2006 Summer Camps
Georgian Language and Culture Course
October 23-November 25
Shalva & Ketevan Mindorashvili
A five-week intensive language and culture course in Sighnaghi, Georgia. Emphasis will be on learning basic Georgian conversation and reading/writing skills and on acquiring a solid overview of grammar, with 4-5 hours of language instruction each day followed by other subjects—including dance classes, singing and instrumental instruction, cooking lessons, lectures in Georgian history. There will be a series of organized excursions on the weekends.
Ask us for contact information if you’d like to query our inaugural autumn 2003 program participants about their experience. Guaranteed to be an unforgettable and life-changing way for a college student to spend a semester off, or for a high school graduate to start off a gap year.
Tuition includes five weeks’ room and board, all lesson costs, and expenses for all group excursions.
$1500
Sighnaghi, Republic of Georgia
A medieval fort-town and 19th-centurry administrative center, Sighnaghi is a beautiful and deceptively quiet hill-town perched at the edge of the lower Caucasus mountains in eastern Georgia that is in fact a hot-bed of cultural activity, home to ancient Bodbe Monastery, an adjunct campus of Tbilisi University, its own music college, and a dance school, as well being as a refuge for artists and artisans of all sorts. We will use Village Harmony’s own ‘retreat center’ in Sighnaghi (Patty has owned a house here since 2001) for rehearsals, and will take meals at the home of one the Zedashe singers. Participants have the option of being housed with local families.
Please peruse our online photo-album from the 2003 Language and Culture course
Letter from Georgia
by John Graham
The following letter was composed after John's trip to Georgia with Village Harmony. It takes place in the late fall of 2003, when the language program participants went on a weekend trip to Vashlovani. (This trip coincided with the overthrow of Eduard Sheverdnadze). The picture to the right is of (left to right) John, Rafael, and Shergil chanting around the campfire
Dear Friends
Happy New Year! I have passed out of Georgia but it has not passed out of memory. I still have so many stories to tell. But what excuse do I have to fill your inbox with fantastic stories now that I'm comfortably situated in rural Pennsylvania. My mother says, 'keep writing, but also repaint the basement," so if I neglect to write further just picture me with paint in hair and beard.
I do have a couple stories left though, let's see...
Once upon a time, on a frosty morning, in the early dawn light of yet another clear Georgian day, the adventure to Vashlovani State Park began.
An early morning breakfast of porridge, fresh bread and honey, prepared by the two Leahs who have been our wonderful and talented cooks during the language program, started us off with warm bellies. As a result, our rented van grumbled more than we did as we curled around the hills out of town. For a moment, I looked back and saw the rose blossom of dawn light strike the plaster walls and tin roofs of the hilltop houses in Sighnaghi. Woodsmoke hovered between the rooftops, mixing with the lifting mist to reveal the cathedral steeple and tower turret in skyline profile. We turned the corner, crested the hill, and saw the sunrise on the fertile plains of Kakheti, stretched fluidly as if over the lolling waves of a once distant sea. Indeed, this valley was once submerged, the memory of which is preserved in the porous, shell-studded sandstone banks along the highway.
Numbering ten Americans, two Georgian teachers, and joined by two drivers and our park ranger guide Amiran in the town of Dedopliskaro, the cultural heart of Eastern Georgia, we jostled out of town in a caravan of four-wheel drive jeeps. We drove into the fields, gradually finding our way over paved, gravel, and dirt roads, gradually leaving behind the world of buildings, towns, and men. Fields tilled and untilled stretched as far as the eye could see behind and around us, but ahead rose the first grassy hillocks of Vashlovani, a disturbed land of steep canyons, desert hills, snakes, and soldiers on border patrol.
The lead car turned off the last semblance of a road, and we followed, driving straight up the side of the hill, the high grasses brushing the car windows. I rode in the familiar perch of Raphael's recently repaired Niva, and spotted raptors on the wing while he disconsolately kept eyes on the grass ahead.
"Huge bird at 2 o'clock" I would say.
