Author: Intergalactic Tourist

My last stop on the way home from the Soviet Union in July 1973 was London, England. I had been invited to stay with friends who were living there, in a house near Gatwick Airport to the south of London. I didn’t take many pictures during my short stay, and I have only a few to offer here.

Of course I could not visit London without seeing the Tower of London, first built by William the Conqueror in 1068 and expanded during the following centuries. It has served as a royal residence and grand palace, armory, treasury, prison and public records office; it has also housed the Royal Mint and the Crown Jewels of England.

Near the Tower of London stands the Tower Bridge. It is much newer than the Tower itself, having been built in the 19th century (1886-1894), but it is equally well-known as a landmark. It is often confused with London Bridge, but that is another bridge in a different location. That bridge, the one commemorated by the nursery rhyme, has a longer and rather interesting history, dating from Roman times. Originally it was built of wood, but under King John (who is also commemorated by a nursery rhyme, Humpty-Dumpty), a stone bridge was completed (1209). That bridge, known as Old London Bridge, lasted until the 19th century. Hundreds of houses were built upon it, and at the south end was a gatehouse where the heads of convicted “traitors” were impaled on pikes – figures such as William Wallace, Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell.

In 1831 the Old London Bridge was replaced by the New London Bridge, which didn’t last as long. By the 1920’s it was found that the bridge was sinking by an inch every eight years, and in 1967 construction on a new one was begun; it was completed in 1973. The old New London Bridge was sold to an American businessman, Robert McCulloch. It was dismantled and shipped in pieces to Long Beach, California, whence it was trucked to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, and rebuilt over the Colorado River in 1971. It was reconstructed around a steel frame so it wouldn’t sink into the Colorado as it had in the Thames. The stones were used as cladding for the steel framework.

Nothing I had ever read or heard about the Tower of London prepared me for the spectacle of the Tower Ravens. These birds inhabited the garden and were quite accustomed to the presence of humans. Their wings were clipped so they could not fly far, though they were certainly able to get around the Tower grounds with ease. They were well-cared for by the custodians of the Tower; they had bands around their legs to keep track of them and were quite aware of their privileged status.

The ravens were fractious and quarrelsome; they fought amongst one another ferociously, and at one point I saw one raven pinning another down on the ground and pecking its head like a hammer. I was not quick enough to get a picture of that episode, and when I turned back after retrieving my camera, the peckee was gone and its assailant was digging into a piece of bloody meat. I first thought with horror that the dominant bird had dismembered its victim and was eating it, but it turned out that while I wasn’t looking the victim had fled and the victor was merely enjoying chunks of meat that the keepers had thrown in the yard in the interim. But there was no doubt that these birds are rowdy characters.

Elegant residential and office buildings facing a London park, which might have been the location of master detective Hercule Poirot’s office. Actually his office was in Florin Court, aka Whitehaven Mansions, on the eastern side of Charterhouse Square in Smithfield, London. But I didn’t know that at the time.

While strolling near Buckingham Palace I was witness to a scene where a girl got tossed into the pool beside Victoria Memorial by a couple of her friends, who then pulled her out, soaking wet. I called it the Case of the Drenched Debutante.

After an all-too-short stay in London, I hopped a Boeing 747 for the flight back to Los Angeles. On the way I was able to get a shot of the coast of Greenland from the plane.

From the stop at Finse, the train embarked upon the final stretch of the Oslo-Bergen railway.  First it passed through a long tunnel, then it embarked on a dizzying descent toward the city of Bergen, allowing me to get some nice photos along the way.

Bergen is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. I caught my first glimpse of it from the train on the crazy-steep descent from the mountains into the city. It has a magnificent harbor in one of Norway’s famed fjords, framed by the mountains. Fortunately I was able to get some shots from the train as it plummeted toward the harbor.

In Bergen I stayed with Sidsel Larsen, one of the Norwegians I had met in the Moscow University dormitory, and she showed me around the city and its environs, starting with the harbor. In Bergen the harbor is ubiquitous; you cannot overlook it. For its entire history Bergen has been a maritime commercial city, as it is today. It was founded in 1070 and grew to be the largest city in Norway, which it remained for centuries until it was overtaken by Oslo in the nineteenth century, and for a while in the 13th century it was also the capital of Norway. It also became an outpost (kontor) of the Hanseatic League, the commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and market towns that dominated trade in medieval northwestern Europe.. (The great medieval city-republic of Novgorod in Russia also hosted a kontor of the Hanseatic League, and I presume that is where the Russian word kontora, meaning office, came from.)

In the medieval period Bergen became a great entrepot for the export of cod caught in north Norwegian waters to the rest of Europe, and was granted a royal monopoly on the trade. The Hanseatic merchants came to Bergen each summer to buy fish from the fishermen from the north; they had their own separate quarter of the town, next to the wharf where their ships docked, which is called Bryggen; it is visible in the picture below.

Sidsel Larsen took me on a walking tour of the Hanseatic Quarter. I was struck by the excellent state of preservation of the warehouses and other buildings. It turns out that they are not the originals; Bergen, like many other Scandinavian and Russian towns, was built almost entirely from wood in premodern times and was subject to terrible fires, the worst of which, in 1702, burned down 90% of the city. The structures I saw have all been built since then, and many of them rebuilt and restored multiple times. Nevertheless they are mostly authentic.

Bergen is one of the rainiest cities in Europe; the mountains surrounding it cause the moist incoming air from the Gulf Stream to rise, cool and precipitate their moisture onto the city. We had to take umbrellas everywhere and frequently found ourselves sheltering from the showers.

