By Cosima Stewart
Driving west from Tbilisi, towards the Black Sea, there is a region named Imereti. Twenty minutes north of Imereti’s largest city, Kutaisi, and one reaches Tsq’alt’ubo (წყალტუბო), a town of mostly derelict Soviet sanatoria.
We arrived in a taxi. A high spring wind, soft and warm, blew through the windows of the car and swayed the cypresses in the middle distance. They stood dark against the snowy peaks arranged flatly on the horizon. The distant snow took on the hazy pale blue of the sky. Those mountains render any vista immediately exotic, their stage-set drama a heart-lightening reminder that one is in the Caucasus.
We didn’t know where to tell the taxi driver to go. We asked for ‘the sanatorium’. There are many in Tsqaltubo – being an entire town-complex of sanatoria – so he dropped us off at a roundabout and we stood on the empty road looking at the mountains.
It occurred to us that we had been assuming a tourist destination. The reality was that of the derelict site. We edged past the warning signs, bent through a metal gate and found ourselves looking at the building illustrated. We had been joined by a stray dog, our mute guide. The tall grass rustled in the strong breeze and our dog trotted ahead. Somewhere the constant wind shook a piece of corrugated iron in use as a fence. The iron knocked and creaked loudly and irregularly, the sound incongruous and poignant sound in the bright sunlight and high wind. Occasionally the bright sky showed where it shouldn’t through the spine of the building. We walked, my companion and I, with the automatic, mutual silence instilled by cemeteries. The wind blew, and we walked the perimeter of the building. It could only be described as cinematic.
A sanatorium is not a hotel. The word ‘hotel’ suggests many things; travel, freedom, business and anonymity among them. In the Soviet Union one did not choose one’s sanatorium. Holidays were prescribed by the state and issued through workplaces. The idea of freedom becomes further alienated from the modern idea of the holiday by the general case that one arrived at the sanatorium only to be presented with an exercise regime, health programme and generous menu. The gutted behemoth before us had once represented a temple to the health of the Soviet worker. In this lay an aspect of the specific, pervasive melancholy of the place, somewhere between ambition and history, utopia and reality.
The word ‘sanatorium’ in English brings to mind institutions, possibly in the Swiss Alps, where one might go to calm one’s nerves. Perhaps if these buildings were referred to as Soviet ‘spas’, some of their mystique might be lost. The town of Tsqaltubo grew up due to its health-giving, mildly radioactive springs. It had been a spa town long before the Soviet era, and remains so today. We were there in March, wildly out of season - an odd feeling at the best of times and doubly so if it remains uncertain that there ever is a season.
I knew before I came to Tsqaltubo that the place had a sad history - one that, unlike the grandeur of the now-derelict buildings, persists to this day. When Georgia fell into civil war after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, thousands of ethnic Georgians were displaced from their native Abkhazia, a region further to the north and west of the spa town. For want of a place to settle, many inhabited the abandoned sanatorium. It was they who I thought of as I walked around. Though we saw no one, back in London I came across an Instagram post; a photo from 2019 showing the courtyard of a sanatorium building at Tsqaltubo. It was full of carefully tended vegetable gardens.
We were back at the roundabout. There didn’t seem to be an obvious place for lunch. Our stray padded confidently ahead. At lunch in a cheerful Kutaisi restaurant about an hour later, the windy quietude and the dappled sunlight on the empty terraces seemed to have happened in a dream.