Zazalo

This weekend I hiked from Ude to Zazalo Tower with a Brit, a Turk, and two Georgians. Here my friend Halice is taking in the countryside.

Nothing like a little permafrost on recently tilled earth.

The Georgian-Turkish border. There is three km of no-man's-land between Georgia and Turkey.

A Catholic Church. When the Ottoman Empire ruled Samtskhe, French missionaries traveled here and converted some locals. One of my fellow Georgian traveler's grandfather helped build this church.

A guard tower on the border across from the old tower.

Zazalo tower was built in the 12-13th centuries to protect Samtskhe from the Seljuq Turks. Locals say fish guts were thrown from the tower at invading Ottomans, but the tower was captured when an Ottoman soldier noticed a pile of fish guts next to what turned out to be the tower's secret entrance.

Lunch with a view

The town of Zazalo

The trail to the tower was little more than flat land next to a water pipe.

Akhaltsikhe

Akhaltsikhe

WWII Memorial

Rabati

Holy Sign Church (Armenian)

Armenian Genocide Memorial

Old Turkish Bathhouse

Greek Orthodox Church (now Georgian)

Catholic Church and Monastery

Queen Tamar Church, Georgian

Context

Gori

I visited Gori after attending a TEFL conference there. It's a city of ~50,000 people, and the birthplace of the Man of Steel, Stalin.

The Stalin Museum

Stalin's childhood home

A recreation of the room Stalin was born in.

Stalin's train. Stalin was supposedly afraid of flying, so he traveled everywhere by train.

Stalin's bedroom in his train.

A Georgian joke: Why is Stalin the best Georgian? Because he killed the most Russians!

Young Stalin was pretty handsome.

Stalin's death mask

Gori Fortress. Gori was captured by General Pompeii in the 1st century B.C. This fortress was built to resist Mongol raids much later.

Uplistsikhe (The Fortress of the Lord), an ancient cave town near Gori. I forgot my camera, but I took some pictures with a friend's phone I'll post later; it was very cool, and completely abandoned, as was the Stalin Museum (winter definitely isn't tourist season here).

Kulalisi

This weekend I hiked to a village near Akhaltsikhe, Kulalisi, with some students from my school. I passed through another village, Sadzeli, on the way there. The village had a WWII memorial; 146 men from the village (most of them) fought in the war, and only 43 returned.

Kulalisi. When I entered the village, everyone left their houses and came to look at the American. I was invited to dozens of peoples houses for tea, and some locals gave me a tour of their town. I ended up eating lunch with a fairly wealthy man who had worked in Yemen and Papua New Guinea on oil pipelines for Exxon Mobile.

What's left of an alleged 9th century castle. I'm pretty sure the history the locals told me was false because their region was controlled by Georgia during that time, but they said this castle was built by Armenians. To be fair, the Bagratid dynasty controlled both Armenia and Georgia during this time; the Bagratuni family controlled Armenia, and the Bagrationi offshoot (but distinct historically) ruled most of Georgia from Kutaisi. And this is only relevant if the castle was indeed built in the 9th century. If anyone knows how to verify this information, or where to find information about the fortresses and history of Samtskhe-Javakheti, please let me know.