One exception to the predominance of wood construction in the medieval city was the Bergenhus Festning, a stone fortress (Fortress) guarding the entrance to the harbor, dating from the 1240s. It contains a tower called the Rosenkrantztårnet, which we were able to climb and get a great view of the city from. I also looked for a Guildensterntårnet, but couldn’t find one anywhere.

On the other side of the harbor, I saw the Norwegian Navy’s latest hi-tech dreadnought, the Statsraad Lehmkuhl, a three-masted barque which is actually used as a training ship for Norwegian naval cadets. It has an interesting history. It was originally built in 1914 as a training ship for the German merchant marine, under the name Grossherzog Friedrich August. At the end of the First World War the victorious British took it over as war booty, but then sold it in 1921 to a former Norwegian cabinet minister named Kristofer Lehmkuhl, who renamed it after himself (Statsraad = “cabinet minister”), and who donated it to his eponymous foundation. In World War II the Germans repossessed it when they invaded Norway, but of course they had to return it to the Norwegians upon being defeated. The Statsraad Lehmkuhl Foundation now contracts it out, mostly to the Norwegian Navy, but also upon occasion to other customers, including, ironically, the German Navy. Although I did not get a chance to board it during my visit to Bergen, years later the ship put in at Long Beach Harbor during a round-the-world summer cruise, and I was able to tour it then.

Bergen is a city built on hills. The seventeenth-century writer Baron Ludvig Holberg, who was born in Bergen, decided that since Rome was built on seven hills, Bergen must be the same. Unfortunately, there is much disagreement as to which ones are to be included in the seven or whether that is really the correct number – many would argue for nine. I think it’s a silly controversy, and the operative maxim is that Bergen is a city of very uneven terrain, with lots of hills and grades. If you like San Francisco, you should feel right at home in Bergen. And I did.

There is a caveat about that, though, which is that I visited Bergen in the summer; in the winter it gets a lot of snow – something you don’t see much of on the California coast. Be that as it may, the two most prominent mountains around Bergen are Ulriken and Fløyfjellet or Fløyen – the second is of course named after me. Fløyen is on the north side of the city, Ulriken to the east; Ulriken is the higher at 643 metres (2,110 ft), Fløyen comes in at 400 m (1,300 ft) above sea level. Both have aerial tramways running to the top. I’m not sure which one appears in the picture below.

Perhaps the most illustrious native of Bergen is the composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), who composed the music for my favorite play, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. (Ibsen, a contemporary of Grieg, came from the town of Skien in Telemark, in eastern Norway.) So it was a big thrill when Sidsel took me on an excursion to Grieg’s house and estate, Troldhaugen (which translates, appropriately for a fan of Peer Gynt, as “Troll’s Hill”). Now, as in 1973 when I visited, it is the Edvard Grieg Museum. When I visited the house itself served as the museum; in 1993 a separate structure was built to house the museum. The house has been described as “a typical 19th-century residence with panoramic tower and a large veranda,” which doesn’t do it justice. Built in 1885, it’s a beautiful late 19th-century house exhibiting not only outstanding craftsmanship but deft artistic features, most notably the wonderful stained glass transom window above the front door.

The Troldhaugen estate is situated on a small peninsula of a large lake or inlet from the ocean, with a jetty projecting into the water.

We scrambled out on the jetty and took pictures of the lovely setting, which were again infiltrated by the ragged rapscallion who had followed me all the way through the Soviet Union.

Grieg and his wife Nina were Unitarians. Upon his death in 2006, Grieg was cremated, and his ashes were interred in a crypt in the side of a hill near his house. His wife Nina moved to Copenhagen after his death, but when she died, she also was cremated and her ashes placed beside her husband’s. Strolling around the estate, we encountered the hillside crypt where their remains are interred.

Returning to Bergen, we visited the Fantoft Stave Church. It had originally been built around 1150 at the village of Fortun, near the eastern end of Sognefjord, Norway’s longest and deepest fjord, about 60 miles northeast of Bergen. In 1879 a replacement church was built, and the original was slated for demolition, but was saved by a Norwegian businessman who had it disassembled and moved to Bergen, where it was reassembled.

In 1992, l9 years after I visited the Fantoft Stave Church, it burned to the ground. The cause was determined to be arson. A series of other Norwegian stave churches were also torched, and the police arrested and charged a man named Varg Vikernes with starting the fires. Vikernes was (and is) an interesting, though unsavory, character. He was born in 1973, the same year I visited Bergen. In the early ’90s he became an influential member of the Norwegian black metal scenc. Black metal (most readers will probably know this, but I did not, having never paid much attention to such matters) is an extreme type of heavy metal music, characterized by “fast tempos, a shrieking vocal style, heavily distorted guitars played with tremolo picking, raw (lo-fi) recording, unconventional song structures and an emphasis on atmospheres.” Many black metal artists paint themselves up as corpses and adopt pseudonyms. They also tend to espouse fringe viewpoints and ideologies, including extreme anti-Christian views, Satanism, ethnic paganism, and neo-Nazism. Some of them are fascinated with the lore and imagery of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Varg Vikernes was such a person. In 1991 he founded a one-man band named Burzum, which is the word for Mordor in the language of that land, which was the abode of Sauron the Great, the evil arch-villain of Middle-Earth and his minions, the orcs. Vikernes had previously been a member of a band called Uruk-hai, a name for a particularly nasty type of orc. He also took the stage name Grishnakh, from one of the orcs in The Two Towers. He flirted with neo-Nazism in his teenage years, and later developed his own ideology, which he described as “Odalism,” a fusion of paganism, traditional nationalism, racialism, environmentalism, simple living, self-sufficiency, and opposition to anything he deemed a threat to his vision of a pre-industrial pagan society, e.g. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, capitalism and materialism.

