by Gary Vikan
The Georgian State Art Museum is close by and accessible from that same street. This is a fairly normal museum by comparison, but for two things. First, we were told that this was formerly an Orthodox theological seminary building and that Josef Stalin, a Georgian like Eduard Shevardnadze, had once been a student here. And second, we learned that it was built over a sulfur spring, as is much of Tbilisi, which means “warm,” as in warm sulfur springs. The windows of the galleries with those gilt silver icons were open and you could smell the sulfur, and this, the Walters conservators told me, was perhaps the most corrosive agent that can be applied to silver. No wonder the icons are black and brittle. Sulfur is terrible, as is the blue wool fabric in the cases. So there on the main level of the museum were those wonderful metal icons in relief, suffering, and upstairs, scores of “naïve” paintings by Niko Pirosmani, whom the Georgians want to believe is the equivalent of his French contemporary, Henri Rousseau. He is not, and most of his paintings are simply atrocious. Nevertheless, we were stuck with at least a few of them that would serve to complete the show. That’s the nature of collaboration.
The Institute of Manuscripts was a bit farther away, in what I took to be a dicey part of town. I thought this in part because it was among what seemed to be squatter gardens and abandoned sheds that recently became homes for someone, but mainly because all the windows and doors of the institute were covered with heavy steel bars and grills of the sort you see in carry-out places in the toughest part of east Baltimore. The other striking thing about that building, when viewed from the outside, was that it was covered with grape vines. This was not so unusual in Tbilisi, since the Georgians claim to have invented wine 8,000 years ago, and they grow grapes wherever they can find dirt and something like an Institute of Manuscripts for the vines to grow up on. But the sheer profusion struck me as odd, as did the inside with its overpowering smell. It was a smell that was familiar to me from my childhood: turpentine. It was as if dozens of painters were in there cleaning hundreds of paint brushes. But there were no painters and no paint brushes to be seen. There was just a very noisy air conditioner, a damp cold draft, and the pervasive odor.
The medieval manuscripts came out for our examination from the stacks, and for some reason the assistant to the assistant librarian who transported them seemed to need to carry four or five at a time, even though it was a short distance to our examination table. I can still see her. She sort of teetered forward with the precious cargo of the 11th and 12th centuries all but falling from her hands; books that in some cases were so fragile that parts or all of them could not be opened. For this reason we just looked at the outsides of a few.
There were many star books in that library, but the star among stars was an unbound Hebrew book without pictures called the Lailash Pentateuch. This particular manuscript needed special conservation care of the sort that only a few people in the world could provide and this meant we paid lots of attention to that precious pile of enormous vellum leaves covered with Hebrew writing. The Lailash Pentateuch was slated to come to Baltimore the summer before the exhibition to get intensive care in our lab. This book would turn out to be the metaphorical canary in the coal mine, with its eventual non-arrival announcing the failure of our show before it was official.
Damp air, the smell of turpentine, piles of precious manuscripts teetering along, and works so fragile we could not touch them was followed by an extraordinary lunch. These are the memories I have of the Institute of Manuscripts. We had seen everything there was to see and had gathered in the office of Director Zaza Alexidze. We sat in silence. Our group included Greg Guroff, the two Walters conservators, a few institute staff, and me. One person from the institute got up to leave, and from our second floor window I could see her drive away. Time went by with no talking. (Silence was best since any casual comment on my part, like about the weather, went from English to Russian and Russian to Georgian, and back again.)
Then, the person who’d driven away reappeared with two bottles of wine and a box filled with luncheon treats I had never before encountered. The oddest and most wonderful looked pretty much like Greek spanakopita, although instead of spinach, it was filled with fresh tarragon. But it was not the same kind we get. Rather, it was incredibly pungent and strong; it smelled like licorice and had an almost stinging bite on the tongue. It was magnificent, and I never tasted tarragon anything like that before. It was also a perfect match for the wine that had just come out of an enormous barrel somewhere in the hills above the city and was only a few weeks old. It was sort of like Beaujolais Nouveau, but just that much fresher, and even more effervescent.
