to be near
a trip to Jvari Monastery
It was early morning when a cab drove up to our hotel. We are leaving Tbilisi for the mountains.
No matter how you look at it, it’s only there, in the mountains, that you can feel the true spirit of Georgia, appreciate its beauty and magnificence.
We are heading up along the winding Georgian Military Highway. The fog slowly melts away and morning rays of the hot Caucasus sun reach us through the car windows. A stunningly beautiful landscape opens in front of our eyes!
After a while, having climbed up another ridge, we stop by a monastery. Famous Russian poet Lermontov poeticized it leaving these lines in our memory:
“Once, not so many years ago,
Where soundingly together flow
Arágva and Kurá — the place
where, like two sisters, they embrace -
there stood a monastery.” *
The Jvari Monastery is situated atop a mountain, overlooking Georgia’s ancient capital Mtskheta lying at its feet. A place where time appears to have stopped, frozen. A total opposite to the hectic atmosphere that has taken over today’s world.
We stood there looking at the Monastery Temple entrance, hesitating to go in. It was a strange feeling, since we had known that we’d be there and like any rushing tourist would need to take a selfie and go into the Temple, so we could check it off our list. But we just stood there and never went in. A Temple we never set foot in. A place we never visited. Tablets of Stone we never touched.
We will realize later what it means to be near something without being in it.
A warm breeze is caressing us. We are enjoying the peaceful atmosphere of the place, the space we happened to be in, the aura surrounding Jvari. The screeching sounds of cars and the hustle of the city are left somewhere far behind.
We soak up the mood created by the rustle and sounds around us, the whisper of the leaves on trees that guard the Temple’s walls. We hear an occasional sound of a metal tool knocking on something, cart wheels creaking, braying of a passing horse or locals talking softly.
It’s hard to believe that places like this still exist… The world around us seems to be changing at the speed of a rock falling from a mountain peak. Ideas or thoughts that only yesterday seemed sacred and absolute are no longer relevant today. They are replaced by new fantasies and their implementations. Caught in the whirlwind of the changing world and the hustle of modern-day life, one naturally looks for something he can return to, something he can come back to again and again, something that would make his inner home. Jvari is exactly that.
It seems that nothing ever changes here. People are busy doing their work, rivers meet and part again, the gold on the domes keeps shining day and night, the mountain range stands guard over its domain and the bell always tolls.
photography and story by © Anton Kokoreff. 2018.
* – Mikhail Lermontov, from the poem “The Novice”. “Narrative poems by Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov” / published by Random House, Inc., New York / p. 82/ Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983. Translated by Charles Johnson / Library of University of Washington, Seattle.