On August 10, 1993, Vikernes murdered his fellow-musician Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth, one of the founders of the black metal “scene,” in circumstances that have never been completely clarified (Vikernes claimed self-defense).  On August 19, Norwegian police arrested him for the murder of Euronymous, the arson burnings of Fantoft and several other churches, and the theft and possession of 150 kilograms of explosives which were found in his home. (He may have been planning to blow up a leftist enclave with the explosives, but this has never been proven.) In 1994 he was convicted of most of the charges, including the burning of some of the churches, but was somehow found not guilty of torching the Fantoft church. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum penalty under Norwegian law (this was also the sentence passed on the mass murderer Anders Breivik), but he was released on parole after 15 years. He eventually moved to France, where he got in trouble with the French police for inciting hatred against Jews and Muslims.

However, in the end the mad vandalism of Vikernes failed in its intended purpose, at least in the case of the Fantoft Stave Church. Work on reconstruction of the church began soon after the fire and was completed in 1997. The restored church now has a security fence around it to impede recurrences of the 1992 attack. The picture below, of course, shows the church as it appeared in 1973.

I left the Soviet Union in July 1973.  Living in the Moscow State University dormitory, I had struck up friendships with a number of visiting foreign students, including several Norwegians.  I was not homesick, and I knew I would not have a chance to travel again for a while, so it was perhaps not strange that I decided to prolong my year abroad by making a detour via Norway instead of flying directly home.

My first stop was Oslo, where I stayed with a Norwegian lady named Eva, who showed me around the city.  Oslo is of course the capital and largest city in Norway, with a population of over a million.  It was founded in the eleventh century, at the end of the Viking Age, when Norway converted to Christianity, and the city celebrated its millenium in 2000. 

Eva showed me around the city, taking me first to Frogner Park, the largest park in Oslo and also Norway’s largest tourist attraction.  It was originally part of an estate called Frogner Manor, established in the eighteenth century.  The manor house still stands and now houses the Oslo Museum.  The park is also the location of the Vigeland Sculptures, a collection of 212 granite and bronze sculptures designed by Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943).  This encompasses some of the most original and imaginative creations I have ever seen and makes Frogner Park worthy in itself of a visit to Norway.

The sculptures occupy 80 acres of the park and are distributed along an 850-meter (2790 ft.) axis, starting at the main gate on the east.  From there one crosses the 15 meter (49 feet) wide Bridge over Frogner Pond to arrive at the Vigeland Fountain, 100 meters (328 feet) west of the gate.  The Bridge is lined with 58 statues, the most famous of which is the Angry Boy, depicting a toddler having a temper tantrum.  I prefer to call it the “Screaming Spoiled Brat Having a Tizze” statue.  Unfortunately, when I photographed it the light came from in back of it, making the Brat’s face difficult to see.  You can see a better shot of it in the Wikipedia article on Frogner Park.

Like the Angry Boy, all the statues in the park depict naked people, both men and women, adults and children. Many of them are engaged in ordinary human activities such as walking, running, dancing, hugging, etc.; but some also represent more abstract conceptions. Some are pensive or placid, others are more animated and dynamic, some are surreal, a few are even violent. The next photo captures the full range: on the left is a group engaged in low-key activities; on the right, a woman dancing and pulling her hair out; behind her, in front of the white column, a man bouncing a small boy on his shoulders; on the column itself, a man fighting a huge lizard.

Sometimes I found it hard to figure out what the people depicted by the statues were supposed to be doing. For instance, the girl in the next picture might be swimming, but if so she appears to be doing so in a tree. One web page I came across calls it “Dreams and Flights of Fancy.”

This was just one of 20 sculptures surrounding Vigeland’s Fountain, all depicting people involved with trees. According to the museum’s web page, “The tree groups represent a romantic expression of Man’s relationship to nature. They also form the setting for life’s evolving stages, stretching from childhood and adolescence through adulthood to old age and death.” The Fountain itself is a giant bowl held up by six men, who, according to the fountain’s web page, “representing different ages, may be interpreted as toiling with the burden of life.”

As you can see from the following photo, beyond Vigeland’s Fountain lies the centerpiece of Frogner Park, the Monolith. As you approach the Monolith, you climb a granite staircase festooned with statues of groups of people in all kinds of poses, some rather bizarre.

One of my favorites was a woman on her hands and knees, bearing a child on her back. Apparently they are playing horsey, with the child using a braid of the woman’s hair as a bridle, which also serves as a gag, while the child’s expression is one of sadistic delight. It all serves to convey the notion that motherhood turns women into beasts of burden, who are supposed to accept their lot meekly and in silence.

The Monolith towers 46.12 meters – 46.32 feet – over its plaza and resembles a giant granite totem pole, with 121 human figures entwined in it, all seeming to struggle to get to the top.

According to the Vigeland Museum’s Monolith web page, “The sculpture depicts 121 human figures clinging and floating together. There are women and men of different ages, and the top of the Monolith is crowned with children. The sculpture has been interpreted as a kind of vision of resurrection, and our longing and striving for spirituality.”