That was Georgian hospitality made up on the fly. More typically, it came in the evening, with an enormous banquet on the table awaiting you and, at the head of the table, the tamada or toastmaster. The dishes were fantastic and mostly unfamiliar to me, with lots of walnuts in various forms and tarragon and plenty of white wine. I know there was a sequence and rhythm to what was eaten when, but I never figured it out—maybe because of the wine. And as for the tamada, after things had gotten going, he would stand up and solemnly propose a toast. Then a bit later there would be another toast, and so on. And after a while those around the table would propose their own toasts. For the Georgians, this is a national ritual of great importance, and with a skilled tamada it can be poetry.
This meant there may be a toast to our mothers and what they have meant to us, and to our wives, without whom we’d be nothing, and to our children and others, and eventually to our dogs and cats. After each toast, those at the table would raise a glass of wine, and the tamada, depending on his or her stamina, would raise a glass of vodka. I could never figure that out; in Georgia vodka is consumed out of smallish water glasses and in such quantities that I at first assumed it must be water. Periodically, new dishes would replace empty dishes. I recall one with little animal body parts in a creamy walnut sauce. It was wonderful, and no, it didn’t taste like chicken, but it looked like chicken. As I was about to ask, I picked up what I thought was a drumstick and discovered at its tip a tiny cloven hoof.
Another distinctively Georgian dish, khachapuri, was not on the nightly menu, but became a staple of our workday. Each morning Greg Guroff would distribute the agenda for the day, and it would include nothing before 10:00 a.m. This seemed logical enough, since I took Georgia to be a Mediterranean country with a Mediterranean rhythm. But as it turned out, more often than not the agenda needed updating around 10:00 a.m., the time when so-and-so was to meet us but somehow didn’t show up. (No cell phones then made this all a little messy.)
Once we stopped at a little spare and shiny café on the street between the Georgian Art Museum and the State Museum of Georgia to reconnoiter and rewrite the day’s agenda. (Ray Charles’ Georgia on My Mind was on the radio; we heard it often that week.) Since this rewrite could take some time, we ordered tea, of course, and then a little snack, too. Khachapuri is a pizza-like dish that is defined by cheeses of various sorts, and by the final addition, as I recall at the table, of a raw egg. Well, depending on how warm that pizza-thing was at the point of delivery, the egg might be sort of cooked or sort of raw. I’m not sure I cared, but I saw others at the table discreetly pushing the un-set egg off the cheese and nearly off the plate.
TWO SUNDAYS AFTER BEING SINGLED out at the Mayflower by the Silver Fox, I boarded a British Airways flight to London with a small contingent of Walters staff for what I assumed would be the last of my working trips to Tbilisi. Everything to that point had been smooth and pleasant. Now we were coming down the home stretch. We were working with Georgian documentary filmmakers on completing a video that would introduce Georgia—its people and their history, their beliefs, and their art—at the beginning of the show. We also needed to measure the individual works for the exhibition cases and mounts that we would soon build at the Walters. And it was critical to get a sense of which works were visually the strongest in order to highlight them in the exhibition design.
Lookin
g back, I wonder how much I suspected that trouble lay ahead. I do recall at the airport in Baltimore, as we waited to depart, I overheard our exhibition designer telling the others about some “problems.” It involved something he had seen on the Internet about demonstrations in Tbilisi against the show. I dismissed this immediately, partly because I didn’t yet know much about the Internet’s trustworthiness as a news source, but mostly because our designer seemed to always find something to worry about. And I did not. My attitude was more cavalier. After all, we were on our way.
