The “Poetic Chaos” of Gardens and Genres in Colonial Tbilisi

Abstract

One summer afternoon in Tbilisi, my friends Elizbari and Malkhazi, both native Tbilisians, and I bought some beer from a local store near Malkhazi's home in the hillside residential Tbilisi neighborhood of K'rts’anisi. For various reasons I can no longer recall, it would not do for us to drink in his home, so we randomly chose a deserted spot nearby: a patch of gravel next to a decrepit building with a large fallen tree, which afforded us a place to sit. Malkhazi surveyed our abject drinking spot, raised his beer in a heroic pose, and proclaimed: “Ortach'alis baghshi mnakhe, vina var!” (In the gardens of Ortachala see me, who I am!).1 We laughed at the absurd poetic reference. It was a famous line from a Persian-style Georgian poem by the noble romantic poet Grigol Orbeliani. It was a mukhambazi, a genre of poetry emblematic of “Old Tbilisi” city poetry associated with a nostalgic Georgian mythology of the nineteenth-century colonial city, centering on the island gardens of Ortachala, the site of drunken feasting of typical Tbilisian street peddlers called kintos (Georgian k'int’o). The stanza goes as such:In the gardens of Ortachala see me, who I am,In a happy-go-lucky feast see me, who I am!A toastmaster with a drinking bowl, see me, who I am!Well in a fistfight see me, who I am!Then you will fall in love with me, say, “You are precious!”