Vigeland began designing the monolith in 1919 and continued working on it for the rest of his life. Construction actually began in 1927 when a huge granite block was brought to the site and a shed erected over it to protect the workers from the elements. Three stone masons worked on transferring the design from plaster to stone from 1929 to 1943. Vigeland, who died in 1943, did not live to see the unveiling of the Monolith to the public; this occurred in 1944, oddly enough during the Nazi occupation. Apparently the Germans were not hostile to Vigeland’s work, nor he to them, and some critics considered his designs to be an expression of Nazi or Fascist esthetics. Personally, I didn’t find that to be the case.

At the west end of the sculpture area stands the Wheel of Life, carved in 1933-34, depicting four adults, a child and a baby linked together in a circle.

Not very far from Frogner Park, on the Bygdøy peninsula, I visited two fascinating museums, the Vikingskiphuset (Viking Ship Museum) and the Norsk Folkesmuseum, or Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. The former houses three famous Viking-era burial ships, named for the places at which they were excavated – Oseberg, Gokstad and Tune. Because I didn’t have flash equipment, I didn’t take any pictures of the ships, which are housed indoors. But the museum web site has plenty of them.

The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, however, has a number of outdoor exhibits; in fact it claims to be the world’s first open-air museum, having been founded in 1881. It has extensive collections of artifacts from all regions of the country, including 150 buildings relocated from towns and rural districts. The centerpiece is the Gol Stavkirke, a wooden church originally built in the town of Gol sometime between 1197 and 1216, but disassembled, brought to Oslo and re-erected in 1880. Stave churches, a type of wooden church commonly built in northwestern Europe in medieval times, replaced an older type, the post church, in which the posts – the vertical timbers supporting the walls and roof – were sunk directly into the ground, making them vulnerable to rot and insects, whereas in the stave church the posts rested on stone foundations, affording better protection from decay. I have always been struck by the resemblance between the Norse stave churches and some types of Russian wooden churches such as those at Kizhi, on Lake Onega in Karelia. I wonder whether the similarity is the result of influence or convergent development.

Another legacy of medieval times is the 14th-century Rauland farmstead from Østerdal, consisting of several log buildings as seen in the next photo.

The elegant wooden cabin with its carved balustrade is clearly designed for extreme Nordic weather conditions. The ground floor has a small footprint with sturdy timbers to support the weight of the larger upper floor, which contains the main living quarters and is so designed that in winter, when heavy snowfalls have inundated the ground floor, one can step off the balcony onto the snow wearing skis or snowshoes. The roof is extremely thick and robust in order to withstand huge weights of snow, and slanted to encourage the snow to slide off.

Another set of historical buildings had been transplanted from Hovin and Gransherad, former municipalities in the former county of Telemark. Telemark county is famous for originating a skiing technique that combines elements of Nordic and Alpine skiing. The municipalities are “former” presumably because they have become depopulated, while the county of Telemark is “former” because it has been combined with another county to form the county of Vestfold og Telemark. But this took place only in 2020, long after I visited in 1973. In any case the name Telemark remains forever memorialized in the skiing term.

I did not have an opportunity to visit one of Oslo’s most famous historical attractions, the Akershus Festning (fortress). I was only able to snap a photograph of it from across the bay, and the view was obstructed by a stone rampart that I could not climb.

The construction of Akershus Fortress began around 1290, at the order of Norwegian King Haakon V, in the aftermath of an attack on Oslo by a rebel baron and pirate named Alf Erlingsson. Begun as a defensive bulwark, it also came to serve as a royal residence and eventually a prison as well. Its importance soon grew to such a degree that it was said that “Whoever controls Akershus, controls Norway.” Although it doesn’t appear particularly formidable compared to many other famous strongholds I have seen, in the many sieges it has endured over its long history it has never been taken by force. Even the great military genius Charles XII of Sweden failed to capture it. But it surrendered without a struggle to the invading Germans in 1940, when the Norwegian government evacuated Oslo. During World War II, the Germans and their puppet government, headed by the Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling, used the fortress as a prison and place of execution for members of the Norwegian Resistance. After the defeat of Germany, the Norwegian Resistance in its turn executed Quisling and other Norwegian traitors, as well as German war criminals, at Akershus. Today it contains two military museums, the Royal Mausoleum and government offices.

Following my all-too-short stay in Oslo, I went on to Norway’s second-largest city, Bergen, via the Oslo-Bergen Railway, which runs over the rugged snow-covered interior of Norway. My relatively primitive camera allowed me to get only a few pictures from the train, but when it arrived at the halfway point of the journey, the mountain village of Finse, I was able to stroll around a little and get some decent shots of that picturesque hamlet.

I was enamored of Finse Station, and I suppose one of the major reasons was the railway station’s Troll, who reminded me of the Mountain King in my favorite play, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (pace Elouise Mattox). In the play, the callow and foolish title character gets involved with a girl from the Troll community, whom he is to marry, after obtaining permission from her father, the Troll King, who lives in a mountain fastness. In the upshot, Peer arouses the ire of the King by rejecting some of his conditions for the marriage, barely escaping with his life, but not before he has accepted the motto of the Trolls: instead of “To thine own self be true,” which is the human version, the Troll motto is “To thine own self be enough.” This comes back later to haunt him.