"Does it have a dyhedral wing formation, how long are it's tail feathers, and what are its wing markings?" he would ask.
Trying to spot birds on the wing through binoculars while driving all-terrain is no small feat. "It looks to have some white on its belly, and it's very big; but what does dyhedral mean again?" I would respond. Invariably, my description was unsatisfactory or took too long.
Raphael's birding passion would make him hold up the caravan as he ground to a halt and scanned the skies himself. Amiran our guide was himself a birder, and pulled over several times so we could all pile out and gaze admiringly at soaring Black Vultures, Griffins, and Golden Eagles, each boasting wingspans as long as your car. These are the great birds of legend, perhaps the same who ate Prometheus' liver as he lay chained high in the Caucasus. The great raptors migrate from nesting grounds in Northern Europe and Russia down along the Black Sea to Africa and back each year, and though we were two days drive from the Black Sea, Raphael noted that birds follow thermals, not unpaved roads like us.
At last, cresting the hillside, we were met with a blast of cold wind from Azerbaijan and the lower Caucasus Range, which suddenly slammed into view across the basin and range country of Georgia's last frontier with Persia.
During the middle ages, invading armies marched this way every generation for five hundred years, and it is said that in this land of Kakheti, every square meter of earth is soaked with the blood of Georgians. To my heart, knowing this legacy, the land was forlorn, rugged, and inhospitable. At some time this area was under a great ocean connecting the Black and Caspian Seas, but then mountains emerged separating the water, raising great sea-beds into fertile plateaus. A strange twisting and convulsing further upset this region, and erosion yielded the view before me, a pockmarked, undulating maze of canyons, cliffs, dry watercourses, and steppe-like grasslands. We stood like the gnarled trees around us, leaning into the wind, the desert sun beating down, and somehow the bleakness, the stark beauty of the land left us speechless and small, momentary observers in an instant of a much grander creation.
Arriving at our camping spot, we eagerly broke out prepared bowls of potato salad, eggplant and walnut paste, homemade bread, soft-cheese, and village wine. Unbeknownst to us, or as was often the case, not communicated to us, the Georgians were making a bonfire, peeling branches, and preparing lamb shish-kebabs for everyone. We were happily well fed and looking towards setting up our tents when they all came over and demanded we eat and drink chacha toasts.
Setting down a huge tub of freshly grilled and steaming chunks of shish-kebab (as big as your fist), one man whipped out his hunting knife, sliced a pomegranate in two, and with great show of masculine cooking technique, squeezed the fruit all over the meat, the red juices running down between his fingers. We feasted and raised our glasses to the Supra toasting themes of God, Friendship, Conservation, the Giving Earth, and per tradition, the Mother of God, protectress of Christian Georgia. I watched my pallet, but brother Raphael, enflamed by his passion for conservation work, answered toast for toast his Georgian counterparts, and fell ill far before his hour.
* * * * * * *
"I hate it when these guys do this," Raphael complained, as once again, four or five Georgian men gathered around the precariously perched Niva, each gesticulating and talking loudly of the best possible way to go over the obstacle ahead. We were hole jumping and boulder dodging up a dry riverbed with our four wheel drive vehicles, but lately Amiran had been climbing five foot vertical boulders with his Niva, and our Niva was just not making it. I jumped out and threw some rocks at the base of the incline we needed to surmount, hoping it would help.
The Georgians talked loudly and gestured vehemently, but failing to communicate, one man offered to drive himself, claiming to be a 'very good driver'. This must have enflamed Raphael even more, because with a shout, he gunned the engines and roared past me, twisting and turning the car up out of the ravine straight up a vertical incline, one wheel spinning air, the other kicking back a spray of sand and pebbles. For an instant we held our breath as the car hung suspended, and then with a gut-wrenching squeal, it peeled up and over the rock out of sight. I cheered, the Georgians made manly gestures and returned to their vehicles. Driving in Svaneti felt like a Toyota commercial meets a mountain sheep trail, driving in Vashlovani recalls being at the monster truck regatta with the guys.
