My running buddy, Dave, left Georgia for good this
week. So before he left we decided
to visit the only two castles in Georgia we haven’t seen. Let me back up.
Dave is an engineer by training and an historian by
hobby. Here in Georgia, he combined
those traits and specialized in castles.
Castles, in order to fulfill their burden, were built on top of the
highest and steepest ground overlooking a village or villages. Trails, even roads, were built so building
materials and supplies could be more easily transported to the site. Those roads, naturally, no longer exist. The castles themselves have not been
maintained so for the most part they have collapsed and now exist as a pile of
stones and blocks. That was Dave’s
playground. He enjoyed nothing more than
climbing up to some pile of rubble and trying to figure out how things would
have been a thousand years ago. He liked
to envision how the castle would have looked in its prime and what each pile of
rubble would have been.
There were two castles we had put off because of the
remarkable inconvenience of getting to them.
As I said before, there is no road to get there, the terrain is always
steep and rich with every type of thorn bush known to man, and what pathways
may exist are littered with stones and rocks that have rolled down from the
castle site. Two in particular are
particularly noteworthy for their pain in the ass factor: the Manavi Fortress in a town called Sagarejo
(don’t ask me how to pronounce it; even the locals can’t decide how to
pronounce the “-jo”) and a castle outside a small village called Korjori.
The Manavi Fortress also called the "Come and See
Castle" because enemies could only see it and never could take it (guess
they couldn't find the road, either). It
was never captured or destroyed. It was
the summer residence of the kings of Kakheti, one of the regions here in
Georgia. Since the temperature was only
in the low 90s last weekend, and the humidity only in the upper 80s, it seemed
like a good time to climb two miles up a steep hill to see a pile of
rocks. (Because, certainly, this pile of
rocks would look different than the other 10,000 piles of rocks we’ve seen all
over this country.)
Arriving at Manavi, after catching our breaths, fighting
back the urge to throw up, and overcoming the strong desire to pick up one of
those ancient building blocks and braining Dave with it for talking me into
making this “hike,” we each immediately fall into our “castle exploring duties.” For Dave, that means putting on his engineer
hat and walking the grounds. He paces
out the distances, looks for places where a cistern would have been, searches
for where the pens for the animals would have been located, and tries to
determine what the chapel would have looked like. For me, that means going to the highest point
and seeing how far I can throw rocks downhill.
If there are herds of cattle or goats or sheep in sight, it means seeing
how close to the animals (or the shepherd) I can get with a rock. There’s no worry about the shepherd
confronting me about my hobby because shepherds are smarter than we are and
know better than to climb straight up a hill that goats avoid just to yell at
us in a language we don’t understand.
When I get bored throwing rocks at livestock or
shepherds, I try to see how close I can get to Dave with a rock. That’s simply a way to pass the time until
Dave starts to ask questions, and he’s going to ask some questions.
Typical Q: “If you
were attacking this castle, from which direction would you approach?” Smartass A:
“I wouldn’t. I’d ransack the
village since everyone is in the castle, and move on to the next village.” Next typical Q: “How would you attack this castle?” Next smartass A: “Slowly, on horseback, and at night when it
isn’t so damn hot.” I try to turn this
around by asking my own questions: “Why
in the hell would I want to attack this castle, anyway? What’s in it that I want badly enough to
climb this steep mountain where goats don’t even want to go while angry people throw
rocks and shoot arrows at me? These
people haven’t done anything to me.”
Dave’s A: “Because you’re a
raider, a marauder; that’s what you do.”
Seems to me someone could have made a lucrative career back then out of
job placement services. “So, young man,
do you want to be marauder, marching long distances in the heat of summer and
cold of winter with little to eat or drink so you can climb a steep hill with
no roads but plenty of sticker bushes while people try to kill you? Or would you rather stay home and be a shepherd
or a blacksmith or something that allows you to pay attention to the wives and
daughters of those idiots who left the village to go marauding?” I know what I’d choose.
But I digress. As
I expected, we learned nothing new from the Manavi Fortress. So it was time to move on to Kojori. I did learn several things from Kojori. I learned that no one goes up to Kojori. I learned that the climb to Kojori is so steep
and difficult that the government actually built a metal staircase so you can
get up there. (Of course, the staircase
hasn’t been maintained since it was built, so you have to climb over missing
steps, rusted handrails, and support bolts that only have about 1/32” left in
the rock.)
Then, once you get off the staircase and you think you’re
there, you get to crawl on your hands and knees through what once was the outer
wall to get to the inner courtyards.
I learned
that once you do finally get to the inner courtyard – after the dry heaves have
ceased and the vertigo has stopped – that it is a beautiful view. I learned that beautiful views aren’t always
worth the effort of getting to where you can see them. Finally, I learned that climbing ridiculously
steep hills just to look at piles of rocks is not a bad way to spend an
afternoon.
Thanks for reading.
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