Finse sits on the shore of a lake, Finsevatnet, at an elevation of 1,222 meters or 4,009 feet above sea level, the highest point on the Bergen line – or on any Norwegian railway line, for that matter. This doesn’t seem very high compared to the European Alps or the Sierra Nevada in California. In fact my astronomical observatory, in the hills near Anza, California, is higher, at an elevation of 4300 feet, and it rarely snows there. But Finse’s location in the far north ensures that the ground has snow on it the year round.

Finse is said to be a Mecca for recreation both in winter and summer. It is also a base for training expedition personnel and first responders. In winter there is snow skiing and iceboat-sailing on the lake; in summer there is hiking, including hiking on the nearby Hardangerjøkulen glacier, and mountain biking. Finse was the location for the shooting of the Hoth ice-planet scenes in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

Finse also hosts a railway museum. I did not go into the museum, but I did note some of the external exhibits, such as the huge railway cars that were built to serve as snowplows. They had been decommissioned, presumably because they were obsolete; I was not able to find out what had replaced them.

One possible reason was that they were no longer needed, though I found this difficult to believe. It turned out that just west of Finse, a tunnel had been bored through the mountain to reroute the section of the road most prone to blockage by snow and avalanches. The entrance to the tunnel is visible in the next picture.

I took my leave of Finse after shooting one last picture of the Troll cavorting with children outside the railway station. I had wanted to wait until he had finished lulling them into complacency, in preparation for seizing them, trussing them up and cooking them for dinner. But the train was leaving, and I had to go.

Tbilisi was a fitting climax to our whirlwind April 1973 tour of Central Asia and the Caucasus.  It is a magnificent city and the capital of one of the most distinctive, mysterious and intriguing countries in the world.  Georgia, or Sakartvelo as the natives call it, is an ancient, unique and fascinating land.  The inhabitants are possibly descended from the original modern humans to people the area and speak a language (actually several languages, the so-called Kartvelian group) related to no other known linguistic family in existence, written in its own script which is derived from neither Latin, Cyrillic nor Arabic.  The country is mountainous, rugged, and stunningly beautiful.   The men arc noted for being brave and skilled warriors, generous and welcoming but quick to anger, with a strong sense of honor; the women for being beautiful, proud and assertive – a Georgian woman is queen in her own household.   Georgian hospitality is legendary, and we were to experience it in full.

Georgians have been Christian since the 4th century CE. Their national church belongs to the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity but is autocephalous, owing obedience neither to Rome, Constantinople or Moscow.  The Georgian ecclesiastical architecture is also sui generis.  Some of the most important examples of this genre are found in the town of Mtskheta, about 20 kilometers northwest of Tbilisi, which was also the  destination of our first excursion in the Tbilisi area. 

Mtskheta is a very old city; it was the capital of the early Georgian Kingdom of Iberia from the 3rd to the 5th centuries CE, and is still the site of the headquarters of the Georgian Orthodox Church. It lies at the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi Rivers; from there the Mtkvari continues to flow eastward through the heart of Tbilisi.

The crowning glory of Mtskheta is the 11th-century Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. The cathedral’s origins date back to the conversion of the Georgians to Christianity in 337 CE, when a wooden church was built on the site, followed by a stone basilica in the 5th century, and eventually by the current cathedral in the 11th century. The name Svetitskhoveli means “life-giving pillar” and is associated with a Georgian legend which holds that a Georgian Jew named Elias visited Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion of Christ, purchased the mantle of Jesus from a Roman soldier, and brought it back to Mtskheta. There he showed it to his sister Sidonia, who took it in her hands and immediately died from overexcitement. The mantle could not be extracted from her grasp and was buried with her; over her grave grew a great cedar tree. Many years later, it was decided to build a church on the site, the wood for which was to be acquired by cutting down the tree. However, the tree refused to fall and instead levitated into the air; when, following a full night of prayer, a local saint persuaded it to return to earth, it formed the first pillar of the new church. Its wood turned out to have magical properties, supposedly emitting a liquid that cured people of disease. The cathedral now contains a ciborium (freestanding canopy supported by columns), dating from the 17th century, under which the mantle of Jesus is supposed to have been buried along with Sidonia.

The current version of the cathedral was built between 1010 and 1029. It is constructed in the so-called cross-dome or cross-in-square style, which features a square central structure called a naos, topped by a dome, with rectangular extensions on the sides to form the overall shape of a cross. The cathedral has been damaged and restored several times since it was first built. It was destroyed by Tamerlane in the late 14th century and then reconstructed, with the present dome added, in the 15th.

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral stands in the middle of a large courtyard, surrounded by walls built in the 18th century. Entrance to the courtyard is from the western wall.

Entrance to the cathedral is also on the west. Originally there were portal galleries on the north and south sides as well. But in the 1830s, in anticipation of a scheduled visit by Emperor Nicholas I, the Russian authorities decided that the cathedral needed to be tidied up a bit and made to look more respectable; they chose to do so first by razing the portal galleries on the sides. They also thought it would be a good idea to improve the appearance of the interior walls by whitewashing them, thereby obliterating a number of priceless medieval frescoes. In the end the tsar’s visit was canceled. Fortunately, modern-day restorers have been able to recover some of the frescoes that were thus obscured.

The eastern facade of the church features two high and deep niches on either side, with a window in the middle illuminating the apse, framed in red stone and surrounded by stylized decorations, including two bull’s heads beneath the window.

Above the window on the eastern facade is a decoration resembling a peacock’s tail; still higher, just beneath the roof, are three small windows, and to the left of those is a bas-relief decoration representing an eagle with spread wings hovering above a lion.

