those icy waters in March 2015 when he was walking toward the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
The city is currently in the grips of a political crisis over a Russia-inspired law that critics fear will stifle media freedom.
Paul Salopek is back in Tbilisi now and talked with The World’s Marco Werman about the area’s cultural past and the country’s political landscape today.
Marco Werman: Paul, it’s good to have you back on the show. We’ll get to the protests in a moment, there’s big news there that we’ve been covering. But let’s talk first about Tbilisi, where you are right now. Historically, what makes Tbilisi unique?
Paul Salopek: It’s another one of these trading hubs, and it’s like a fulcrum point that balances right between Europe and Asia. This is where many of the Silk Road caravans came. They would unload their merchandise here, take a steam bath in the hammam, and then trade on to Europe. So, it was kind of a marketplace society here where everybody was welcome.
You had been walking for nearly two years, nearly 3,000 miles out of East Africa, when you reached Georgia in 2015. From what I understand, you kind of got stuck there for months. How did you shift gears from visitor to basically resident?
Yeah, months and months. I was trying to get a visa to walk through Iran because Iran, as you know, Marco, is a hugely important country in terms of just human culture, human migrations. And the weeks were ticking off. Right? I was applying, I was applying, I was kind of thinking I’d be staying in Tbilisi only for, you know, maybe a few weeks. I ended up spending almost nine months waiting here. Iran’s that important. Guess what? The visa did not come through. So, I had to basically enjoy a lot of good wine here and got to know the Caucasus before heading into Central Asia instead.
One of your explorations in Georgia took you to a vineyard. Georgians claimed to have invented wine-making. Is that national pride speaking, or is there something to it?
It’s a little bit of both. It’s a complicated thing. I don’t want to offend my Georgian friends, right? It’s really hard to go back 8,000 years. This is early, almost Neolithic. This was even before the Bronze Age. There was no written language. But they found, you know, they found clay pots here. They’ve done scrapings inside, analyzed whatever residues, and it was grape juice. So, I think Georgia has as good a claim as anybody, maybe, you know, parts of Turkey, parts of the Caucasus. This area might have been the original vineyard of the world, for grape wine anyway. They’re very proud of it.
I mean, you write about this vineyard where a previous owner, whom you describe as a Francophile, used to make champagne, which would flow in a fountain in the courtyard.
It was a great anecdote. I went to another vineyard when I was here, a small family vineyard. And the guy was making beautiful wine. Georgian wine, as you may know, specializes in making it out of a clay pot. They sink it into a ground. It’s called a kvevri, and it has kind of an earthy flavor because of that. Very distinctive. And [the guy] said, “You know, I went to Italy, and I won this first prize award.” And they said [to him], “Hey, where have you been all these years?” He said, “Guys, you know, we’ve been fighting the Russians. Give me a break.”
Now, notably, Georgians have also been cultivating honey bees for thousands of years. You came across an archeological dig, a burial site where mummified bodies had been embalmed with honey. Tell us about that.
I got to actually go into the lab where they were analyzing some of these artifacts. We’re talking about 4,300 years old. This is really the beginning of the Bronze Age. These are semi-nomadic cultures that used big ox carts. They had tamed oxen but not horses yet. And they were kind of moving, like in tented camps around the steppes, around the mountains of this part of the world. The archeologists found this very big mound that they dug into and buried, and it was some kind of a chieftain. There were apparently people who were slaves who had been sacrificed and who died along with him. But they and everything else in this burial chamber was preserved with honey. You could smell 4,000-year-old honey. You could smell the sweetness coming out of it. They had, like, nuts and berries and pieces of basketry. Honey is an amazing preservative.
How did honey preserve the human body?
It’s so sweet that bacteria can’t survive in it because they consume all the oxygen, and it becomes an anoxic environment. So, the bog people that you heard about in Scandinavian, people they pull out of these mud bogs …There’s just no oxygen, so they don’t decay. Honey has kind of the same effect, right? There’s even a legend that Alexander the Great was buried in honey.
Incredible. Paul, you also wrote about Georgians’ reverence for their nation’s poets. What does that say about Georgian identity?
Yeah, I mean, they have an amazing, rich, very old lyric tradition here. It’s equal to their pride and being kind of one of the first vineyards in the world. Their heroes, their national heroes, are poets. Shota Rustaveli, Vazha Pshavela …These are the names of these kinds of iconic lyricists. You can tell a lot about a society when you walk through its capital and see who’s up on the pedestals and who were immortalized in statuary. Many societies, its kings, its generals on horses with a saber pointing at the sky, and [its] powerful people. In Georgia, it’s often poets.
Now, the question of identity and free expression. It brings us to today, when Georgian security forces are cracking down on protesters outside parliament after lawmakers are close to approving this foreign agents bill. Many there see it as authoritarian and Russian-inspired. What are the people you’ve been speaking with saying about it?
What’s happening here and what people here tell me on the streets …just last night, there were 85,000 [to] 90,000 people marching in the streets against this bill, which the government says is for transparency purposes. The idea is, with this bill, any kind of individual or institution that receives more than 20% of their funding from abroad has to be registered. And the problem with that sounds like, you know, OK, that’s just a transparency law. The problem with that is it has been weaponized in other countries, including in Russia, where the people on the streets doing the demonstration say that even the language of this bill echoes the Russian bill that has been used to crack down on civil society. And indeed, there’s an election later this year. There’s a very important election coming in the autumn in Georgia. And the opposition people, the citizens marching in the streets, are saying it’ll be very difficult to monitor and watchdog this election if this bill passes. Because all of us, the media, civil society groups, election watchdogs, will suddenly have a very intrusive government looking into what they’re doing because of this registration process.
Well, Paul, I mean, you’ve read a lot about Georgian history. You were immersed in the country for nearly a year, as you explained. Put this current debate and conflict over the foreign agents’ bill into a historical context.
Looking at deep history, the Caucasus have always been a bridge. They’ve bridged two continents, you know, Europe and Asia, the northern steppe, the southern Mediterranean climates. So, yet again, this seems to be a tug of war for the country of Georgia about where its heart lies versus where geopolitics is trying to drag it. Eighty percent of Georgians, according to the latest polls, favor integrating into the EU. The EU is saying that this new bill threatens Georgian integration. So there’s a tension here between, I guess, elites, political elites and ordinary people, between people who’ve had power here for a long time and those who don’t. And it’s just playing out. This is the latest iteration of a place that’s both a crossroads for trade but also a cockpit for competing power. And a very important part of the world.
Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Writer and National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek has embarked on a 24,000-mile storytelling trek across the world called the “Out of Eden Walk.” The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, has funded Salopek and the project since 2013. Explore the project here. Follow the journey on X at @PaulSalopek, @outofedenwalk and also at @InsideNatGeo.
Less than .05% of listeners will donate. Can we count on you?
Our coverage reaches millions each week, but only a small fraction of listeners contribute to sustain our program. We still need 224 more people to donate $100 or $10/monthly to unlock our $67,000 match. Will you help us get there today?