The 4:00 p.m. flight on British Mediterranean Airways out of London was how you got to Georgia, and that was all fine except for the fact that the plane arrived at 2:00 a.m. This experience was made strange not only by the odd hour, but also by the visual spectacle of flying in over a city that because of chronic power outages was illuminated by thousands of tiny gas lanterns in hundreds of little kiosks. These had sprouted up everywhere and apparently kept very strange hours, offering their spare inventory of cigarettes, vodka, potatoes, and bread pretty much 24/7, basically to no one. The vendors just sat there, smoking cigarettes. That’s what you saw coming into town, after having passed through security at the tiny, all-but-deserted airport, with its soldiers carrying machine guns, its smoke-filled clearing room lit by dim, grayish florescent lights, and its posse of swarthy men watching soccer and smoking, and not talking or even looking up. In the darkness, in what I understood was the fancy part of town where the diplomats lived, we arrived via a steep, narrow, crumbling street at Betsy’s Place, a small elegant hotel, behind a heavy steel door.
Greg Guroff, at about 4:00 a.m., went immediately to the computer in the small lobby. And from there he confirmed our designer’s dire report. I can still see and hear him. It turned out that yes, indeed, there had been demonstrations. The former president’s wife, of all people, had begun a hunger strike against our exhibit. The seminarians were against us. At about the same time that President Shevardnadze was holding forth on the merits of the Georgian National Exhibition in Washington, DC, a member of the Georgian Duma, Guram Sharadze, with the endorsement of Georgian Patriarch Ilia II, had apparently issued a statement denouncing our show in the strongest terms.
As a new day dawned in Tbilisi, newsstands throughout town featured our exhibition on page one with a two-column headline. The story line was clear: The only thing of merit in the otherwise fourth-rate, crime-ridden city of Baltimore was the National Aquarium. No one had ever heard of the Walters. And so on.
From that point before dawn on Monday, May 10th, through midnight, Friday the 14th, Tbilisi offered me two parallel realities. One was the work the Walters staff had gone there to do and was doing; the second unanticipated reality was the intense, ongoing national debate about the exhibition. Along with Greg, I was the voice of and face for its merits and a stand-in for President Shevardnadze, who I quickly gathered was not much beloved by anyone. I did six hours of live television debates over four days, and I recall that when I arrived in Rome that Saturday to meet up with a group of Walters trustees, they remarked on the sunburn I had acquired under television spotlights. Our main allies were the Georgian Minister of Culture, Valeri Asatiani, and our museum collaborators, Levan Chilashvili at the State Museum of Georgia, Nodari Loumuri at the Georgian State Art Museum, and Zaza Alexidze at the Institute of Manuscripts. We had ongoing logistic and moral support from the American embassy, and the Georgian Academy of Sciences was on our side as well, mostly, I think, because the exhibition represented for them engagement with the West and scholarship.
Those who were against us and our exhibition—and there were many, including museum curators and many academics—kept talking about the money the FIAE and the Walters were going to make and then not share with the Georgians, about the inherent fragility of the works (which meant they should not be moved anywhere), and about their suspicion that the FIAE and the Walters were going to make exact copies of the loaned works and send the copies back and keep the originals. Some of our opponents also entertained the even more bizarre idea that the air in the West was somehow corrosive and would cause permanent damage to the medieval metalwork. (The claim was that the works in that 1981 Vienna exhibition that had travelled on to Paris had suffered grievously from the corrosive Parisian air.)
Feelings were intense on both sides. I paid a visit to a gentle old woman named Leila Khuskivadze, a scholar friend of my professor, Kurt Weitzmann, whose name I had heard around the manuscript room at Princeton many times and always in the warmest and most admiring way. I was there in her cluttered office simply to convey Kurt Weitzmann’s greetings. But she immediately got onto the Georgian National Exhibition and, as much as she seemed to want to envelop me in her admiration for Weitzmann, she was vehemently against it. Her gruesome metaphor stuck with me: “I would rather have my child die of starvation at my side than send him away and never meet him again.” Irrational anxiety seemed to trump all logic; it was as if such an exhibition had never taken place in the history of mankind. The true underlying question, Shevardnadze would later explain in a letter to Ambassador Hartman, was one of Georgia’s “democratic development.” As it emerged from Communism, would the Georgian State remain where it had been for two centuries, inward looking and under the dominance of Russia, or would it develop into a Western-style democracy? As I heard that question evoked with a typically Georgian poetic flare: “Will our sun rise in the North, or will it rise in the West”?