From Svetitskhoveli Cathedral we moved on to the spectacular Jvari Monastery, which stands on top of the mountain of the same name overlooking Mtskheta. The religious significance of this site dates from the early 4th century CE. Legend says that Saint Nino, a female evangelist credited with converting the King of Iberia to Christianity in 337 (and also the same saint who prayed to bring the cedar tree back to earth as described above), erected a miracle-working wooden cross there. The cross attracted pilgrims from all over the Caucasus, and eventually, in 545, a small church was built over it. Later, between 590 and 605, a larger church was built to accommodate a growing influx of pilgrims, and that became the “Great Church” of Jvari, pictured here.

The Great Church of Jvari monastery is perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi Rivers, with a dizzying drop down to the river below.

From its juncture with the Aragvi, the Mtkvari River continues to flow down through the middle of Tbilisi a few kilometers to the east.

The Great Church was built in a style known as “tetraconch” – from the Greek words for “four shells” – which is characterized by a cruciform plan with an apse at the end of each cross arm, and three-quarter cylindrical niches between the apses. (An apse is “a large semicircular or polygonal recess in a church, arched or with a domed roof, typically at the eastern end, and usually containing the altar.”)

The three-faceted apsis (projective enclosure) on the eastern facade is decorated with bas-reliefs depicting scenes of Georgian rulers consorting with Christ and the archangels.

Above the southern entrance to the Great Church is another bas-relief featuring two angels lifting a Bolnisi cross, known as the Ascension (or Glorification) of the Cross. The Bolnisi cross is a Georgian national symbol which traces its origin to the oldest surviving Georgian Orthodox church, Bolnisi Sioni Cathedral, built in the fifth century CE in the village of Bolnisi (which we did not visit). Unfortunately, it closely resembles variations of the cross used by medieval crusading orders, including the Teutonic Knights, which evolved into the Iron Cross used by the German military, with which the Bolnisi cross is often confused.

The monastery complex is surrounded by the ruins of walls and towers, as seen in the picture below. In 1973, at the time we visited, access to Jvari Monastery was supposedly severely restricted because of its proximity to a nearby Soviet military base, but it was a scheduled stop on our tour and we had no trouble getting permission to visit it.

Our lodging in Tbilisi was a typical Soviet hotel, not exactly the Ritz-Carlton but better than some I’ve stayed in. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was abandoned for a while, but eventually it became a hostel for refugees fleeing the upheavals in the Caucasus.

There appeared to be some major construction going on not far from our hotel. I never found out exactly what was being built; the concrete structures under the crane in the picture below look like sections of tunnels for subway cars, but if so they must have been replacements for parts of existing lines since the Tbilisi subway had been completed in 1966.

Georgia is a mountainous country, and Tbilisi is nestled amidst mountains. The highest point in the city is Mount Mtatsminda, at 770 meters (2526 feet). In 1930, the Soviet government established a park atop the mountain. TV towers and a restaurant pavilion were also built there.

You might think that Tbilisi, being a very hilly city, would have a number of aerial tramways and cable cars. You would be right, and this was true while we were there. The top of Mount Mtatsminda can be reached both by road and by a funicular railway which has been in existence since 1905. There were also seven aerial tramways. One of them ran from Rustaveli Avenue to the top of Mount Mtatsminda. However, on June 1, 1990, there was an accident on that line which resulted in 20 deaths. The ultimate cause of the accident was never determined, but its lethality was the result of a failure to maintain the equipment properly, causing a malfunction of the brakes which would have stopped the cars if they had been working properly. The line was closed, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the other aerial tramways, and the funicular railway as well, were shut down. In 2012 the funicular reopened, and eventually some of the aerial tramways as well. In 2017, construction began on a new aerial tramway line to the top of Mount Mtatsminda.

We rode the funicular railway up to the park. Halfway up there is a station where one can get off and walk to the Mtasminda Pantheon, a necropolis where a number of celebrities are buried, and which I’ll describe in more detail later.

When we visited, the Mt. Mtatsminda park was just a quiet landscaped area where one could stroll amidst the trees, and the serenity was only occasionally interrupted by events such as the ceremony pictured here. But in recent years, since Georgia became independent again, the locale has been transformed into an amusement park, with carousels, water slides, a roller-coaster, dark ride, funicular, and a ferris wheel.  

Up the hill from the restaurant pavilion we came across a flat, open area with a pedestal for a statue, but instead of a statue we found only a Georgian flag. It turned out that the pedestal had once been occupied by a statue of Joseph Stalin.

As one might expect, Mtatsminda Park offers spectacular views over the city. Here is one to the north.

And here is a view to the south. I found, however, that some of my most interesting shots were to be taken from locations lower down, which provided better resolution and enabled me to more easily identify the points of interest.

Taking a bus from the top of Mt. Mtatsminda, we rode down to the Pantheon halfway up the mountain. Debarking from the bus, I was able to admire and photograph some of the fine stonework which borders the winding road leading to the Pantheon.