A military escort accompanied us for this part of the trip. Seven soldiers and their lieutenant inhabit a small compound with a woven wicker fence, two guard dogs, and a little shed with a big sign reading in Georgian and English 'GUSTOMS'. One soldier spoke some English and was able to make the other soldiers jealous by trying to talk with all of the pretty American girls who had just shown up at their post.
"What is your name? I am Giorgi." Holding up a small jar, he said, "this very dangerous viper, call it Gurza."
We gathered around and stared at a little pathetic snake... "If he bites, you will die," the soldier confided.
Since we had to wait for permission to continue our trip in the State Park, we had a Supra complete with shish-kebab, soldier wine, and our leftovers from the night before. Gurza was there to witness the event but when he went missing, everyone freaked out. I wasn't pleased to be freaking out with a group of eighteen year old soldiers with wine in one hand and Kalashnikovs in the other, but there was an element of humor to the occasion. Just think, a deadly snake on the loose! Thankfully Gurza was only in the next room, safe in his jar. We were all grateful when Amiran and the lieutenant rolled up in a cloud of dust having consulted with a superior officer elsewhere. They informed us that we were being stalled by a mere "overthrow of the government" in Tbilisi, but that travel would now continue as planned.
Up the canyon an exposed mammoth bone poked out of an embankment. We parked on a cliff and looked out over a valley fissured with white sandstone spires, standing against the cliffs like armies of solemn guardians. The place looked like Bryce Canyon, Utah. Amiran showed us the map, and after the hair-raising drive in, we were happy to get out and stretch.
We took off hiking down the mountain, following the watercourses into the valley, and Amiran showed me the tracks of fox, wild boar, wolf, and sheep. Sheep are illegal in the park of course, but there aren't enough rangers to really stop them. Poachers are a problem too. We traveled through the twisting cliffs and dry sandy washes of the valley for nearly an hour until, emerging onto a desert plateau we sighted a line of trees, and gradually approached a wide rushing river.
The water was bright blue, the sycamore leaves a bright autumn gold, the sandstone banks shimmered white. I thought to go swimming to escape the heat, but the water was fast, deep, and frigid. Instead I challenged Shergil my friend to a bout of rock-throwing Olympics (various artistic ways of throwing rocks into water), my favorite past-time, while the Georgians made a bonfire, whittled some sticks, threw on the shish-kebab, and broke out pomegranates. Who was carrying a sack of raw meat down the mountain? I didn't ask.
Eventually eating our fill, throwing a last rock in the river, climbing out of the desert valley, driving back down the wash and bumping over boulders, over the sandy plains to the guard house, we made a quick stop to wave to the lonely soldiers, then barreled over the savanna passing illegal herds of sheep, up and over the hills, down into the vineyard valleys, across the plains of Kakheti, up the switchbacks to our hilltop fortress home Signaghi, where we dispersed to sleep happily ever after.
No wait, that ending is too good. Didn't I mention that every road-trip in Georgia has car trouble?
Well, I won't tell the whole story except to say that Amiran's Niva and the other ranger vehicle both ran out of gas at the same time, also coincidentally at the same time that Amiran's clutch and transmission gave out. Not five minutes before, our third Georgian driver had taken a 'shortcut', turned off his walkie-talkie, and disappeared with the four Americans in his vehicle including our director. But while waiting in the middle of a field for two hours as the stars rose and set above us, we Americans reminisced about how wonderful it was to have well prepared, organized guides for our trip. In fact, it was noted that the reason that gas had run out in both of the ranger trucks at the same time was due not only to ill-planning, but also that both of these trucks had been taken out driving over the hills the night before by our festively liquored drivers.
So in fact, we did arrive back to Sighnaghi, but at midnight and in a new bus that had been sent to find us in the middle of Kakheti. It was cold enough to freeze toes. So cold the pipes were probably frozen, but it didn't matter because the electricity wasn't on, and we couldn't run the water pump anyway. I made a fire in the woodstove, heated up some red wine, and curled up with my journal to write you this letter.
Love to each of you in the New Year!
Expect one more Georgian letter soon,
Yours,
John Ananda