My first official event of the week, later on Monday with members of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, started off well enough. There were perhaps a dozen people in the room, and a few were not only academy members, but also members of the Duma and sympathetic to our cause. Greg Guroff put me at the head of the oval table, and this was my first signal that Gary Vikan was really going to be the face and voice for this show in Georgia. I was the academic, not an old Cold War diplomatic type like Greg, and I could speak from the heart. Which I did. I found my narrative in just a few minutes. Greg patiently conveyed this in Russian to someone who then rendered it in Georgian. This gave me time to think about what would come next.
I lingered on the fact that I was a Byzantinist and sort of glossed over my director role. I told about my love of Orthodoxy and icons, and spent plenty of time on that 1981 show in Vienna. And I talked about how Georgia in the 12th century was the leading creative force in the Orthodox world. I described the layout of that Vienna show, which I could remember vividly, and how amazed I was to encounter those gilt silver icons in relief. I told them I had recently presented a hugely successful exhibition from Russia, and that this Georgian show was long overdue and would be even more dazzling. I believed this to be true. The room was hazy blue with cigarette smoke by then, and the ashtray at my left was overflowing. I finished my talk, and then each member of the academy said his or her piece; I’m sure there was an order dictated by their hierarchy, but I couldn’t figure it out. I did form this idea that we were acting out a moment of drama not unlike one that must have played out many times among students, professors, and members of the equivalent academy in Paris in the spring of 1968. We had a big adversary, the stakes were high, and we would act on principle—principle of the broadest and a most noble sort: the very future of a nation. The moment was, for me, simultaneously tense, tedious, stifling, and exhilarating.
Things mainly went downhill from there. The press conference at the American embassy, behind the huge steel security doors, was more than a hint of what lay ahead. A bunch of attractive young women reporters, all very smart it seemed and all dressed in black, posed questions that surprised me. They were mostly hostile questions asked with a big dose of cynicism and mostly under the heading of money. It was about money they assumed we were going to make and not share.
When this came up, I saw for the first time the old Greg Guroff in action. The man who had confronted the hardline Communists not so many years earlier was now bearing his combative Cold War teeth. Every point Greg made about the show need
ed to be argued and nuanced, and those young reporters were his adversaries. At the time, I didn’t think that was so wise, since it clearly annoyed them. As for me, I would have played “rope-a-dope” and tuckered them out with my Midwestern earnestness, although I suppose that was naive. In any case, Greg was being Greg, and I marveled at his feistiness and his verbal agility.
At about 10:00 p.m. the following Friday, after half-a-dozen press conferences and an equal number of television debates, Greg and I were doing a radio show that was hosted by monks of the Georgian Orthodox Church; They had hung a large portrait of our nemesis, Patriarch Ilia II, in the monitor room. I liked the format; it was much less intense than TV, and there were no vocal adversaries in the room with us. The antagonists were all “out there” and were invited to call in, which they did. I remember this moment for the little scribbles of paper that were passed our way by the anchor with the callers’ questions that were no different nor less hostile than those we had been hearing all week. And then the electricity went off, which was sort of comical.
But it meant that we fell behind and therefore had to race like crazy for the last TV interview. I did it by myself at what I would call “Live at Midnight” because it was a match for what happens in Baltimore and all over America, namely Live at Five. But the show came on at twelve o’clock. We raced through the dark to make airtime, went across a parking lot with no lights but lots of pot holes, and down a dark hallway with a crumpled carpet that seemed set to trip me, to enter a studio and a seat behind a large desk. It was almost midnight, with only thirty seconds to spare, no more. Two things I recall. The poised anchorwoman, with her hair in a bun and wearing a brown suit, said to me just before we went live that she was against the exhibition and was going to ask me difficult questions, and she did. The other thing I remember are the mouse turds all over that desk we were sitting behind. And oddly, that made me feel better.