The Mtatsminda necropolis is located in the churchyard around St. David’s Church, as seen in the following photo taken from Mtatsminda Park. Among the notables buried there are the Russian diplomat and playwright Alexander Griboedov. Chiefly remembered today for his play Gore ot Uma (Woe from Wit), in 1829 Griboedov was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to Persia. Russia had just defeated Iran in the Russo-Persian War of 1826-28 and forced its Shah to sign a humiliating treaty; anti-Russian sentiment in Iran was strong. Shortly after arriving in Tehran, an incident arose in which several Armenian escapees from the royal harem – a eunuch and two women – sought sanctuary in the Russian Embassy. When the Shah demanded their return, Griboedov refused, on the grounds that the Treaty of Turkmenchai, which ended the recent war, Georgians and Armenians held against their will in Persia were to be repatriated to their homelands. The Iranian mullahs refused to acknowledge that this provision applied to women in Muslim harems, and stirred up a mob to storm the Russian embassy, slaughtering Griboedov and the rest of the legation. Griboedov’s body was mutilated and dragged through the streets. Eventually his remains were recovered and returned to Georgia, where he was buried. Also buried at the Mtatsminda Pantheon are Nino Chavchavadze, Griboedov’s wife, and other members of the Chavchavadze family; the first democratically elected president of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia; and various Georgian artists, scientists, scholars, and public figures.

At the Pantheon I encountered the first, and to my recollection still the only, public drinking fountain I saw in the Soviet Union. Jerman Rose obligingly posed for me to take a picture of him drinking from it.

In one corner of the cemetery I came across a plain marble headstone, with an alabaster decoration, inscribed only in Georgian script. Here was interred one Ekaterina Geladze, the mother of Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin.

From Mount Mtatsminda, we took a road which runs eastward on a ridge to Sololaki Hill. To celebrate the 1500th anniversary of Tbilisi in 1958, the twenty-meter-tall (65 feet) Kartlis Deda statue was erected on the top of Sololaki Hill. Also known as Mother of Kartli or Mother Georgia, the statue depicts a woman holding a winecup and a sword—the winecup symbolizing the hospitality accorded to friendly visitors, the sword expressing the readiness to defend against enemies.

The Kartlis Deda site also provides a viewpoint offering some of Tbilisi’s most striking vistas. At the base of Sololaki hill are a pair of fine old churches, the Upper and Lower Bethlehem.

Further to the north of the Kartlis Deda viewpoint, near the river, lie the Sioni Cathedral, the Norashen St. Virgin Mary’s Armenian Church and a church with the improbable name of Jvari’s Mama’s Church.

To the northeast of Kartlis Deda one obtains a stunning view of the Mtkvari River, crossed by the Metekhi Bridge. Near the bridge, on the far bank, is the Metekhi Street Virgin Church, and on the near bank is the St. George Armenian Church. On the bridge stands a statue of King Vakhtang I Gorgasali of Iberia (c. 449-c. 522), traditionally recognized as the founder of Tbilisi.

The Metekhi Street Virgin Church, properly the Metekhi Church of the Assumption, stands on an elevated cliff above the Mtkvari River. I was later able to photograph it from the northeast. It was originally built in the late thirteenth century, during the reign of King Demetrius II, and was damaged and restored several times thereafter. It was built in a style called cross-dome, with three projecting apses on the east side and four freestanding pillars supporting the dome. Stalin’s fellow Georgian and head of the NKVD Lavrenti Beria wanted to demolish it, but somehow it survived; it was used as a theater until the 1980s, when the Soviet regime acceded to popular demand and returned it to the control of the Georgian Patriarchate.

Continuing along the ridge from the Kartlis Deda statue, we arrived at the Narikala Fortress. Originally built in the 4th century by the Sassanian Persians, the fortress was expanded and rebuilt over the years, most recently in the 16th and 17th centuries; but an earthquake in 1827 damaged it badly, and it fell into ruin.

The Narikala Fortress is another great location for capturing panoramic views of the city.

We had plenty of free time in Tbilisi to stroll the streets and wander on our own. Except for the churches, which somehow have survived the vicissitudes of the ages, most of the construction in Tbilisi dates from no earlier than the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, for several centuries Georgia had been carved up between the Ottoman Empire and Persia, with the western part subject to the Turkish sultans, and the eastern areas vassals of the Persian shah. In 1783, however, Erekle II, ruler of the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, hoping to improve the security of his domain by finding a more reliable protector, signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Empress Catherine II of Russia, which made his kingdom a protectorate of the Russian Empire. Unfortunately this move backfired, provoking a Persian invasion, the destruction of Tbilisi and the massacre of its inhabitants, which the Russians failed to prevent, in 1795. In 1800 Catherine’s successor, Tsar Paul, proclaimed the outright annexation of Kartli-Kakheti to the Russian Empire, deposing the king. Under Tsar Alexander I the Russians secured their control of Georgia by defeating the Persians and forcing them to acknowledge Russian hegemony in Georgia by the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813. Alexander I also began the incorporation of Western Georgia into the Russian Empire, a process which was completed during the Russo-Turkish wars of the 19th century.

The Mtkvari River is very scenic and provided many vantage points for beautiful photos, but it seemed that wherever we went there was this slovenly, disreputable character, perhaps a terrorist, who kept popping up and insinuating himself into my pictures. Somehow we could never get rid of him.

The advent of Russian rule, though heavy-handed and insensitive, provided the peace and security which enabled the rebuilding of Tbilisi to proceed unhindered, and the Russian authorities placed their stamp on the city by devising a new city plan and commissioning new buildings in Western styles. 

I remember being impressed by the apparent modernity and prosperity of Tbilisi, and the general European appearance, in contrast to many of the towns we had visited in Russia itself. Also, there seemed to be many foreign cars – Mercedes, Volvo, even a few American cars – on the streets.

