Sukhumi, Abkhazia, July 2010

This work of architecture should be alive, connecting something to something else, someone to someone else. Instead, it’s dead. It wipes out any possible rhetoric about the country. On the bridge over the Inguri river, a red line marks the “border” between Georgia and Abkhazia, in the South Caucasus, we walk scattered behind a donkey pulling a rickety trap with all our luggage on it, driven by an old Caucasian farmer who looks 15 years older than he really is. It’s the new difficult stage of this friendship trip that Rondine is undertaking across the Caucasus. Behind us the last Georgian outpost, a falling sentry box with two people in uniform and four machine guns at their feet, checking astonished the passports of the international group that wants to cross the bridge and go to Sukhumi.

A rusty barrier, lifted at 45 degrees, is swinging pushed by the wind, in the silence. It’s the only movement, the only uncertainty. Everything else is clear and still, only the cows bivouacking in the middle of the road are dangling their tails close to the faces of some people that look like they are waiting, who knows for what or for who. The bridge we’re on is at least 300 meters long. The cart is carrying our luggage. The bus dropped us of at the swinging barrier and left with the young Georgian student from Rondine that “prefers” to stay on the other side. We proceed in silence in a squalid atmosphere, desolated and abandoned. Our names have been written down on a scruffy notebook and we are now at a new blockade. Two young soldiers come out from a sentry box camouflaged among foliage, next to a pile of scrap iron, yawning and stretching while tucking their shirts in their trousers. They take the passports with hands that don’t see soap often, they don’t say a word and make a sign with their head to make us walk on. We continue among cement blocks stuck in the middle of the road, dissuading nothing. In fact time passes but not a soul passes by. We are alone. They tell us that a group like ours has never gone through that check point.

On the bridge, silence. Tarmac residuals and wide puddles make us walk in a slalom. From a distance it looks like a joke, but nobody feels like laughing. It’s a mortifying place that affects your breath and sight. The bridge is slowly crossed, the donkey can’t make it up a small hill. The farmer gets off and somebody form the group pushes the cart sympathizing the poor animal. Finally we see the Abkhaz, and Kan, the student from Rondine that has organized our welcome. More check-points, all similar and symmetric, everything is equally abandoned and rusty. In the air you can breathe boredom like in the Italian film “The desert of the Tartars”. Only two militaries, with a more professional posture and uniform, look at us without answering to our shy  but polite greetings. Somebody is whispering: “they are Russian”.

Kan’s embrace suddenly humanizes the atmosphere, but squalor and agony have not ended. Escorted by the police we leave for Sukhumi.  We cover 100 kilometers very fast, in a dangerous and agonizing way. We understand, while we travel along, why our chaperones tell us not to look, “we haven’t had time to rebuild”. A terrible lie is not enough when observing the long line of abandoned and burnt houses. Also trees have remained standing in the middle of the green and wet countryside with their burnt black trunk. Chewing up the miles, trying to avoid the craters left everywhere by negligence, heavy transport and even cows, bulls and pigs that graze along the roads, the horror of emptiness changes into agony for poorness. Human beings start to appear.

More kilometers and a new barrier with two tired policemen and the background changes again. We enter a zone that offers difficult signs of civilization. And so on, until we get to Sukhumi, on the Black Sea. It’s like freeing ourselves from a collective will to forget. The villages and houses still inhabited by Georgians willful to stay are behind us, now they are Abkhaz. They make an effort to show their calm side. In Sukhumi it also happens to see some old men sprightly play cards on the seaside. Everyone tells us: “We have nothing against Georgians: in Abkhazia they are 30% of population”. Many questions rise. We will listen to the answers.