Except for the scheduled tours, for which buses were furnished, we did our sightseeing via public transportation. On one occasion, several of us took a bus to the downtown area, and when we got off, I discovered that my wallet was missing. I immediately realized that someone on the bus had picked my pocket. This was was not a hazard exclusive to Tbilisi; in Moscow my first roommate, Ariel, had once had his pocket picked on a subway escalator by a man who had bumped into him pretending to be a drunk. I reported the theft to the guides, though of course I knew that nobody would be able to do anything about it. They were quite apologetic about the incident, but we all had a good laugh when I told them that the stolen wallet, which I had kept in my pants pocket, contained nothing more than seven rubles and an expired California driver’s license. I kept my passport and most of my cash in another wallet, much more securely concealed.

The major legacy of Georgian architecture surviving from before the 19th century are the many Georgian and Armenian churches (historically many of the inhabitants of Tbilisi have been Armenian). The Sioni (Zion) Cathedral in downtown Tbilisi is an outstanding example. Its basic elements date from the 12th century, but it was destroyed and rebuilt many times since then. At the time of our visit, the Sioni Cathedral was the seat of the Catholicos-Patriarch of all Georgia, and remained so until 2004, when it was replaced by the newly built Holy Trinity (Sameba) Cathedral in the Avlobari district on the other side of the Mtkvari River.

On April 12, 1802, the Russian Commander-in-Chief in the Caucsasus, General Karl von Knorring, assembled the nobles in the Sioni Cathedral and read to them the proclamation of the annexation of Kartli-Kakheti to the Russian Empire. He also required them to take an oath of allegiance to the Empire, enforcing it by having the soldiers which he had previously disposed around the cathedral arrest those who refused.

On the last day of our stay in Georgia, our hosts took us to the cave monastery site of Vardzia. The caves were carved in the cliffs of Mount Erusheti, on the south bank of the Mtkvari River over 200 kilometers west of Tbilisi. Although cave settlements have existed there for thousands of years, it was only in the twelfth century CE that large-scale development of the site began. Most of the work was done in the 12th and 13th centuries, during the “Golden Age” of Georgia under Queen Tamar. A severe earthquake in 1283 devastated Vardzia, and though it was partially rebuilt, further development was at an end. With the decline and fragmentation of Georgia in the 14th and 15th centuries, along with ruinous foreign invasions, Vardzia fell into decline. In the 16th century, after the division of Georgia by the Ottoman Turks and the Safavid Persians, with the eastern areas going to the Persians and the western parts, including Vardzia, to the Ottomans, Vardzia was abandoned.

Our tour bus brought us to a pleasant park setting, presided over by a stone church nestled under the cliffs towering nearby.

Whatever notes I took at the time have not survived, and I don’t remember the name of the church or anything else about it, such as when it was built. I think it must have been of relatively recent construction. The main church at Vardzia is the Church of the Dormition, which is carved out of the rock at the foot of the mountain, but it was not open to the public at that time.

From the church, we proceeded up a path to the foot of the cliffs, where we were able to get a closer view of the caves in which the monks had lived.

Some members of the group even tried to climb up to the caves themselves, but I don’t think any of them actually made it that far.

After we tired ourselves out hiking round the site and taking pictures, our Georgian guides lit a fire and prepared a barbecue for us, which served as our farewell dinner. They had brought abundant supplies of pork, beef and lamb, which they cut up into kebabs and roasted over the fire. In the Caucasus, shishkebab is known as shashlik, and this usage has spread to Russia as well, where kebab restaurants are known as shashlichnye. Our hosts had also brought abundant supplies of Georgian wine, and we feasted and toasted our hosts until nightfall.

The next day we boarded a TU-104 twin-engined jet for Moscow. This was our second flight on a TU-104; we had also flown on one from Tashkent to Tbilisi. I don’t remember much about the first flight, but I do remember the second. The Tbilisi airport is distinguished by a takeoff runway with a sharp drop-off, in fact a high cliff, at the end, so if the aircraft hasn’t reached takeoff speed by the time it reaches the end of the runway, the results can be unpleasant. The TU-104 was the world’s second passenger jet aircraft to enter service, after the British Comet in the early 1950s – not an auspicious precedent since the Comet was taken out of service following several disastrous crashes which resulted from design defects. The TU-104 also had its problems. It was unreliable, unstable, control response was poor, and it had a tendency to stall at low speeds. This last shortcoming caused pilots to make their landing approaches at higher than recommended speeds, with attendant risks. One person I knew had been on a TU-104 flight to Kiev, where the aircraft came in too fast, overshot its touchdown point and ended up a couple hundred feet beyond the end of the runway in a swamp. Our flight from Tbilisi was relatively sedate, but I do remember that when taking off the aircraft seemed to take forever to get up to takeoff speed, and I wondered whether we were going to fall off the end of the runway before we became airborne. The plane did dip a little when the runway ended, but did not stall, and off we went to Moscow. On the plane I sat next to my Moscow roommate, Chris Buck. On our approach to Moscow, the crew turned off the cabin pressurization at 15,000 feet. The drop in pressure causes Chris’s sinuses, which had been giving him trouble, to explode, and I was alarmed to see him suddenly doubled over in agony. Fortunately this didn’t last long; the pressure shortly equalized and by the time we landed he was more or less back to normal.

Later I learned a little verse that Russians sang about the TU-104: TU-sto-chetyre luchshe v mire samelyot, Skazal, vylezaya, obuglennyi pilot. “The TU-014 is the best airplane in the world, said the charred pilot as he crawled out [of the burned cockpit].” The TU-104 was retired from service in 1979.